(no subject)

"With sincerest apologies to Leo, perhaps all happy Chinese reverse mergers resemble one another, while each unhappy Chinese reverse merger is unhappy in its own way."

FT Alphaville caught up on its Sino-Forest reading over the weekend and enjoyed the latest post by John Hempton of Bronte Capital. It looks at Paulson & Co.’s loss from the perspective of a fellow portfolio manager, offering sympathy and rivalry in equal measure. Hempton recognises that small teams of investors will use “shortcuts” based on received wisdom such as timber being a safe asset.

Sino-Forest homework done for the evening, FT Alphaville returned to some extra-curricular reading. But, flicking to Part Two, Chapter 16 of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (as one does), we soon felt confused. Have we picked up the wrong book? I thought this was supposed to be a love story?

For it turns out that Tolstoy foreshadowed Hempton by about 138 years…

Perhaps we’ve been following Sino-Forest for too long already, but we could spot our John Paulson, Carson Block and Sino-Forest characters in this passage:

( Russian excerpt and English translation behind the cut )

Mostly as a reminder for myself.

I remembered reading this, and now I actually have a pointer.

From Michelle Goldberg's recent piece on Michelle Bachmann:

[A]ccording to Randall Balmer, who is both an evangelical and a historian of American evangelicalism at Columbia University, it was the born again Jimmy Carter who first marshaled the era's newly awakened Christians. "He brings them into the political arena. There's no question about that," says Balmer. "And the great irony is that they turned so rabidly and rapidly against him four years later."

That's exactly what happened with Bachmann, who campaigned for Carter in 1976—she and Marcus even went to one of his inaugural balls—but soon tacked sharply rightward.

Real-time bikeshare maps.

http://bikes.oobrien.com/ has real-time bikeshare maps for many cities around the world. A few cities, like Paris, have stopped sharing data for some reason. Most of the others, including Montreal and Washington, seem to be okay sharing their station data. The maps also list how many stations are empty and how many are full, as well as circling them on the map. If you click on a station, you get a graph of how many bikes have been at that station in the last 24 hours.


It's really quite cool.