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As politicians and investors cast their enthusiastic support behind the legislation and technology necessary to christen the “New Age of Ethanol”, consensus among the world’s leading scientists is still critical at best. From hungry Mexicans to enraged environmentalists to ruffled foreign dignitaries, the real cost of ethanol has become increasingly obvious to all but the most cynical energy hucksters. Fueled by agricultural protectionism and the pressing drive for “energy independence”, the Ethanol Lobby is now humming on all cylinders, and if Runge and Senauer are right, that might spell disaster far beyond the pumps…

Since their earliest days a rogue asset class — a breakaway tax haven from the archaic world of REITs — income trusts have drawn the ire of free-market economists and the capital of free-wheeling investors alike. The former see the structure as an anti-competitive perversion of natural capital flows, while the latter flock to invest in a sea of premium yields. Traditionally, policy makers have been hamstrung by this natural dichotomy, but with their latest Halloween trick, Flaherty and the Tories have taken a bold step toward a fair and open capital market. Baby boomers may cry foul over their lost pot of gold, and socialists may applaud their conservatives counterparts for a rare shot across the bow of a …

One of the last developed countries to modernize competition in the red hot mobile sector, Canadian regulators have finally bent to the will of their constituents and — as of March 14, 2007 — will force incumbent cellphone operators to allow customers to switch service providers without losing their existing number. While that might not seem like such a dramatic shift in domestic policy on its surface, the move has been years in the making, though surprisingly, the changes have come with surprisingly little industry fanfare.

Recent reports have pegged open interest in the world’s largest IPO at nearly US$400 billion. That’s a lot of capital ready to speculate on a still unproven Chinese macroeconomy, particularly in the face of its ongoing structural woes. Could this be the end of the beginning for capitalism in China? Or perhaps the beginning of the end…
The Enduring Allure of China
by Peter Zeihan, Stratfor.com

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is expected to raise nearly $22 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) — the largest in history — after shares are made available to retail investors Oct. 27. The ICBC offering is the latest in a series of IPOs involving Chinese banks, into which Western investment firms have …

How to Prevent a Blackout
A Beginners’ Guide
On August 14, 2003, my lawnmower died. It was 4:10 pm and the perfect weather for gardening. Suspecting a simple neighbourhood brownout, I resigned myself to reading in the afternoon sun. Power failure wasn’t uncommon during the steamy, air-conditioned months of summer, but as I discovered hours later, this outage was anything but common. At its height, the blackout of 2003 plunged nearly fifty million people into darkness, and it would be days before power returned to the furthest reaches of the grid. Subways and office towers were evacuated, streetlights pulsed hypnotically as pedestrians guided traffic, hospitals and prisons switched to backup diesel generators, and beer and melting ice cream were shared …

Economics is converging with everything these days, from the environment to the grocery store to the bedroom. This time, the playing field is none other than the human brain itself, and the results are less surprising than they are empirically fascinating. Contrary to conventional thinking, it turns out that people won’t always act in the own best interests, and that’s as true for investing and gambling as it is for adultery and employment…
MIND GAMES
by JOHN CASSIDY in the New Yorker

What neuroeconomics tells us about money and the brain.
Like many people who have accumulated some savings, I invest in the stock market. Most of my retirement money is invested in mutual funds, but now and again I also buy individual stocks. …

In light of the grand sociopolitical developments over the last eight years, this speech by the former prime minister has found some new legs…

(more on the lighter side of advanced statistical heuristics, from America’s preeminant econo-literary duo)
A Star Is Made
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly
If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month’s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or …

“Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without in any way being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and the operation of a real economic system.”
- Wassily Leontief, 1982

(the following prose figures prominantly at the end of every nortel press release. caveat investor…)

Certain information included in this press release is forward-looking and is subject to important risks and uncertainties. The results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual results or events. Factors which could cause results or events to differ from current expectations include, among other things: the outcome of regulatory and criminal investigations and civil litigation actions related to Nortel’s restatements and the impact any resulting legal judgments, settlements, penalties and expenses could have on Nortel’s results of operations, financial condition and liquidity, and any related potential dilution of Nortel’s common shares; the findings of Nortel’s independent review and implementation of recommended …

as a primer on basic investment analysis and the ongoing challenge of balancing risk and reward, this email exchange tries to demystify the increasingly lucritive but often frigtening world of “structured finance”. caveat investor…
From: [a good friend]
Sent: December 20, 2005 9:56 AM
To: [me]
Subject: Can you please look at this prospectus?
My father is interested in this but thinks it may be too good to be true. What is your opinion?
From: [me]
Sent: December 20, 2005 11:14 AM
To: [a good friend]
Subject: RE: Can you please look at this prospectus?
it’s called “structured finance”, and it happens all the time. think of the income trust as a really tasty cake. each individual layer of the cake is a different type of security, from …

