Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

A fascinating look at some banks.

Update: The link to the WSJ graphic is now included. Sorry about that.

The Wall Street Journal has posted a great "interactive graphic" that compares the 19 stress-tested banks on a number of criteria including new capital needed, tier 1 common capital ratio, and amount of TARP funding received.

A related aside: I love complex graphics along these lines and don't think that the value of such graphics can be overstated when one considers the graphics' ability to convey different depths of information for those of different intelligence and interest levels. Nate Silver does a great job with his graphics, for example "A Starry-Eyed Look at the 2012 Republican Field." The most cursory glance tells you nothing more than which candidates are present and which candidates might be similar to one another simply because there is little distance between them (basically the level of focus shown by someone who just wants to pretend to be smart around others, e.g. "I'd say Huckabee, Romney, Jindal, and Palin are the favorites."). The next level of information gets into actually looking at those axes and understanding what they imply. The third level takes into account the size of each bubble: the larger the bubble the greater the public support for that candidate. Finally, one can, as Nate suggests, consider the implications of the political 'gravity' exerted by each of these 'planets.' That is, one can imagine that when one politician gains support (that is, his planet grows) it must be pulling that support from elsewhere (that is, exerting a political gravity on the supporters of the other planets, pulling them away).

Honestly, this post did begin as a quick post only focused on that banks graphic; it spiraled out of my control once I started talking about the always riveting topic of graphics! I hope it all made sense.

Rewriting history as it happens

I really disagree with this practice by the Wall Street Journal. Basically the WSJ is changing stories without noting when and how it has done so. Imagine that on January 20 I sent you a link to an article in which I really liked the opening line of "Rod Blagojevich re-declares his innocence on the Today Show." Well, if that is a WSJ article then when you check it out a few days later the story very well may not contain that line, may be significantly different in other ways (paragraphs completely removed, quotes missing, etc.), and may even have a different publishing date.

While I understand the importance of accuracy in a digital newspaper, I also think the the Portfolio author above is correct when he argues:

The WSJ is one of the key newspapers of record when it comes to this financial crisis, and increasingly it's being read online rather than on paper. In fact, much of the WSJ's online content never appears on paper at all, which means that the web is the only place to find it. It's therefore incumbent on the WSJ to preserve those web pages. If it doesn't, it's essentially erasing not only its own history, but also that of the financial crisis.

Scare quotes

The New Republic has a pretty funny article posted right now about the WSJ editorial board's use of scare quotes. According to the article, "Like most of us, the Journal [editorial board] uses scare quotes to signify that a term is misleading." The problem, argues The New Republic, is that The WSJ uses quotation marks in ways that seem to either indicate a certain level of incompetency in the use of the English language or a disdain for certain policies. Assuming that one of the respected papers in our country can speak our language, that leads us to the conclusion that The WSJ is simply implying a lot more than it is saying, an interesting practice for a news source.

I am posting this more because of my own frustration with the overuse of quotation marks than because of my opinions about the WSJ editorial staff (opinions that are more or less nonexistent).

Let's hope Chris keeps his job

If any of us should want to keep our jobs it should be Chris, at least according to Career Cast (rankings based on work environment, income, future prospects, physical demands, and stress). Basically the best jobs in the country are mathematician (ranked 1), actuary (2), and statistician (3) while the worst are lumber jack (200), dairy farmer (199), and taxi driver (198). It is in my best interests to have friends in that first set, so I really hope Chris is fortunate enough to hold that area down until he can hire the rest of us as we are fired from our less appealing jobs.

I currently sit at ranking 127 on the list (teacher). As it turns out that is below piano tuner (76), teacher's aid (106), and sewage plant operator (118). Damn it.

Update: I meant to include the full list before.

WSJ candidate statements

Below are links to two articles that ran in the WSJ this morning, one written by each of the presidential candidates. We all know the basic problems with each of the stump speeches, and they are not all removed from these articles, but I still enjoyed reading them, as the last-minute nature of the pleas changes the tone in an interesting way.

John McCain - "What We're Fighting For"
Barack Obama - "The Change We Need"