https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2026-06-22T10:44:02+00:00 https://www.freerange.city/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant jmThe short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will *force the bank to foreclose on it*. Foreclosure is very bad for both the bank and the operator, so both parties would rather “extend and pretend,” leaving the building vacant while they wait and hope for the market to change. ]]> via:hn finance money real-estate buildings commercial-property dereliction empty-buildings vacancy extend-and-pretend loans foreclosure https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0751972cafe0/ 2023-08-10T12:00:52+00:00 https://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/ jm karl-jeacle history irish mortgage amortization finance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f865a7f3ae14/ 2023-05-11T16:17:51+00:00 http://davidhunt.ie/solar/ jm quotes solar-pv solar home money finance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c8e65845f3f6/ 2022-02-08T16:41:45+00:00 https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22922511/crypto-nfts-sports-betting-money-hobby jmJeff, like most skeptics for whom the system has actually worked pretty well, is eager to cash out once the price of ethereum goes back up. But talking to him, and to the rest of the (almost entirely) men who’ve turned money into a hobby, made me more than anything feel like I was too late to something that hadn’t even really happened yet. Because of course it isn’t “too late” to become an overnight crypto millionaire or to cash out on an incredibly lucky bet; it’s just highly unlikely that that person will be you. Nobody wants to be a cynical spoilsport, stewing in resentment of these men who have won and will probably keep winning, who look a lot like the ones who have always won: the men who have the time, the knowledge, the energy, and, most importantly, the money to turn “having money” into its own hobby. ]]> crypto finance gambling internet nfts ethereum scams hobbies betting https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a1178dd9e620/ 2021-11-04T15:36:17+00:00 https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html jmMinerva is obviously heavily influenced by the technological path dependency of the financial sector, which is another way of saying: there is a lot of MS Excel. Any new software solution is going to be compared with MS Excel and if the result is unfavourable people will often just use continue to use Excel instead. Many, many technologists have taken one look at an existing workflow of spreadsheets, reacted with performative disgust, and proposed the trifecta of microservices, Kubernetes and something called a "service mesh". This kind of Big Enterprise technology however takes away that basic agency of those Excel users, who no longer understand the business process they run and now has to negotiate with ludicrous technology dweebs for each software change. The previous pliability of the spreadsheets has been completely lost. Using simple Python functions, in a source controlled system, is a better middle ground that the modern-day equivalent of J2EE. Financiers are able to learn Python, and while they may never be amazing at it they can contribute to a much higher level and even make their own changes and get them deployed. Don't knock spreadsheets. If only they had a decent way to handle unit tests, they'd be the business. Update: sounds like this is based on J. P. Morgan, specifically: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qmi5fm/comment/hja6hqg/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3]]> banking finance python coding excel spreadsheets software bank-python https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b803af882769/ 2020-04-29T14:06:50+00:00 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-22/kim-stanley-robinson-let-the-fed-print-money-for-the-planet jm finance carbon climate-change kim-stanley-robinson economics quantative-easing future green-recovery https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:89250c9ce882/ 2020-02-03T16:19:07+00:00 https://github.com/philsturgeon/awesome-earth/issues/107 jm via:philsturgeon investing investment finance green climate money https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a9416f1649e9/ 2019-10-28T20:15:33+00:00 https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/ jmA friend of mine, who works in finance, asked me to explain what Tether was. Short version: Tether is the internal accounting system for the largest fraud since Madoff. ]]> cryptocurrency finance bitcoin tether patio11 bitfinex fraud https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dbcfe36b177b/ 2019-04-25T08:32:29+00:00 https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/bgyfet/til_theres_a_wikipedia_editor_called/ jm This comment over on /r/dataisbeautiful and this one both by /u/shy-talk is where I first heard of him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Britishfinance He seems to have started last year and of course peppers in plenty of non-controversial contributions too but he's definitely determined to paint Ireland as negatively as possible with regards to our financial and tax regulations. Some articles he's created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put_on_the_green_jersey There's actually so many articles where he goes out of his way to make Ireland look bad there's no point trying to list them ]]> ireland politics taxation britishfinance abuse wikipedia finance propaganda uk-politics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bd641aa4e0d6/ 2018-12-18T12:43:02+00:00 https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/12/17/the-bart-sudden-hundreds-of-bitcoin-pumps-or-dumps-to-burn-the-margin-traders/ jmFinance journalists need to stop treating crypto as an efficient market that responds to concerns. It’s a thinly-traded unregulated playground for whales, out to wreck the margin traders. A $400 dip in fifteen minutes is not a “market signal” — it’s a deliberate dump to manipulate the price. Though there’s still downward pressure on the price — all the suckers from the bubble have gone home, so they’re not buying … but