People and events in our family

椭圆机：20分钟。跑步：35分钟，5000米。

看完了“Street fighter: The last 72 hours of Bear Stearns, the toughest firm on Wall Street”.

The book is a quick read. There is not much new information given that I’ve read so many books on the financial crisis now. It’s written by Kate Kelly, a journalist. It really goes beyond the 72 hours before the firm got purchased by JPM (how could you fill a 200-page book based on 72 hours of events?) Some interesting anecdote: The father of Andrew Metrick (who is at Yale now) is a senior executive at Bears; Hank Paulson is a Christian Scientist and environmentalist; Jamie Dimon knows a lot about the technical details of accounting.

跑步10分钟，力量7组，椭圆机5分钟，力量7组，跑步5分钟，力量7组，跑步15分钟。

椭圆机：55分钟。

跑步：20分钟，3200米。爬楼梯：20分钟，100步/分钟，120层楼。

跑步：20分钟，3200米。爬楼梯：20分钟，100步/分钟，120层楼。

跑步：45分钟，7500米。椭圆机：15分钟。

New Yorker blogger John Cassidy interviewed eight Chicago economists and talked about the efficient market hypothesis and the rational expectation models in light of the financial crisis. Very fun reads.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/01/interview-with-richard-thaler.html#entry-more

In particular, the following conversations are very interesting:

Cassidy: I spoke to Cochrane. He said the problem with behavioral economics is it is too flexible—you can use it to explain anything. He also pointed out that Robert Shiller has been calling for economics to incorporate psychological insights for thirty years, but little progress has been made.

[In answering this question, Thaler brought up the Internet stock bubble, during which shares in Palm, the handheld computing companies, were worth more than the entire market capitalization of Palm’s parent company, 3Com.]

Thaler: [Cochrane] has a model explaining why, during the Internet bubble, the prices of Palm and 3Com were rational. Rational models are one hundred per cent flexible. If you allow time-varying discount rates, there is no discipline whatsoever. If you look at what happened to tech stocks and then to real estate, and you say maybe there wasn’t a bubble—where is the discipline in that?

I think it’s fair to say that behavioral economics hasn’t solved everything. That is true. But to say Shiller and I have been doing it for thirty years—there was just me and him. Now we have some young recruits. We are not outmanned a thousand to one. But there is work to do.

爬楼梯机：30分钟， 每分钟70-120步。

20分钟，2800米。

看完了Henry Kaufman写的”The road to financial reformation: warnings, consequences, reforms”

跑步：55分钟，7500米。

跑步：40分钟，7000米。椭圆机：15分钟。游泳：300米。

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Nicole游泳注意事项。

自由泳：换气抬头太高，时间太长。

蛙泳：手臂划水幅度太大。

仰泳：腿太低，有坐在水里的趋势。

力量：25分钟。椭圆机：10分钟。跑步：25分钟。

读完了Gasparino写的”The sellout: how three decades of Wall Street greed and government mismanagement destroyed the global financial system.”

This is one of the better books that I’ve read so far on the financial crisis. Compared with the other two books on Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, this book covers a much broader range of firms, starting with Salomon Brothers in the 80s and digging into firms such as Merrill, Citi, JPM, Morgan Stanley, and GS with more depth. Much of the book is based on anecdotes or conversations with the executives of these firms. It does feel quite repetitive from time to time when reading the book. The main thesis is that the excess leverage taken by the Wall Street firms  leads to their eventual collapse. Inevitably, a book such as this tends to be oversimplified in the process of searching for the truth for a phenomenon as complicated as a financial bubble and crisis. Overall, an interesting read; even though it does not necessarily give the readers more insights into the financial crisis, it provides many fun stories about the firms in the last 30 years.

500米。

椭圆机：15分钟。跑步：15分钟，2000米。

椭圆机：30分钟。力量：20分钟。跑步：10分钟。

椭圆机：60分钟。