Tradememe

Everything You Ever (Or Never) Wanted to Know About the Fed

So, the Fed is owned by the major banks. And when they got into trouble, the Fed prints more money to bail them out. Everything is now clear.

World Bank Says, Fix Banks First. Uh-Oh.

Good post. This economic crisis was started by the financial crisis and we need to fix the financial system in order to kick start the economy back into sustainable growth. All the growth resulted from the stimulus packages in the world will last until the money runs out.

Mark-to-Market Triggered This Recession; It Will Also Trigger the Recovery

I don't think we should discard mark-to-market altogether. But changing it so that it does not depend on the wild fluctuations of assets would be a good thing. One suggestion I saw on this site was the use of a 3 to 5 year moving average for the valuation of assets.

Waiting for the Government to Act on Banks

The problem is that they don't want to save the banks, but they don't want to see the banks fail either. So, we are in a kind of economic limbo.

Why This May Have Been a Sucker's Rally

The two-down-days, one-up-day pattern will wreck portfolios only if one sells in the very short term. But with a longer outlook this search for bottom will look futile.

Give Bernie a Break

On Mar 12 11:23 AM Alex Filonov wrote:

> There is some difference between lawful robbery and unlawful one.

So, Mr. Alex Filonov,

There is such a thing as lawful robbery...

Too Late to Complain About Mark-to-Market

It's only in hindsight that we know for sure the full effect of a rule or regulation. With time any rule or regulation can be improved upon. This is not some kind of religious dogma that is permanent.

Greenspan Yet Again Blames Others for Housing Bubble

Good post. Unfortunately, doing post mortem does not contribute in fixing the present situation. We must admit that we have got the benefit of hindsight and we all enjoyed the bubble before it burst.

APIs: The Future of Content Distribution

Hello David,

Intelligent aggregation is a very good choice of words, I believe. And we do agree that Techmeme has shown the way in that field. We at www.tradememe.com endeavour to do the same in the business field.


On Mar 11 07:04 PM David Jackson wrote:

> Jeff, terrific article. Thank you.
>
> I want to drill down, however, on your assertion that APIs will be
> successful. Do you remember how advocates of RSS made similar arguments
> a few years ago? They said that users wanted content on their own
> terms, and that RSS would allow users to fragment individual sites'
> content and reassemble it for themselves in an RSS reader. And they
> argued that ads in full text RSS feeds would be as profitable as
> traditional web site ads.
>
> But if judged by the degree of adoption outside the tech community,
> RSS has generally been a failure. Perhaps the reason is that readers
> wanted intelligent aggregation: they want to know which topics are
> important, and which articles to read on those topics. RSS couldn't
> do that, because most RSS readers force the user to browse all the
> subscribed-to RSS feeds and piece together any themes for themselves.
>
>
> The winning model turned out to be Techmeme, which does exactly that:
> it tells me which topics are hot and which articles to read on them.
> Here at Seeking Alpha, we've followed a similar model with our home
> page: we've moved away from a "stream of content" to intelligent
> clustering of articles by "story". (Here's how Editor in Chief Mick
> Weinstein explains it: seekingalpha.com/artic...)
>
>
> And what happened to RSS monetization? Feedburner offered ads in
> RSS, but nobody reported that they made any real money from them.
>
>
> So the question is: How are APIs different from RSS?
>
> It would be great to hear your explanation of that. (And Oren's too.)

APIs and the Future of Web Content

I doubt those APIs would become more mainstream than RSS feeds. In our business news aggregator website, www.tradememe.com , we have tried APIs but we have found them to be less robust than a standard technology like RSS feeds.

Google Now Allows You to Target Ads Yourself

This is a great idea. Basically, Google is making all of us improve its targeting algorithm for free. And it avoids the privacy issue by giving us the possibility to opt out of the program.

Blame the Accountants: A Lynch Mob Forms

I don't see how the desire to change mark-to-market should be considered to be an attack on the accounting profession.

Citigroup Questions

It is true that the movement of Citigroup should not affect the market. But we are dealing with mass psychology and not rational thinking based on mathematics.

Markets Recover on Strong Internals

The Citi-based market uptick tells us that it's the financial crisis that is causing the economic crisis and not the other way around. So, we need to find a solution fast for the toxic assets problem that is polluting the financial system. Just stimulating the economy will affect the symptoms and not the root cause of the disease.

The Homepage, Refreshed

The new design is very nice, especially the aggregation of posts around themes. We do it too at our aggregation site, www.tradememe.com and in chronological order. We think our site is very much complementary with SA.