Tuesday, April 28, 2009

An online personal financial planning course

If you want to gain knowledge of personal financial planning issues (for free), I just found a great course to help you get there. It is quite detailed, broken into lessons, and has some useful add-on tools.

http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/AR0102092/

Thank you UC Irvine for being so progressive to help the public, and thank you to Get Rich Slowly for pointing this out to me and helping the public take control of their finances from those who oppose their best interests (which seems to be everyone these days).

Monday, April 6, 2009

Osinski's "Manhattan Project"

The following link is an article by Michael Osinski, one of the main people responsible for developing and implementing the means to repackage mortgages into traditional bonds (so they could be resold), then into CDO's allowing for various levels of risk.

"My Manhattan Project"


Many parties share responsibility for what has happened in our mortgage markets, but I believe this article displays something important in core statistical understanding that contributed to this mess.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

It was funny before, but honestly, am I being taken by everyone?

In reality, most of us will never step foot in a place like the resort the AIG execs ran up a $500,000 bill at, but we have each paid for that right thousands of times over now, not to mention we should get to take a private jet to get there. At least with the NFL owners, it seems less direct. We only fund them through multi-billion dollar tax rebates for new stadiums with more seating so they can have more attendance revenue. That's better than just writing a check.

Do you feel like you are low man on the totem pole?

So today we have the NFL justifying it's meeting at the same resort where AIG was lambasted for their retreat footed by taxpayer dollars. Much farther back in history, during economic hardship, the victorious underdog gave average Americans hope that even if everything is gamed sheer determination can beat the obviously better competitor. Even in horse racing and boxing (2 sports notorious for being gamed) we have the recent movies Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man detailing two narratives from the Great Depression. Yet that was a time when the athlete underdogs grew up as and were still the average Joe. They didn't make millions each year.