Alfred Hitchcock once said...

I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.

The shooting of an Occupy Oakland protester by the police yesterday and an article from HuffPo last month really got me thinking about the police and freedom. There is a fundamental trade-off between safety and freedom and I'm starting to worry we've gone too far into the safety camp. According to this article 90% of cities over 50,000 people have SWAT teams. Do cities this small ever really need to use force this drastic? There are billions in counter-terrorism funds floating around and no accountability in the DoD - they flat out don't know where the money goes. Apparently what happens is that little rural towns end up with tanks and machine guns. Do we really trust all these towns to keep these weapons secure? Isn't it more of a risk to spread deadly weapons all around the country?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarization-9-11-september-11_n_955508.html

Time for a new career?

According to physicist Jonathan Carter nearly any model calibrated to real life data will yield awful predictions. Though I'm not sure if he's advocating making predictions based on no data instead?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finance-why-economic-models-are-always-wrong

Also I wonder if anyone has written an article about "why scientific american articles are always wrong." That might give me some comfort.

Book of Mormon coming to Chicago

YES! Its sold out forever in NYC, hopefully the bigger theater in Chicago will make tickets easier to get.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-07/news/ct-ent-0907-book-mormon-chicago-20110906_1_mormon-missionaries-chicago-mission-anne-garefino/2

Groupon Bubble

Funny how economics works, someone comes up with a great idea makes a lot of money, everyone copies that great idea, all of a sudden the original idea is no longer profitable. There are red flags all over groupon, a constantly shrinking IPO, old investors bailing as new ones come in, questionable accounting practices and big payouts of the executives. This does not sound like a company on firm financial footing. One line from this article in particular stuck out - "[Groupon is part of] an industry that is turning into the digital equivalent of junk mail."

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-21/tech/30305419_1_groupon-s-ipo-ipo-boutique-daily-deals

SEC settlement with Citi

Today Citi settled with the SEC for nearly $300 million over a structured CDO deal. Seems like every bank is going to face these kinds of lawsuits.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576640873051858568.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

What's interesting about this specific settlement is that it names an individual - Brian Stoker. Most of the settlements are very generic sounding and don't call out anyone. So of course I'm curious and I look him up on linkedin - turns out he's only 3 degrees of separation from me. Looking at his work history he went from VP at Merrill Lynch to Director of Structured Products at Citi and now he's an Analyst at some private equity shop. Ouch. Sounds like that structured products experience is a liability these days.

Maybe it just collapsed on its own?

Imagine if every bank in the US was guaranteed by the local/state government. I certainly wouldn't have my money in any bank from Illinois or California. Thankfully we don't have to worry about where our bank is located, our dollars are equally safe (or unsafe) anywhere. Europe isn't so lucky, a euro in a Greek bank is much less secure than a euro in a German bank. So of course people have been moving their euros out of Greek banks (among others) and into German banks. This forces Greek banks to liquidate assets and transfer the euros to German banks. So the big question on everyone's mind is do the Greek banks have enough in assets to cover all the deposits in their bank? At the rate they're are losing deposits we'll find out very soon just how big the holes in their balance sheet are.

http://blogs.cfr.org/geographics/2011/10/13/euroflee/

h.t. MR

Paid Detail Unit

Unbelievable. For $37 / hour Wall Street bankers can hire a member of the NYPD, complete with gun, handcuffs and the legal authority to make arrests. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, Wall Street already owns Congress, the Fed, a private army is the next logical step. I worry about the Occupy Wall Street crowd, they may be in over their heads here...

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/who-really-owns-nypd-turns-out-its-no

To top it off these hired guns are indemnified by taxpayers. God forbid Wall Street be held responsible for their actions.

h.t. Big Picture