the miners still have to sell coins for actual money to pay for their electricity. And even more so now that the price of mining one bitcoin is at — or above — what you could get for selling that bitcoin. So one minute you’ll see a sudden $100 increase in the price that cost 130 BTC of dollars — and those are actual dollars going in — followed the next minute by a matching $100 drop that came from selling only 30 BTC. It’s much easier to drop the price than raise it. ]]> investing bitcoin via:harikunzru cryptocurrency pump-and-dump barts finance margin-traders currencies fraud https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8013d3ae0499/ 2017-07-03T11:00:26+00:00 http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/01/08/462250239/when-an-index-card-of-financial-tips-isnt-enough-this-book-is-there jm finance money advice npr 401k pensions financial-advisors https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aea0606848c1/ 2015-09-30T11:35:39+00:00 http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/30/how-the-banks-ignored-lessons-of-crash?CMP=share_btn_tw jmFirst of all, banks could be chopped up into units that can safely go bust – meaning they could never blackmail us again. Banks should not have multiple activities going on under one roof with inherent conflicts of interest. Banks should not be allowed to build, sell or own overly complex financial products – clients should be able to comprehend what they buy and investors understand the balance sheet. Finally, the penalty should land on the same head as the bonus, meaning nobody should have more reason to lie awake at night worrying over the risks to the bank’s capital or reputation than the bankers themselves. You might expect all major political parties to have come out by now with their vision of a stable and productive financial sector. But this is not what has happened. ]]> banks banking guardian finance europe eu crash history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:de468fc8be8f/ 2014-07-16T13:14:04+00:00 http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4661.html jmAll this evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: the order cancellations and trade executions just before, and during the trader's order were not a coincidence. This is premeditated, programmed theft, plain and simple. Michael Lewis probably said it best when he told 60 Minutes that the stock market is rigged. Nanex have had enough, basically. Mad stuff.]]> hft stocks finance market trading nanex 60-minutes michael-lewis scams sec regulation low-latency exploits hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8f00f85dfa2a/ 2014-06-30T16:47:17+00:00 http://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-t.html jm history capitalism economics piketty capital finance taxation growth money cory-doctorow thomas-piketty https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bce1db32c25e/ 2014-02-14T17:58:58+00:00 http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2014/02/05/why-dispute-resolution-is-hard/ jm finance security ross-anderson emv bitcoin chip-and-pin banking architecture verification vvat logging https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:62a4022f073b/ 2013-04-20T21:57:54+00:00 http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/ jm In his remarks on the final panel, Frank Partnoy mentioned something I missed when it came out a few weeks ago: the role of Microsoft Excel in the “London Whale” trading debacle. [..] To summarize: JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz [...] to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed. After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors. Most spectacularly, “After subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two and of lowering the VaR ...” I write periodically about the perils of bad software in the business world in general and the financial industry in particular, by which I usually mean back-end enterprise software that is poorly designed, insufficiently tested, and dangerously error-prone. But this is something different. [...] While Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets -- badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way. This is why the JPMorgan VaR model is the rule, not the exception: manual data entry, manual copy-and-paste, and formula errors. This is another important reason why you should pause whenever you hear that banks’ quantitative experts are smarter than Einstein, or that sophisticated risk management technology can protect banks from blowing up. At the end of the day, it’s all software. While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number. ]]> excel reliability software coding ides jpmorgan value-at-risk finance london-whale quants spreadsheets unit-tests testability testing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2089e0606d0/ 2012-03-18T12:59:01+00:00 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/colm-mccarthy-this-burden-of-bank-debt-is-simply-not-sustainable-3053806.html jm bondholders ireland finance colm-mccarthy bailout https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a59f2ec16fcf/ 2011-12-06T10:04:08+00:00 http://www.rte.ie/news/money/debt/how-would-my-finances-change-if-euro-collapsed.html jm ireland euro disaster rte finance money mortgages https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6be0c60a3882/ 2011-04-18T10:23:01+00:00 http://namawinelake.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/a-cheeky-offer-on-tracker-mortgages-from-permanent-tsb/ jm ptsb permanent-tsb finance money mortgages tracker-mortgage investment https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7ad3669c9a40/ 2010-11-26T14:58:42+00:00 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/20/eric-cantona-bank-protest-campaign jm banking crisis economics finance protest france eric-cantona https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:049893053959/ 2010-02-02T13:41:58+00:00 http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/01/26/how-online-card-security-fails/ jm verified-by-visa security phishing web banks banking money authentication finance visa 3dsecure papers https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:793360f0b382/