Chicago is definitely the Second City for most people working on Wall Street, as suggested by that famous New Yorker cover showing a native’s view of the world west of the Hudson as an alien wasteland.
But the Chicago Tribune says that the city’s futures markets have flourished, in part because they don’t do OTC trades […]

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It’s a lot to be proud of, this independent capitalist system that tells the government to get lost.
Except when it doesn’t.
Headlines yesterday were Fed Chair Ben Bernanke saying the bank will extend its lending facility for investment banks for another couple of months if needed. The Fed is also working with the SEC on improving […]

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The Fed is reluctantly thinking that it might consider taking action against asset bubbles in future. Chariman Ben Bernanke still says it is hard to determine a bubble.
Really? When tech stocks were trading at 50-100X earnings? When people in booming states like California were buying houses at 5-6X their income? When mortgage brokers were offering […]

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Philippe Carrel, SVP at Thomson Reuters, has been rounding up bankers, quants and technologists in New York and London to gauge the satisfaction with existing information on structured assets (very low) and create some standards that market participants can agree upon. Everyone knows Black-Scholes has some underlying problems but it provides an accepted way to […]

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Last month at The Forum in London, the MiFID conference sponsored by JWG-IT, David Wright, deputy director general, EU Commission, told bankers they should take the current financial crisis seriously.  “The firms that created this mess have to step up to the plate. This is not the time for firms to seek de minimus solutions or […]

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