Blogs

Plaxo

Submitted by chris on Fri, 2010-06-18 17:49

I receive email from Plaxo from time to time, all are upcoming birthday notifications. It’s not difficult to click delete in gmail, but today I started to wonder why I have not close the account. I started using Plaxo around 2004, trying very hard to avoid clicking the wrong button and spamming my whole contact list. It had some promises, but never become essential to me like LinkedIn had. When I logged in just now, my profile was still that of my previous job which was more than 2 years ago. That’s how long I have not logged in, and I think it’s time to let go.

Before I do the irreversible, I wanted to make sure I gave them their due. I have not been around for a while, may be they have been doing something great withing my knowing. So I looked at their blog to see the recent updates:

so I had to look at their blog for recent changes. 

  • April’10 – Site redesigned, putting more focus on address book
  • March’10 – Announced new CEO
  • February’10 – Updated address book with better search, categorization
  • September’09 – Sign into Plaxo with Yahoo account and 2-way sharing of Plaxo’s social thing (They called this Pulse) and Yahoo’s social thing (I don’t even know what they call this)
  • August’09 – Updated search functionality to easier find the C-Suites
  • August’09 – Announced search for company navigator

I use Google Contacts to manage my central contact list, and LinkedIn to maintain professional network. Admittedly, Plaxo might have come up with some new ideas before LinkedIn, but with the small number of users on their network (I don’t think the “Plaxo is Spam” label helped) it just doesn’t matter.

At least, they have made it very very straightforward to close your account. Log in -> go to Settings -> select close my account. This is unlike that other social network out there. Kudo to you. And Good Bye.

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Attributing systemic risk to individual institutions

Submitted by chris on Mon, 2010-05-17 21:56

Working Papers No 308 from BIS talks about this subject, which is one of the important things we need to understand in order to fix the Too Big to Fail type of banking regulation.

This aim is to require important banks, those that because of their size will likely take others down with them when they fail, to be more careful in how they run their business. It will not be easy to get everyone to agree on how this should be done.

This paper attribute the importance of a bank to several factors:

  • The number of banks
  • The banks’ relative sizes
  • The exposure of banks to common risk factor
  • Banks’ probabilities of default

I have not read through the paper yet, but here are a few paragraph and a nice set of charts.

we investigate the joint impact of system lumpiness and banks’ exposure to the common factor on systemic tail risk. The results are portrayed in Graph 1, left-hand panel. In this panel, lumpiness is captured solely by the number of homogeneous banks in a hypothetical system and is held fixed (at one of three levels) in order to plot systemic risk as a function of the common-factor exposure.

A key message of the graph is that a decrease in the lumpiness of the system depresses systemic risk by more (the distance between the lines is greater) when banks’ exposure to the common risk factor is smaller. To see why, note that lower exposure to the common factor means greater importance of idiosyncratic risks. In turn, idiosyncratic risks are those that are diversified away at the level of the system when its lumpiness decreases (in this case, as the number of banks increases). In the limit case, in which all banks are exposed only to the common risk factor (i.e. when the asset-return correlations equal unity), changes in the lumpiness of the system are inconsequential.

The flipside of this intuitive result reveals an important insight regarding the consequences of measurement error. The different slopes of the three lines in the left-hand panel of Graph 1 indicate that systemic risk tends to increase faster in the exposure to the common factor when there are more banks in the system. Thus, a given error in the estimate of banks’ exposures to the common factor is likely to result in a larger error in the measurement of systemic tail risk when the system is less lumpy.Read more

Volcano vs. Nuclear Bomb

Submitted by chris on Mon, 2010-05-03 14:54

Ash cloud from Mount Eyjafjallajökull compared to what would result from a few nuclear warheads. Human can’t prevent volcanic eruptions (yet), but we can try to get along.

 Volcano vs. Nuclear Bomb

from GOOD

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