Go read this

Bronte Capital on the Bond Insurers

Bill Ackman’s short on MBIA was a short with an ever-changing thesis. What he saw was a highly levered company – often 140 times or more levered – doing things that were not quite straight. His original observation was the AHERF transaction – something I understood from my first look at MBIA in year 2000. Then he saw one I did not know about – a securitisation of tax liens over properties in Philadelphia. More accurately this was a securitisation of uncollectable tax liens from crack houses and the demolished houses of the dead. The transaction however was rated AAA with MBIA’s guarantee. Moreover MBIA unambiguously knew fraud was going on – firstly there was a tape of a meeting of senior executives in which the truth was on open display – and then there was the name of the transaction – which translated (badly) from the Latin as “black hole”.

Question

Which show is a more accurate portrayal of New Orleans,
Treme or MTVs, The Real World New Orleans (2010)?

Soccer Ideas

Add a goal tunnel. Have a corrugated metal tube that runs into the goal from beyond the goalie area. If someone can kick the ball into the tube, it is an automatic goal, since the goalie cannot defend it. New and entertaining strategies can be added with this feature. For example, players can be "tunneled" by being slammed against the sharp metal edges of the tube, thereby increasing the physical component, and with it, the entertainment value of the sport.
-Bookstaber

(BTW is the greatest last name evah)

Chemistry of Common Life

Private payrolls were a disappointment at just +83k, versus consensus of 112k. Birth-death added 147k. Census removed 225k, in line with consensus. Temporary help was another terrific "green shoot" increasing by +21k. And the Unemployment rate dropped to 9.5% because 652k people walked out of the labor force, which dropped from 154.393 million to 153.741 million.
-ZH

China

I may sound like a complete Luddite, but I have LONG questioned the wisdom of foreign firms locating factories in China and exposing themselves to the risk of piracy, counterfeiting, and other forms of technology transfer. This is an authoritarian country where organs are harvested from prisoners who are still alive.
-NakCap

Mexico

Oil is a case in point. Pemex, the state-owned oil company, occupies a unique place in Mexican hearts: each year on March 18, school children celebrate with theatre and speeches the 1938 decision to nationalise the industry. Yet oil makes up an un-healthy proportion of government income - more than one-third - and production has plummeted, from about 3.4m barrels a day in 2004 to just 2.6m b/d as lack of investment and of foreign know-how made themselves felt. In private, Pemex officials admit Mr Calderón's reforms, meant to give the company more flexibility to work with the private sector, are too meek to turn things around.

?

In my few months of meeting transgender children, I talked to parents from many different backgrounds, who had made very different decisions about how to handle their children. Many accepted the “new normalcy” line, and some did not. But they all had one thing in common: in such a loaded situation, with their children’s future at stake, doubt about their choices did not serve them well. In Brandon’s case, for example, doubt would force Tina to consider that if she began letting him dress as a girl, she would be defying the conventions of her small town, and the majority of psychiatric experts, who advise strongly against the practice. It would force her to consider that she would have to begin making serious medical decisions for Brandon in only a couple of years, and that even with the blockers, he would face a lifetime of hormone injections and possibly major surgery. At the conference, Tina struggled with these doubts. But her new friends had already moved past them.
-The Atlantic via Kottke