Tuesday Links

Jiro Dreams of Sushi: "Back in the 1980s, everybody believed that the Japanese were going to buy up the whole world, so they gave the Japanese a lot of grief, such as putting quotas on car imports, forcing them to open plants in America. But then their bubble burst in 1990, and now you never hear about the Japanese anymore, except about how tragic their economy is and they can only afford $300 sushi dinners."

Falky: "If risk were positively related to return, one effect of this would be for many very wealthy people to be morons who took more risk than they realized."

New bubble in high yield: "Certain desks have been advocating a move to CCC assets as they still yield approximately 100 bps over their all time low seen on...wait for it...May 2007."

If we have to have fractional reserve banking... "A much better approach would be to foster general market liquidity, Nom de Plumber argues, without favoring or disfavoring specific assets, by restoring legal contract sanctity, loss privatization rather than socialization, risk-capital sufficiency, and credit market pricing integrity."

"Even our 'rich' are poor - only $423k of financial assets on average for top 10% by income. See p26 here"

gdp regions in europe

Career risk and asset gathering "managers are generally compensated far more for the size of the asset base they manage than for the portfolio performance they generate. They are thus likely (and highly incentivized) to avoid managing money in such a way so as to make outperformance possible"

Focus Media: calculating losses on disposal