General linkiness

[unixronin]

Cotton candy is a glass.

Chris Christie sets a reporter to rights for calling him confrontational (via rosencrantz23).

The SR-71 flight manual is now available online.  (Well, OK, it will be again in a couple of days after they rebuild their database, which crashed under the traffic load.)

A back-of-the-envelope estimate of the scale of the BP Deepwater

Comments

[dafydd]

The Federal Funds Rate isn't quite zero.

Also, the Federal Funds Rate and Discount Rate only apply to overnight loans. So, effectively, banks only get 1/365th of that 3.5% interest...

(Interestingly, The Fed is privately held, but turns over its profits to the US Treasury. In 2009, that profit was $45 Billion returned to the people of the United States.)

[unixronin]

The article seems to imply only a handful of banks get that 0% rate. I don't know if that's correct.

It does put a bit of a different complexion on it if it applies only to overnight rates though. Of course, one could argue that daily churn doesn't actually cost the bank anything; they just have to make the same transaction 365 times a year.

$45 billion annual profit from the Fed isn't to be sneezed at. Unfortunately it's a drop in the bucket of current spending.

[dafydd]

The investorwords.com site says The Fed doesn't directly set the rate, but makes its preferences known through selective buying and selling. I'd call it analogous to being the dealer at a poker table where the players can lend to each other. If one player were getting a flat 0%, I suspect the other players would want to know why.

[dafydd]

Also, I've only skimmed the article, because I clocked almost 55 hours this week and I'm exhausted. I did note that he was approaching hysteria regarding last week's half-hour crash, but fails to mention the automated trading holds that would have stopped all trading had the markets sunk much lower than they did.

I don't remember what the percentage-drop triggers are, but I do recall the NYSE saying it had a half-hour hold and a 4-hour hold built in to its computers, and that two half-hour holds in a day would result in all trading stopped for the day.

[unixronin]

The "Flash Crash" was pretty interesting in a lot of ways, I think, not least because some of the stop-loss triggers apparently did not work, and because the NASDAQ selectively chose to retroactively cancel some, but not all, of the trades involved.

I have no doubt there will be more investigation.