Keith Fortowsky's Profile

“Then, starting in December of 2000, there was a great convergence,” he said. “Natural gas went first – the $2-per-BTU commodity exploded to $3 almost overnight – it hit the supply wall, and collided with oil. By 2004, oil moved its price up to $8 per BTU and linked itself with the metals market. Then finally, in 2006, oil, gas and metals moved higher and linked themselves with the food market.

“After that, we don't care what commodity you buy. We called it a bushels-to-barrels-to-BTUs convergence. Take corn: It can now create heating and transportation; it's actually very good for burning to generate electricity. It can create plastic or cardboard, so it's a source of materials. And finally, you can eat it if you want. It can meet any of these demands. And you can use petroleum to create plastics, or to create fertilizer to grow food – suddenly, we are indifferent to what commodity we are buying to meet our demands.”

So rather than mining, or logging, or digging oil sands, or farming, nowadays we are simply extracting an aggregated uni-commodity from the ground, one that can be deployed for almost any purpose. This means that food is no longer just food: It is speed and heat and enclosure.

The American information economy has been evolving for decades. Equifax, for example, has been compiling financial histories of consumers for more than a century. Since 1970, use of that data has been regulated by the Federal Trade Commission under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But Equifax and its rivals started offering new sets of unregulated demographic data over the last decade — not just names, addresses and Social Security numbers of people, but also their marital status, recent births in their family, education history, even the kind of car they own, their television cable service and the magazines they read.

... it sounds like a paradox - Paris has almost three times as much rain as London but London is much rainier than Paris. The answer is simple. In Paris when it rains, it pours - unlike the constant drizzle we're used to over here.

This is a nice example of how averages can be misleading. The fact is, for someone wanting a dry holiday, what matters is not how many inches of rain will fall when it rains but how long it's likely to rain for.

... they can't all be above average. But they could nearly all be above average. And this is actually an extremely common situation.

To take my favorite example: nearly everyone has an above-average number of legs. I wish I could remember who first brought this to my attention. James Kushner, perhaps?

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks.
... Google does provide phone support to Gmail customers who subscribe to Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 annually and includes larger storage quotas and other benefits. Customers who use the advertising-supported version of Gmail, however, must rely solely on what Google calls “self-service online support.”

“The single biggest challenge for deans” in the years ahead, Quinn said, will be “how do you decide what to stop doing.”

There’s really no such thing as an entry-level generalist, so you’ll need to pick a path and devote yourself to it.

TO the uninitiated, Nebraska conjures a certain image: a treeless prairie steamrolled pancake-flat, stretching to the horizon. But tucked in a north-central patch of the state is the Niobrara River Valley, filled with a surprising collection of conifers and hardwoods, 200-foot sandstone bluffs and spring-fed waterfalls.

"The thing about Blair is that for most of his career he has been a lot brighter than those around him and he has got into the habit of not listening. But he is now at a level when he should be taking advice," said one adviser.

Once a bank in a given town shut its doors, all the knowledge accumulated by the bank officers there effectively disappeared. Other banks weren’t nearly as willing to lend money to local businesses and residents because the loan officers at those banks didn’t know which borrowers were less reliable than they looked. Credit dried up.

“If a guy has a good investment opportunity and he can’t get the funding, he won’t do it,” Mr. Mishkin, who’s now an economics professor at Columbia, notes. “And that’s when the economy collapses.” Or, as Adam Posen, another economist, puts it, “That’s when the Depression became the Great Depression.” By 1932, consumption and investment had both collapsed, and stocks had fallen more than 80 percent from their peak.

As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector.

The same thing is happening now. Financial markets are global, not local, today, so the problem isn’t that the failure of any single bank locks individuals or businesses out of the credit markets.