When was the last time you looked at the label on just about anything? Chances are, if the item cost you less than $30, you just participated in the global phenomenon we’ve come to know and love as the Low-Cost Chinese Import. Entire retail franchises have already been built built around this new breed of price-conscious shopper, and while consumers are absolutely beaming at the prospect of $1 placemats and flashlights and coffee pots, little time is spent reflecting on where those items are actually made, and how little the workers are getting paid to actually make them.
The funny thing is, given two items of identical value, informed consumers will typically buy the one that costs them less, regardless of …

In an attempt to explain the subtle but important distinction between cash flow, revenue and income, this article is the first in a series on basic investment strategy, and can serve as a primer for anyone interested in a more “rational” approach to financial research and analysis…
The first thing most people do when they hear about a new company is follow the ever-popular “share price” line of simple deductive enquiry (“Where’s it trading?” “Where was it trading?” Where will it be trading next week?”). In essence, these people are making the fairly respectable gamble that it really is “good news” that drives share prices up, and it really is “bad news” that drives them back down again. To be sure, …

This absolutely blows my mind. With one simple download and a click of the mouse, I can literally zoom in from space on Moscow’s infamous Red Square, hovering less than 2,500 feet above St. Basil’s Cathedral and the ominous gaze of the Kremlin, as my computer pieces together terabytes of high-resolution satellite imagery from the urban landscape below.Then, with another subtle click, I’m flying back into space, and this time descend on one of the many sprawling banks of the raging Tigris River, closing in with crystal clarity on the now-empty walls of the National Museum of Iraq. Once home to some of the world’s greatest antiquities, the building is now just a depressing reminder of the often painful cost …

this one comes as a sort of “public service announcement” to the rational readership (all three of you know who you are!)
honestly, do yourself a favour and go read this book. it was co-written by a (so-called) “rogue” economist who, to our collective benefit, chose to apply his capacity for mathematical prognostication on something other than jobs reports and manufacturing indices. stuff like cheating in sports and the life of a crack gang. stuff like campaign finance and the challenge of standardized testing.
here’s an exerpt to whet your appetite:
…Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop- which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions-they now hurried to explain it. Most of …

Sitting in a highrise. Staring out into space.
She turns and asks: “what do you think they’re doing in that window over there?”
It’s 3:30am, and one of the city’s most expensive hotels bursts through the low-rise jungle foliage less than a stone’s throw away. Its western face sits directly across from their elevated garden patio.
In a well-lit window themselves, they muse about the nature of their own story, and how the exercise would be just as enjoyable from the other side of that same visual equation, staring out at their own towering spire through that well-lit window in the fancy hotel.
“They’re make-up artists,” she said with confidence, “and they need the bright light to paint some beautiful faces before a morning …

It’s past is long and exotic, filled with decades of geopolitical intrigue, war, murder, espionage, treason, power — and best of all, religious fundamentalism. It’s colossal footprint on the world has been likened to the invention of the wheel, the rise of the microchip, and the discovery of the human genome. But how exactly did oil get so quintessentially “slick”?
The American Dream
Like any great tale of American success, oil began with absolutely nothing. In the beginning, it was a smelly, black, gaseous sort of nothing. As we’ve come to learn, petrochemicals are derived from ancient vegetation and marine life, trapped for eons within the sedimentary rock of the Earth’s firey mantle. Over time, under immense pressure and heat, all that …

(another good primer on the business of hollywood, from one of the many gifted keyboards at slate.)
Tom Cruise Inc.
The numbers behind his celebrity.
By Edward Jay Epstein
The total “gawkerization” of Hollywood, entertaining as it may be to the public (and journalists), blots out much of the reality underlying the movie business. Witness, for example, the treatment of Tom Cruise after People asked on its Web site, on May 12, if his relationship with the actress Katie Holmes represented “1. TRUE ROMANCE” or “2. PUBLICITY STUNT.” In this weekly pseudo-poll, which makes no pretense of finding a random sample, and in which subscribers with AOL’s instant messaging can “vote” as many times as they like (paying a charge each vote), 62 percent …