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This week, Iraq has moved from a trading floor with a whiteboard and magic marker pen to full electronic trading in their Stock Exchange.  This is good news for the country and a sign of a return to stability. Now what equities and commodities are we going to trade in … oil?

Oohhhhh-errrrr.   Like any good blogger I love a bit of gossip and nothing better than my old firm, NCR, getting into a spot of hot-under-the-collar bother with HP. Apparently, lots of NCR-ers have been toddling out of Dayton, Ohio across to sunny Palo Alto, California with little USB sticks full of sensitive materials.  Now, the…

Ah well, I can’t leave the credit crash discussion alone without a final mention of poor Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill, the taxpaying citizens who are now left carrying the can of the debt-fuelled crash.  With the banks being bailed out by the central banks, Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill are suffering.  Many of these…

Ah well, I can’t leave the credit crash discussion alone without a final mention of poor Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill, the taxpaying citizens who are now left carrying the can of the debt-fuelled crash.  With the banks being bailed out by the central banks, Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill are suffering.  Many of these…

Popped onto eBay today and found all this wonderful stuff being sold by Bear Stearns employees to try and top up the coffers lost in the JPM bargain basement sale (although it’s slightly more expensive after JPM upped the ante to $10 a share). There was the award to the development team of a Bear…

Popped onto eBay today and found all this wonderful stuff being sold by Bear Stearns employees to try and top up the coffers lost in the JPM bargain basement sale (although it’s slightly more expensive after JPM upped the ante to $10 a share). There was the award to the development team of a Bear…

Popped onto eBay today and found all this wonderful stuff being sold by Bear Stearns employees to try and top up the coffers lost in the JPM bargain basement sale (although it’s slightly more expensive after JPM upped the ante to $10 a share). There was the award to the development team of a Bear…

I’ve been trying to get into Xobni’s (inbox backwards) plugin for Outlook for a few weeks, but they’re blocking me out as they’ve been overloaded with demand even though the product is only in Beta test mode.  This is because Bill Gates referred to them as the “the next generation of social networking” and touted…

I’ve been trying to get into Xobni’s (inbox backwards) plugin for Outlook for a few weeks, but they’re blocking me out as they’ve been overloaded with demand even though the product is only in Beta test mode.  This is because Bill Gates referred to them as the “the next generation of social networking” and touted…

In Part One, the fact that the markets are technologically turbo-charged was discussed.  Today, it’s the humans fault as technology is only doing what the humans tell the systems to do.  I could talk about SIVs, CDOs, Credit Default Swaps, Hedge Funds and all sorts of other stuff, but I’ve done that before (see "Department…