savageinfidel

Yesterday, the Unknown Family was set to go to a nearby city for an overnight trip to check out a couple of hospitals (part of the Unknown Son's treatment plan). We were getting ready to leave in the morning, and then the fun started. Unknown Wife's experienced some leaking. We were somewhat concerned, but not much, because the the new baby wasn't due for another three weeks. We called her OB/GYN, and he told us not to bother about coming to his office - just go straight to the hospital. So, it was off to the neighbor's with the Unknown Son, off to school with the Unknown Daughter, and off to the hospital with us. Halfway there, her water broke. We arrived at the hospital, got checked in, and then proceeded to wait. It took quite a while, because, while her water had broken, the baby was in no hurry to move to his new digs. To make a long story short, 16 hours later (at 12:20 A.M this morning), a new member of the Unknown Family made his appearance. After ...

It's been a pretty busy week, what with the Unknown Son's medical issues, teaching CFA classes, research, and the rest of the big ball-o-crazy we call life. Regular blogging should resume presently. But in the meantime, here's a Muppets Classic (my kids love them -we've already finished the first season on DVD, and are working on the second).

It always seems strange to see someone post that they won't be blogging for a couple of days - it's like saying that your readers need your regular spewage so much that they'll have troubles without their regular fix. I have no such illusions. Nevertheless, some weeks just need to be mentioned. The last cycle of the Unknown Son's chemo went fairly well – by the end of the week, they’d figured out the right mix of drugs to knock down the nausea, and he was doing pretty well. He had minimal nausea or other issues in the day or two later. This time, it’s a different story. First off, the cocktail he’s on this time had to be infused over a 7-8 hour time frame (instead of the 4 hour infusion time last cycle), so it involved us getting there by 9 and not leaving until about 5 o'clock. Add in the 1 hour commute each way, and it made for a very long day. In addition, this time around, the chemo cycle only ran over three 3 days of infusion, so we did it on Tuesday, We...

This is true for my first drafts, and even more so for most grad students. Sad, but true.

Soorry ab out the short post with nothing more than a link in it. I thought I'd saved it as a draft, but goofed (it's a chemo week, and people shouldn;t blog when tired). In any event, check out this piece by Eric Zitzewitz who's guest posting at Freakonomics. He's one of the sharpest guys around on prediction markets (he's also done some nice mutual fund research). In any event, he usues the intuition developed in Breeden and Litzenberger (1978), who demonstrate how you can create "Arrow-Debreu" securities by comparing the prices of options at adjacent strike prices. For the unitiated (i.e. less nerdy) among you, an AD securitiy pays $1 if a certain event occurrs and zero otherwise. It's basically what the betting contracts at Intrade are. The nice thing about traded AD securities is that the logical price for one is approximately the marginalk trader's probability of the even occurring. So, the prices tell you what "the market...

From today's Wall Street Journal : Citigroup Inc. announced Tuesday a new program aimed at addressing the latest challenge facing the mortgage industry: unemployed homeowners. Under the program, Citigroup will temporarily lower mortgage payments to an average of $500 a month for certain borrowers who have recently lost their jobs and are at least 60 days behind on their mortgage payments. Borrowers will be allowed to make the lower payments for three months. Citigroup will waive interest and penalties during this period. n January, the New York bank bucked the rest of the industry and endorsed legislation that would allow bankruptcy-court judges to modify the terms of troubled mortgages. Citigroup executives have said that move, which could take a toll on the company's bottom line, was designed to win favor in Washington. ...Mr. Das said the federal government "had no role at all" in the company's latest loan-modification effort. The new program "was cre...

Posting will be light this week, since life is far over the line into CrazyTown: It's a chemo week for the Unknown Son, so every day I'm either teaching or (on my non-teaching days) taking him to chemo. I've got a conference deadline tomorrow (for the Southern Finance Association meeting) In addition, I'm teaching two nights this week in a professional program. Somehow in the midst of all this, I have to write an exam for my case course. Finally, in case I forgot, when I wake up tomorrow, I'll probably have to shovel upwards of a foot of snow before I take Unknown Son to the clinic for his chemo? Ah well - I guess I'll have to plan on sleeping Friday night. By then it'll all be over.