Business Insight Zone

Business-oriented stories worth reading on a chilly weekend at home:

1. “Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”

Anyone who’s read this blog for long (for example this post) will know that I’m an unabashed fan of James Fallows, who, besides being one of the best magazine writers alive, is, from my brief personal experience with him, a genuine mensch.

In this Atlantic interview, Fallows conveys the views of Gao Xiqing, a high official in Beijing who manages $200 billion of China’s highest-profile foreign investments. Even setting aside Gao’s official importance, it’s worth listening to him for his pure smarts, and because he studied and worked as a lawyer in the United States. His background gives him a highly informed view of both the Chinese and American sides of the world’s most important bilateral economic relationship.

2. There’s Plenty Of Oxygen In The Air

New York-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson explains how venture-backed companies like Tumblr can thrive even in a dismal economic climate: “For those web services with real usage and a manageable burn rate, I think there will be plenty of oxygen in the air.”

3. Why So Serious?

In this post, the anonymous Epicurean Dealmaker dissects the fundamental problems of thinking that underlie the current financial crisis:

It is my belief that many quants, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers came to believe — consciously or not — that, by explicitly embracing and accounting for chance, they had tamed it. They spent countless millions of man hours designing and implementing elaborate mathematical models and risk control systems based on aleatory principles that could predict, with remarkable accuracy, the variation in return and behavior of securities and derivatives under normal circumstances. They spoke confidently about “value at risk” and “maximum expected daily trading loss” as if they knew what they were talking about. As if those terms actually meant anything. And then they trotted off to their bank, or their prime broker, or the Discount Window to borrow a couple more turns of leverage against their proprietary positions.

But you cannot tame chance. That is what makes it chance. At base, implicitly attributing the kind of predictability these individuals seemed to ascribe to chance was a fundamental error, a category-mistake.

4. How The Tonight Show Will Fuel New Media

Ask A Ninja impresario Kent Nichols speculates in interesting ways about the possible ripple effects of Jay Leno’s new variety show.

5. 10 Ways to Learn Faster – Speed Learning

Jim Estill, who heads the Canadian operations of SYNNEX, writes an interesting blog from a CEO’s perspective. In this post, he suggests 10 straightforward ways you can boost your rate of learning. (My personal area of focus: speed-reading, because I have a bad habit of reading too many things at the same speed I would if I were editing them.)

~

Photo by Elvire.R.

Category: Economics, Entertainment, Finance & Real Estate, Productivity