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Lance Cpl. Brandon King, a driver with Delta Company, 1st Tank Battalion, performs maintenance on an M1 Abrams Tank at Forward Operating Base Shir Ghazay, Afghanistan, April 5, 2013. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tammy K. Hineline.
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Mother Jones
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The Wall Street Journal reports today that high-speed traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are exploiting the ability to get confirmation of their own trades a few milliseconds before the rest of the public. Here’s an example of how it works:
Firms can use their early looks at CME trading data in several ways. One strategy is to post buy and sell orders a few pennies from where the market is trading and wait until one of the orders is executed. If crude oil is selling for $90 on the CME, a firm might post an order to sell one contract for $90.03 and a buy order for $89.97.
If the sell order suddenly hits, the firm’s computers detect that oil prices have swung higher. Those computers can instantly buy more of the same contract before other traders are even aware of the first move.
I’ve read enough about high-speed trading that I can’t even get too worked up about this. The rich get richer, regular traders pay the price, etc. etc. What really makes this story worthwhile is hearing the high-speed traders try to justify what they do:
Officials with Virtu Financial LLC, a high-speed trading firm in New York, view a slight head start as good for the overall market, according to a person familiar with their thinking. The person said the data helps traders who buy and sell futures contracts throughout the day manage risk and post more quotes that benefit other buyers and sellers. The person said Virtu doesn’t use the information to amplify its profits by anticipating moves elsewhere in the market.
Proponents say eliminating the ability of parties in a trade to get information slightly in advance could lead to less-liquid markets because some firms would be inclined to trade less due to the greater risks.
Yep, you read this right. Giving a few select traders an unfair advantage over everyone else is actually good for everyone else! Why? Because if these lucky traders didn’t have an unfair advantage they wouldn’t make lots of extra sure-thing trades, and these sure-thing trades benefit the entire market because…..
Um, liquidity! It’s the last refuge of the scoundrel and the first refuge of the high-speed trader. They create liquidity, baby, and without that, the entire commodities market, which is famously liquid and always has been, might just seize up and die. Seriously. That’s their story.
I don’t even have the energy to mock this lame nonsense right now. Maybe Felix Salmon will do in the morning. In the meantime, I’ll just leave you with a further fascinating little nugget. It turns out that the time advantage for high-speed traders is different for different commodities: 2.4 milliseconds for silver futures, 4.1 milliseconds in soybean futures and 1.1 milliseconds for gold futures. Feel free to speculate on why this might be in comments.
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A few months ago I wrote about the great construction employment mystery: housing starts are way up, but construction employment is fairly flat. What’s going on?
Today, Neil Irwin revisits this, and suggests that a new report from Goldman Sachs has the explanation:
Key to understanding the sluggish growth in construction jobs is a concept called “labor hoarding.” That’s what happens during a recession when companies don’t fire as many workers as the decline in business would seemingly have justified. Firms don’t want to lose all their quality workers and then be unable to keep up with demand when business finally turns around, so they keep people on staff even when there is not enough work to keep them fully busy.
This seems to have happened on a large scale in construction in the last few years….But because construction companies never fired as many workers as the collapse in their business would have justified, that means that over the last year, they haven’t needed to hire additional workers to keep up with the uptick in business.
I think this is probably right. A day after I first wrote about this, I posted an update that took a longer-term look at housing starts and construction employment. The basic chart is on the right, and sure enough, it looks as if construction employment (the red line) didn’t drop as much as you might expect based on the last big housing bust in the early 90s. Back then, there was about an 18-month lag before employment started to catch up to the rebound in housing starts, but this time, because employment didn’t drop as much, it might take two or three years before we start to see job growth. In other words, it might still be about 12 months before we see a substantial uptick in construction employment.
Mother Jones
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We’re Probably Still a Few Months Away From an Employment Boom in Housing
Too many insurance companies aren’t connecting the dots.
Insurance companies have been paying out big bucks of late, funding cleanup in the wake of wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events likely made worse by global warming. Superstorm Sandy caused an estimated $50 billion in economic losses, and it was just one of 11 American catastrophes in 2012 that wrought more than $1 billion worth of destruction.
So one would logically think that insurance companies would be among the most clued-in businesses when it comes to understanding and bracing for humanity’s horrendous effects on the weather.
Not so, according to the results of an industry-wide survey of 184 insurance companies that operate in California, New York, and Washington state.
From a report published by CERES [PDF], the nonprofit that administered the survey:
In general, almost all companies responding to the survey show significant weakness in their preparedness to address the effects climate change may have on their business. However, a small subset of industry leaders are evolving their business strategies to remain competitive as the impacts of climate change unfold. Given the strong scientific consensus on climate change, the rest of the industry would be well advised to follow the lead of these innovative companies.
