New Blog

I've started a few of these now, and have trouble keeping even one blog up-to-date. But I had to set up something to counter the "cheaper pizza" that we see creeping into the everyday lives of academics these days.

One of my colleagues refers to teaching as "selling pizza." As in, "we're all just selling pizza, here."

I can't disagree with this person more, but since that's the model they want to work under, I figured that we should try to work within it. After all, this person might be right. Or they might have some influence over the process.

My pizza is very expensive. And it will continue to be.

New rules to help stop market meltdowns

From a story on FT.com today, it appears that new SEC rules are coming out next week to set floors on equity prices. This is an attempt to avoid the kind of firesale that we saw on May 6, and it's an echo of the limits that have been in place since 1987 to deal with daily changes in the S&P500, known as "circuit breakers." Although such a thing is common in futures markets, shutting markets down after max price changes is pretty new for equities, and not very well understood. Only time will tell if these limits are going to to harmful or worthwhile.

More here