Everything you can imagine is real.
A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases. The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. The time-traveller scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify “we.”
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Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis
Employees walk past a sign at Merrill Lynch headquarters in New York on Oct. 30, 2007. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images) They created fake demand. A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged. The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. Individual instances of these questionable trades have been reported before, but ProPublica's investigation, done in partnership with NPR's Planet Money [2], shows that by late 2006 they became a common industry practice. ProPublica also found 85 instances during 2006 and 2007 in which two CDOs bought pieces of each other.
All About Trends
The BIG SHIFT to online for financial products: Google Finance research
At their annual ThinkBanking event last Thursday (Sept 9th) in Sydney, the Google Financial Services Team released their latest behavioral research supported by Global Reviews’ Customer Experience Benchmarking. The results are a shock to those expecting traditional marketing methods to strongly influence customer behavior in respect to product selection in the financial services space. Barney Pierce, the Head of Industry – Finance for Google in Australia articulated that the research “shows a fundamental shift toward the online channel dominating research for financial products and services. Greg Muller and his team at Global Reviews who assisted with collecting the research explained that the research was conducted across Australia with a sample size of over 900 people from all walks of life – it was directed at all users of financial services products. 88% of customers research online Staggeringly when it comes to financial products, 88% of customers today start their journey online.
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Is Google the best candidate to create a good, customer-focused
Slowly -- and sometimes not so slowly -- the bricks have been giving way to the clicks for the past 15 years. Plenty of formerly unassailable business models have suffered as a result. The tears flowing for these companies, however, have been few outside their own high, stony walls. Users, customers, innovators, seekers -- the majority bottom sections of the social and economic pyramids -- these are the big winners in the many wonderful effects of the Web and Internet. And I for one have the freedom, productivity, choice and empowerment to prove it. Except in one glaring area: banking. I have had it with the old financial processes, lack of capability, murky institutions, rips-offs, peonage fees/rates -- and especially attitudes. I have had it with credit cards, banks, mutual fund companies, PayPal, debit cards, MasterCard and Visa. Merchants hate it, users hate it. You want financial industry reform? A few good transactions The last two years are and should be the last straw.
Online Stock Trading - TD Ameritrade
Where banks and socials can agree
I said I would respond to Venessa’s rant in a bit more detail, as she deserves a response and not just a pat on the head to say: “there, there”, which is what she implies most banking folks have done so far. Before I get into that, it’s interesting to see the reaction to yesterday’s blog entry. Most of it is that polarisation does not help which, in this context, is where you get the ‘them and us’ mentality I referred to yesterday. That is very unhelpful and causes wars. What these discussions should remember is that the discussion is more about two parallel systems that run separately, complement and have overlap where appropriate. Anyways, here’s a direct response to what Venessa wants from her bank. First, she wants transparency. “All I know about the way my bank works is that I deposit my money there, and then they take that money and go make money off of it. There are banks that do this, but they are nearly all mutuals, community banks, building societies, credit unions and such like.
Understandings Earnings Estimates
In the video above, Hewitt Packard’s CEO Leo Apotheker said the following: Carl: Before we let you go, Leo, I don’t know if there’s been a quarter since you joined where the company beat, if you will, I wonder you’ve got to be looking forward to that day.Leo Apotheker: We’ve beat this quarter.Carl: But with accompanied by guidance that was very disappointing. Every quarter has had some level of disappointment. Are you looking forward to one where there is none? The transcript cannot convey the frustration in Apotheker’s voice when he was accused of missing expectations for the current quarter. Gamed Earnings As the next two charts show, beating earnings and revenues expectations is nothing new. The chart below highlights the inception of SEC regulation “FD” (aka, Fair Disclosure). Note that the percentage of companies beating estimates has been falling in recent quarters, from 75% in the first quarter of 2010 to 67% in the first quarter of 2011. Click on chart for a larger image Conclusion
