A serial intern in the finance sector speaks: "Applying for internships is so tiresome and bruising. It's like dating, you sit by the phone waiting for a call. Back in my days at university I would get up at 5.30am or 6am. First I'd go jogging, then send out an application for an internship. Every morning. It's so painful to hear 'no' all the time."
posted by feelinglistless
on Jan 27, 2012 -
86 comments
A Swarthmore College student-reporter's
questioning of whether it is moral to go into banking sparks NYT columnist Nick Kristof to not only assert the affirmative, but to argue (in part) that in fact
more well-educated, liberally-mined people should go into "conservative" industries like banking in order to reform it from the inside. In effect, Kristof suggests, socialist-leaning, educationally-empowered students should hunker down, swallow their disdain, and apply their ideals to change finance.
Said student responds (in Slate): elite, ostensibly liberal-leaning students don't seem to be particularly discouraged from capitalism or going into banking in this climate, and probably never have been.
posted by Keter
on Jan 24, 2012 -
49 comments
Chext is a site that enables the user to enter transactions and track their bank balance via SMS. People sharing a bank account can also get updates when money is spent from the account by the other person.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Sep 19, 2011 -
30 comments
Out of thin air? "Have you ever said something like 'Let me buy you a beer next week'? I'm sure you have. We all issue promises of this sort. And we frequently use such promises as a form of currency... I have just described a simple credit exchange. Societies rely heavily on promising-making and promise-keeping. It is the foundation of all financial markets. I'd like to point out something about the promises you make. They are made 'out of thin air.' "
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 14, 2011 -
47 comments
Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, says:
If the goal was to increase lending, well we haven't increased lending. ... Banks that were too big to fail are bigger than ever. ... When TARP was announced, the whole purpose was a statement that we're not going to let our large financial instiutions fail. And with that I think we may be in a far more dangerous place today than we were a year ago.
(via)
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 26, 2009 -
15 comments
The Bulls vs. Bears? The incessant back and forth between
equity market longs and
shorts is well known to most retail investors via a variety of distribution channels; financial television, the print media, online news. But the really big market battle, one with the potential to impact the entire US economy, happens, as is usual in finance, just out of sight of retail eyes ...
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on May 13, 2009 -
24 comments
Every year the Strategy Team at
Saxo Bank, a Danish
virtual bank, publishes a list of ten black swan class market events. Some of the more dramatic possibilities Saxo advance for 2009: crude trading down to $25 a barrel causing severe social unrest in Iran, the S&P 500 falling to 500, Chinese GDP approaching zero and several member states dropping the Euro. The complete
2009 list is here and for completeness their
2008 [ .pdf ] ,
2007 [ .pdf ] and
2006 lists [ .pdf ] are also available.
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on Jan 7, 2009 -
32 comments
Soros on the banking crisis: "
A deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out. When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly." - Soros lays out some ideas about what can be done to fix the markets ... Planet money had another
nicely done piece on the debacle last Friday.
posted by specialk420
on Nov 10, 2008 -
79 comments
Afraid to read
the daily news? Need some broader perspective on The Credit Crunch? There are lots of different ideas by lots of different authors floating about ...
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on Oct 13, 2008 -
34 comments
A
private FDIC?
The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service, or
CDARS, is a way to conveniently spread bank accounts across multiple banks. CDARS, run by privately held Promontory Interfinancial Network, offers its customers
up to $50 million of deposit insurance, or exactly 500 times single account limit mandated by the FDIC. Promontory does this by arranging to distribute client funds nationwide in $100K increments to over 2,300 banks. Promontory is nothing if not well connected: while founders Mark Jacobsen
previously served as Chief of Staff at the FDIC, co-founders Alan Blinder was
Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Eugene Ludwig
was Comptroller of the Currency, several former members of the FDIC currently serve on Promotory's board.
Not surprisingly, some folks are openly critical of Promotory, some going so far as to state
"It undermines a lot of the safeguards around the FDIC deposit fund."
posted by Mutant
on Sep 26, 2008 -
64 comments
Follow the money: for the past year,
the big trade was short bank stocks, and use the cash to go long oil. Massively profitable, but now that trade is unwinding. So where is the big money being invested now? Lots of places:
diamonds,
fine art,
guitars, and
Madonna.
posted by Mutant
on Aug 20, 2008 -
36 comments