Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. More on DuckDuckGo.

2. Markets in everything, honey trap edition, or should they call it something else?

3. Do hedge fund returns have lower volatility?

4. The still-underrated Dylan Matthews covers MMT, graphic here.

5. Remarkable Swedish rescue, but of what?

Comments

Peter

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Thanks for the link to The Sun. There's a neat new feature under which you can rotate the picture of the Page 3 chick through the full 360 degrees.

Andreas Moser

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The Sun girls are also experts on human rights: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/human-rights-with-hollie/ - or so they think.

Miley Cyrax

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@2

Usually I'm sick of the Brits-have-bad-dentistry jokes, which have been beaten like a dead horse, but... goddamn that guy has horrible teeth.

Alan

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LA Story
Harris: SanDeE*, your... your breasts feel weird.
SanDeE*: Oh, that's 'cause they're real.

My last girlfriend liked my slightly irregular teeth.

Jamie_NYC

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My thought exactly...

Andrew'

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I'm not following...his girlfriend liked your teeth too?

steve

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His dentistry is fine, but he needs to be snared by an orthodonture trap.

Ari Timonen

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This is actually rather common in UK. Some people suggested this is because of the lack flouride in the the drinking water.

Daniel Kuehn

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Kinda weird they couldn't manage to track down a picture of Joan Robinson or Abba Lerner, huh?

Barkley Rosser

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That hedge funds have lower volatility is not surprising as they reputedly use elaborate straddle strategies that are designed to do just that. The link seems to suggest that they do not necessarily get higher returns. This would be in contrast with high dividend yield stocks that get both higher returns and lower volatility in the long run compared to other stocks.

Matthew Gunn

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Hedge fund return volatility and risk exposure can be understated due to stale pricing. If hedge funds hold more exotic and illiquid assets, reported prices may not fully reflect volatility in the true market price of these assets, and the hedge fund will report smoother returns than is actually the case. Hedge fund return volatility and contemporary correlation with the market will be understated.

Asness, Krail, and Liew explore the evidence here http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=252810. For example, they find hege fund returns are correlated with lagged returns of the market (eg. the return from the previous month), suggesting some degree of stale pricing in hedge fund assets.

AC

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I'd like to use DuckDuckGo, but it doesn't seem like a very good search engine.

Adrian Ratnapala

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AC, I agree for the one thing I tested. We will see how things go, google is no longer the only bunch who know how to make one.

On the other hand I like that the ".us" top-level-domain is getting the Tuvalu treatment.

Jacob

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I've known about DuckDuckGo for about six months now. Google is my go-to search engine; but If I can't find something in Google, I frequently try DuckDuckGo and sometimes find what I'm looking for.

Adrian Ratnapala

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#5:

"A bit like a bear that hibernates. Humans can do that,"

I didn't know humans could do that, and I bet there is something about this guy's body that makes him better at it than most. But I guess it is hardly suprising that your body slows down in the cold, or that various systems adapt to that.

I suppose this is the start of an evolutionary slope, even before bears could hibernate through the whole winter, some of them were facing accidents like this guy, thus selecting for better hibernateors.

Rahul

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On a related note, body cooling is medically induced to reduce systemic damage in a bunch of scenarios. The first successful end stage rabies treatment a few years ago had a similar protocol.

Dan in Euroland

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#4

Economic Logician had an accurate assessment of Wray's work: http://economiclogic.blogspot.com/2011/02/heterodox-money.html

FYI

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#4, so what is the explanation according to the MMT guys for all the hyper inflation cases we had in the last 50 years? How about the high inflation the US faced in the 70s? The article is not clear on that and I could not find any good link in google about it.

To imagine that the government can print money non-stop at any time without any bad consequence sounds incredibly naïve to me.

Matt Waters

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Indeed, they in fact admit that printing money can only lead to inflation when the economy is at full employment. But that's... exactly what Paul Krugman and other mainstream Keynesians say as well. MMT'er act like they're on this extreme edge, but I don't see how their views are not just orthodox Keynsianism.

And as the article says, MMT'er blissfully ignore falsifying datapoints like Australia and Canada, or for that matter the US in the 1990's. It is definitely true that the demand for an economy has to have an upward trajectory to keep the economy at full employment, but demand is not a zero-sum game. If the government does not run deficits, that does not mean the private sector has a deficit instead. Instead demand is equal to MV and either M or V can go up or do without government changing its deficit.

Andreas Moser

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I am more attractive than the guy in story no. 2.

londenio

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I don't know how attractive you are Andreas, but let's just say that the fact that this guy is not *that* attractive makes the test more powerful. If you ask, say, Ryan Reynolds to hit on your wife out and then she cheats, you don't really know what was going on. Maybe she wasn't cheating on you to begin with but you gave her a good reason to do so. On the other hand, if she cheats with the dude in the picture, your marriage may not be working as well as you thought.

Rahul

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Reminds me of the legal entrapment arguments in FBI undercover sting ops.

Andreas Moser

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Well, because you asked: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/about-me/ (although I have a beard now)

But you are making a good point. If my wife cheats on me with Quasimodo, then something is terribly wrong. However, I still would prefer her not to cheat at all.

santcugat

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Funny that Australia and Canada are both still experiencing explosive housing booms. (You'd think people would have learned by now, but from what I hear from my Canadian friends, this time, things are different)

As I remember, both Ireland (remember the Celtic tiger anyone?) and Spain were also experiencing significant budget surpluses right until the crash.

Cliff Arroyo

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"honey trap edition, or should they call it something else?"

Mayo trap? You're welcome.

cool pipes

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Post writing is also a excitement, if you be acquainted with afterward you can write otherwise it is difficult to write.

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