U.S. Govt Shutdown and Finnish Saunas

Two serious reads with seriously interesting article. First, non-serious stuff.

• Why Finland loves saunas. (BBC) Interesting.

Excerpt:

The only Finnish word to make it into everyday English is "sauna". But what it is, and how much it means to Finns, is often misunderstood - and it's definitely not about flirtation or sex.

In a dimly lit wood panelled room, naked men sit in silence, sweating. One beats himself repeatedly with birch branches. Another stands, takes a ladle of water and carefully pours it over the heated stones of the stove in the corner.

• Absurdistan, D.C.: How Republicans are threatening to turn Washington into a failed state. (FP) 

•  Why hitting the debt ceiling is so much worse than a government shutdown. (Slate) 

Excerpt:

A government shutdown is problematic but decidedly noncatastrophic. Not because the government isn’t important, but because the prevailing interpretation of the law is specifically designed to avoid catastrophe. The debt ceiling is another matter. Nobody really knows what will happen if we breach the debt ceiling because it’s never happened before. And everyone worries that it will be awful because nobody’s created any legal provision for not making it awful. A breach is sometimes characterized as a default on the national debt. But it’s actually weirder than that. (End of excerpt)

A graphic from the Economist on the U.S. government finances.

Sunday Reads - A Singh and a Miss and Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius

• No, the fall of Lehman Brothers didn't cause the financial crisis. (Ritholtz)

• Army's Secret Division would have prevented Samba-like encounters. (Sunday Guardian) 

• Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Grit, not IQ, determines success. (Brain Pickings)

• A Singh and a Miss. (Foreign Policy)

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." ––John F. Kennedy 

Infographic: Will Oil Prices Spike?

With multiple crises raging in the Middle East, there are growing fears that energy prices will spike. Will they? Infographic via Visual.ly and Saxo.

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

Anil Agarwal on India's Economic Prospects & MSD's Not Alone

Anil Agarwal is the Chairman of Vedanta Resources. He is nicknamed ‘metal king’ for his ownership of a clutch of metals companies, like bauxite and iron ore. In a free-wheeling interview with the Economic Times, Mr Agarwal ­­­rues that “the world wants India to remain an import-based economy”.

He further says that “India produces 130 MT of iron ore. And they are talking about depletion of iron ore reserves. India has potential to produce 600 MT of iron ore annually. We’ll have reserves for another 100 years at 600 MT annually. That is India’s capacity.” 

As a co-owner of an oil major (in partnership with Cairn), he says that, “We need 20 oil and gas companies in India, but we have only three — Reliance Industries, ONGC, and Cairn. Cairn produces oil at three dollars. Can you believe this? And India imports at 110 dollars a barrel. So, priority to local resources has to be given.” Read the complete interview here.

Also read, ‘India’s realty bubble waiting to burst’, from the pages of the Business Line.

M. S. Dhoni is sporting a new hairdo. There have been several before who have had a “good or bad hair day”. Treat your eyes to this DC slideshow on sportspersons with some real weird hairdos.

When did globalisation start?

When did globalisation start? The Economist tries to answer this important question. Here's an exceprt:

Early economists would certainly have been familiar with the general concept that markets and people around the world were becoming more integrated over time. Although Adam Smith himself never used the word, globalisation is a key theme in the Wealth of Nations. His description of economic development has as its underlying principle the integration of markets over time. As the division of labour enables output to expand, the search for specialisation expands trade, and gradually, brings communities from disparate parts of the world together. The trend is nearly as old as civilisation. Primitive divisions of labour, between “hunters” and “shepherds”, grew as villages and trading networks expanded to include wider specialisations. Eventually armourers to craft bows and arrows, carpenters to build houses, and seamstress to make clothing all appeared as specialist artisans, trading their wares for food produced by the hunters and shepherds. As villages, towns, countries and continents started trading goods that they were efficient at making for ones they were not, markets became more integrated, as specialisation and trade increased. This process that Smith describes starts to sound rather like “globalisation”, even if it was more limited in geographical area than what most people think of the term today. (End of excerpt)

Read the complete piece.

Sunday Reads - Conflict Minerals & Israel's spies inside Syria

• Israel's spies inside Damascus. (Foreign Policy)

• Conflict minerals: The minerals inside our electronic gadgets have bankrolled unspeakable violence in the Congo. (Nat Geo)

• The only certainty is why some people can not see facts. (Antonio Fatas blog)

• Vandana Shiva on the myths and reality in India's food security act. (AlJazeera) 

The Intriguing Story of a Former Goldman Sachs Techie

Finance professionals, especially of the MBA variety, are fascinated with the Wall Street. High finance is seen as a gateway to stratospheric riches and fast-paced career growth.

It is not just the quant/finance guys who make loads of money on the Street. There are the ‘techies’ who create, operate, and manage the backend operations of computer terminals that enable high-frequency trading, which rake in the moolah. The techies also take home fat salaries and big bonuses.

So, what happens when a top-class techie gets arrested by the FBI after being charged with theft by his former employer, Goldman Sachs?

Source: US News

Vanity Fair has a very interesting piece on the life and times of Sergey Aleynikov, by Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and Boomerang.

A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of stealing computer code, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

Here’s an excerpt:

And then Wall Street called. Goldman Sachs put Serge through a series of telephone interviews, then brought him in for a long day of face-to-face interviews. These he found extremely tense, even a bit weird. “I was not used to seeing people put so much energy into evaluating other people,” he said. One after another, a dozen Goldman employees tried to stump him with brainteasers, computer puzzles, math problems, and even some light physics. It must have become clear to Goldman (as it was to Serge) that he knew more about most of the things he was being asked than did his interviewers. At the end of the first day, Goldman invited him back for a second day. He went home and thought it over: he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to work at Goldman Sachs. “But the next morning I had a competitive feeling,” he says. “I should conclude it and try to pass it because it’s a big challenge.”

He returned for another round of Goldman’s grilling, which ended in the office of one of the high-frequency traders, another Russian, named Alexander Davidovich. A managing director, he had just two final questions for Serge, both designed to test his ability to solve problems.

The first: Is 3,599 a prime number?

[...]

The second question the Goldman managing director asked him was more involved—and involving. He described for Serge a room, a rectangular box, and gave him its three dimensions. “He says there is a spider on the floor and gives me its coordinates. There is also a fly on the ceiling, and he gives me its coordinates as well. Then he asked the question: Calculate the shortest distance the spider can take to reach the fly.” The spider can’t fly or swing; it can only walk on surfaces. The shortest path between two points was a straight line, and so, Serge figured, it was a matter of unfolding the box, turning a three-dimensional object into a one-dimensional surface, then using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distances. It took him several minutes to work it all out; when he was done, Davidovich offered him a job at Goldman Sachs. His starting salary plus bonus came to $270,000.

(End of excerpt)

This is a very long piece but trust me, it is an utterly fascinating and intriguing read. Please find the entire piece here. I strongly urge you to read Lewis’s The Big Short and Boomerang, especially the latter.