paul fauth's Profile

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has said she arranged a September meeting at the Treasury Department, where executives of OneUnited Bank of Massachusetts asked the government for money. In December, Treasury selected OneUnited, the nation's largest minority-owned bank, as an early participant in the bank bailout program, injecting $12.1 million.

Waters's husband, Sidney Williams, until recently sat on OneUnited's board of directors and owned company shares worth at least $500,000.

Waters said yesterday that both the investments and her advocacy were rooted in a commitment to minority-owned banks. She noted that she has disclosed her financial ties to OneUnited in required annual filings. And she said her actions this fall were intended to benefit all minority-owned banks.

Responding to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about her role in setting up the Treasury meeting, Waters said in a statement, "These articles have revealed only one thing: I am indeed an advocate for minority banks."

Waters's involvement with the bank dates at least to 2001, when the company, then called Boston Bank of Commerce, bought a minority-owned institution based in Los Angeles. Waters's husband owned shares in the latter firm and, after the acquisition, became a shareholder in Boston Bank of Commerce, according to Waters's congressional financial disclosure files.

The following year, Boston Bank of Commerce tried to buy a second minority-owned bank in Los Angeles. But that Los Angeles bank decided to sell to a bank from Illinois. Waters tried to block the deal. She said she did so because the Illinois bank was not minority-owned, and she argued publicly that the Los Angeles bank should remain minority-owned.

only four companies other than Berkshire retain the highest ratings from Moody's and S&P: American Data Processing, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil and Toyota.

You are best known for championing the theory that humans are descended from an aquatic ape, first suggested by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in New Scientist in 1960 as a way of explaining our species' unusual characteristics. How did that come about?

In The Descent of Woman I was saying that all these anomalies cannot have evolved on the savannah, because there they would have been maladaptive for the females and the young.

For instance, it was claimed that males lost their body hair to allow them to cool down when overheated in the chase. Yet the non-hunting females became even more hairless than the males, with nothing to compensate them for shivering through the chilly tropical nights. But if it didn't happen on the savannah, then where did it happen? And that's what put me onto Hardy.

Hardy had been politely ignored by the scientific establishment. What response did you get?

After I had written the book, I thought for quite a while that I must have got it wrong. Everyone was saying I was wrong. So I went on writing plays for television. But then this American guy, a policeman, started writing to me and nagging me to push the aquatic ape idea. He contacted lots of the leading people in the field saying, "I'm just an ordinary sort of guy, but can you tell me why you don't believe in the aquatic ape theory?" And when they answered him - some of them did - he sent their replies to me. He was my gadfly.

He wouldn't let me rest until I did something about it. And when I read the letters the experts had written they made it plain they didn't like it, but they didn't make it at all plain why.

So in 1997 you wrote The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. How did that go down?

It was my fifth book on human evolution. This time there was a review in Nature along the lines of "Morgan has certainly got her act together", but no views on whether the thesis was tenable or not. With a few exceptions, the establishment scientists ignored it. There has not been a s

OF THE three great apes - orang-utans, gorillas and chimpanzees - orang-utans have always proved the most difficult to study in the wild. Reaching their habitat is arduous and dangerous because of the humidity and the heat, and the terrain they favour is often infested with leeches, mosquitoes, snakes, crocodiles, and in Sumatra, tigers.
When researchers finally arrived, they found solitary animals, high up in the forest canopy, screened from the ground by dense vegetation, and seldom descending. In the wild, orang-utans live and die in the branches, where their locomotion is mostly not bipedal but consists of a spreadeagled progression, holding onto branches with all four hands. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of biological anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has likened this to "a four-legged spider".
More than 20 years ago, orang-utans were caught up in controversy when Schwartz argued that they might be our closest relative. In his 1987 book, The Red Ape: Orang-utans and Human Origins, he argued that based on the number of physiological features he had isolated, humans seemed to resemble the orang-utan more closely than the African ape.
The thickness of tooth enamel, for example, is a valuable clue for fossil hunters trying to determine whether a specimen is likely to be a human ancestor. In gorillas and chimpanzees, the enamel is thin, while in orang-utans and humans it is thick. Unlike chimps and gorillas, orang-utans and humans show an asymmetry between the two cerebral hemispheres. Most mammals have a pair of holes in the palate, not visible in live individuals because they are covered with a membrane. In the larger apes, they are smaller: only in humans and orang-utans have they merged into a single opening. And the orang-utan's shoulder blade and the talus bone (ankle) is also strikingly like ours.
Many monkeys and some apes have ischial callosities - horny outer layers of skin on both buttocks - to protect them when they sit. The Swiss anthro

Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000. Most of the vacant houses are owned by lenders who foreclosed on the properties and by the wholesalers who are now sweeping in to pick up houses in bulk, as if they were trading in baseball cards.

In the mid-'80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly... until one of them devastated the global economy.
A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

They are known as “quants” because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.

This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Last fall students filled a giant classroom at M.I.T. to overflowing for an evening workshop called “So You Want to Be a Quant.” Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.

Still others have opened an academic front, using complexity theory or artificial intelligence to better understand the behavior of humans in markets. In December the physics Web site arXiv.org, where physicists post their papers, added a section for papers on finance. Submissions on subjects like “the superstatistics of labor productivity” and “stochastic volatility models” have been streaming in.

Quants occupy a revealing niche in modern capitalism. They make a lot of money but not as much as the traders who tease them and treat them like geeks. Until recently they rarely made partner at places like Goldman Sachs. In some quarters they get blamed for the current breakdown — “All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas,” Warren Buffett said on “The Charlie Rose Show” last fall. Even the quants tend to agree that what they do is not quite science.

The worst news is that we appear to be in only the second of five stages of grieving -- and you can pretty much project the path the markets will take until the healing process completes itself.
1. Denial (Nov 2007 - Sept. 2008) : Markets surprisingly resilient in face of recessionary pressures.
2. Anger (Sept. 2008 - present): Wall Street throws tantrum; markets crash.
3. Bargaining (Summer 2009?): Bear market rally.
4. Depression (Fall-Winter 2009?): Dow gives back most of gains from rally (and then some, perhaps); sits near 15-year lows as volatility and volumes decrease.
5. Acceptance (2010?): Market finally capitulates; Dow rebounds to an historically sustainable valuation of perhaps 9,000 points.