Alex Kirtland 27 connections

GDI: The most important economic indicator you never heard of

GDI, or Gross Domestic Income, is a measure of "total income received by all sectors of an economy within a nation. It includes the sum of all wages, profits, and taxes, minus subsidies." (Thanks, Wikipedia.)
But why do we care?
The GDI should theoretically be equal to GDP, as The Economist... more »

Gold and the current account deficit … and the US debt

I'm currently reading the book The Dollar Crisis (more on that later), which discusses at length the consequences of the failure of Bretton Woods. (For those of you with more important things to do than study issues in global economics from the 1970's, Bretton Woods was a system whereby the US... more »

Repo 105 Explained

Paddy Hirsch from Marketplace once again does a masterful job on the white board, this time explaining Repo 105, the latest financial shenanigan to hit the papers.

Repo 105 from Marketplace on Vimeo.
~alex more »

Yield curve time series

I recently came across this nice little visualization of the yield curve from Smart Money.

They call it The Living Yield Curve. It does a nice job of showing how the yield curve has changed over time. It also allows for overlays of typical yield curve shapes, and the average and latest yield... more »

Movie futures

From the FT we learn that there will be not one, but two new movie exchanges where speculators and hedgers can bet on the profitability of movies: the Cantor Fitzgerald offering, HSX (launching sometime in late April, we assume), and something call the Trend Exchange, (coming out later this month)... more »

Transparency for derivatives

The FT reports that the CFTC is pushing for greater transparency for derivatives. Since many derivatives are indeed traded on exchanges, what they're really talking about here are derivatives traded OTC (over-the-counter). And really what they mean is swaps.
Swaps, for those of you with weak... more »