Maison Fleury

This drawing is making the rounds on the intertubes and I find myself going "mmmm" when I look at it.  It stems from a understandable frustration with the banking system but gets the problem and the solution wrong imho. Glass Steagall doesn't say anything about derivatives.  Glass Steagall didn't really say anything about derivatives for the very simple reason that they didn't exist back then. Nor are they really the problem From what I remember, GS was mainly about 2 things  A/ Separation of commercial and investment banking .   The a/ part is pretty straight forward and says commercial banks shouldn't gamble with deposits. Once that gambling is removed then insurance of deposits makes sense. Clinton removed Glass-Steagall under lobbying pressure because large banks wanted to have speculative operations, like traditional investment banks, but also wanted to keep their commercial operations. Note that (for the most part) they were not gambling with

Since my ski accident 2 month ago and the operation in the middle, I have been immobile for the past 2 mo and have another month to go.  In the downtime and instead of waving my arms, I have decided to learn General Relativity. The motivation I have been talking about this 'elastic world' for some time (and the past blog entry) but realized it was time to move from 'intuition' to 'mathematics'. What truly motivated me was that in the first week of downtime I came upon the realization that the anti-symmetric part of the strain tensor of space would give a trivial account of electro-magnetism.  This is fancy way of saying that Electro magnetism is the result of the torsion of space (rotation) and I don't mean at the hand waving level but that I could rebuild Maxwell equations with a couple of lines of calculation by identifying the ElectroMagnetic potential with the displacement and running some math.   In digging further,  this book  comes up.  It is highl