Two of the biggest laggards in acknowledging climate reality: Allstate and Travelers, which “express strong ambivalence about the state of the science — specifically, the existence of climate change and what is causing it,” CERES says.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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Insurance companies on climate change: ‘What climate change?’
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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.
Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set. It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.
All told, of the 190-odd countries on this planet, a staggering 54 participated in various ways in this American torture system, hosting CIA “black site” prisons, allowing their airspace and airports to be used for secret flights, providing intelligence, kidnapping foreign nationals or their own citizens and handing them over to US agents to be “rendered” to third-party countries like Egypt and Syria. The hallmark of this network, Open Society writes, has been torture. Its report documents the names of 136 individuals swept up in what it says is an ongoing operation, though its authors make clear that the total number, implicitly far higher, “will remain unknown” because of the “extraordinary level of government secrecy associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition.”
No region escapes the stain. Not North America, home to the global gulag’s command center. Not Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Not even social-democratic Scandinavia. Sweden turned over at least two people to the CIA, who were then rendered to Egypt, where they were subject to electric shocks, among other abuses. No region, that is, except Latin America.
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¡Yanqui, No!: Why Latin America Didn’t Join Washington’s Counterterrorism Posse
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Vivian Maier’s massive collection of street photography remained hidden from the public eye until a Chicago realtor named John Maloof stumbled across boxes of her negatives at an auction house in 2007. After amassing more negatives and finally googling her, he learned that she had made her living as a nanny and had died a few days earlier at age 83. She left an oeuvre of intimate glimpses of people caught in everyday moments, as seen in this 2011 Mother Jones collection of her work.
Now, Maloof has joined with Charles Siskel and Submarine Entertainment to produce Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary due out later this year. The film draws on Super-8 footage shot by Maier as well as interviews with friends, family, and neighbors that expose more details of Maier’s life and work. Discovering the real Maier is a challenge; as one of her friends put it, “she was a closed person” and also because most people she knew “had no idea she took photographs.” About the film, one friend insists Maier “would’ve hated every minute of it. She would never have let this happen.” Yet, says Siskel, “Vivian’s story is as powerful as her art” and he hopes the documentary “will bring her the recognition she deserves.”
Read more about Maier in Alex Kotlowitz’s essay “The Best Street Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of.”
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This article originally appeared on the ProPublica website.
Some of the nation’s biggest corporations donated more than a million dollars to launch a Republican nonprofit that went on to play a key role in recent political fights.
Like the nonprofit groups that poured money into last year’s elections, the decade-old State Government Leadership Foundation has been able to keep the identities of its funders secret. Until now.
A records request by ProPublica to the IRS turned up a list of the original funders of the group: Exxon, Pfizer, Time Warner, and other corporations put up at least 85 percent of the $1.3 million the foundation raised in the first year and a half of its existence, starting in 2003.
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Big Corporations Like Exxon Put Up Seed Funding for Dark Money Group
Whether because of budget cuts or natural disasters, many of our nation’s libraries are struggling. But DIY efforts are filling the cracks in a few especially hard-hit communities.
Urban Librarians Unite
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Urban Librarians Unite in New York has set up sidewalk mini libraries outside less-mini libraries that have closed due to storm damage.
These tiny, all weather libraries house about a hundred books at a time and there is no expectation whatsoever that the books will come back. … The Mini Libraries are a resource for our communities, a chance to experiment in library science, and a reminder to the public that even if the library itself is in ruins the librarians are still thinking of them.
ULU is quick to point out that its orange boxes, while super-awesome, aren’t a replacement for real library infrastructure.
Advocates of little libraries are often rabid supporters of big libraries as well and it is their respect for the institution that makes them want to emulate it. It is impossible to mistake a citizen’s reading exchange for a well run reference desk. Our Mini Libraries will suffer from the same limitations as any little library. They could never be mistaken as an alternative to the branch libraries they substitute and intended to support. They do offer some comfort and succor, especially to kids and families, and they remind people that libraries — and their librarians — are nimble, caring and quick to respond to the needs of their communities.
We hope that our Mini Libraries will evolve.
“I smell the spirit of Occupy,” writes a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger.
Jaime Omar YassinThe Biblioteca before the city booted it off library grounds.
For an even more grassroots effort on the opposite coast, there’s the six-month-old Biblioteca Popular in Oakland. On Aug. 13, 2012, activists occupied an abandoned library in East Oakland only to be booted by the city within the day. Undeterred, they set up on the grounds and sidewalk outside, providing garden space, kids’ activities, and books in both English and Spanish. At first the city left Biblioteca alone, but then three weeks ago it locked down the grounds and gardens, pushing the library onto the sidewalk outside, where it remains now.
All power to the book people.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries
