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Luckily, nobody's talking about $1 Trillion healthcare reform right now. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962) will cost $892 billion over 10 years, which is more than 10% less than $1 trillion. Not only that, but...

Let's say the Democrats suggest we order pasta for dinner. The Republicans threaten to filibuster, suggesting that we eat broken glass, instead. The Democrats respond by offering a compromise: we'll eat broken glass for dinner, but we'll have tiramisu for dessert. These are our choices in...

What happens when the editorial board of a government-sponsored newspaper is the same party as the government in charge of doling out subsidies? Hell, what happens when they're a different party? AGs who pursued cases that Karl Rove didn't like got fired back in '05. Journalists on the public...

I would prefer that the Attorney General's Office be the police when it comes to politicians, and that the wetlands be preserved by the EPA.

This is a flawed question, but in a very interesting way. The good news (for you, at least) is that correcting the flaw leads to good news (for you). You see, Wall Street is not a monoculture. I'm sure there are some IBs who value variables-and-data over code-and-data-structures, and I'm...

I know, right? This is why I only buy products that are made in sweatshops, preferably ones staffed by child or slave labor. Children and slaves are cheaper! Allowing ethics to inform the way you purchase products? Oh please. Waah waah waah.

Forcing others to depend upon you for their very survival, setting up a situation where the feeding of an entire community depends upon a single person and therefore has only one point of failure between itself and disaster, belittling others' desire for an increased quality of life by putting...

Sounds pretty good, until Steve the Fire Guy gets eaten by a wild boar. Just like you, Steve absolutely refused to teach anyone else how to make fire, because he had a "comparative advantage", and it was just more efficient to let him do it for everyone. But now Steve is gone, leaving everyone...

That's right. It could be anyone at all. This explains why people are rioting in the streets protesting the millions of dollars Tom Hanks gets per picture. America is jealous that Tom Hanks makes a lot of money and they don't. America hates Tom Hanks.

Marxism is another system that's supposed to be good for society. At least, that's what Marxists will tell you. In fact, I can't think of any system ever invented that wasn't "supposed" to be good for society. But then, I'm sure we're all familiar with the desination of the road paved with...

You take as fact the statement "No thing nor event in the known universe or laws of physics lacks a cause." This pretty much begs the question. Perhaps the universe itself exists without a cause. In the scope of human knowledge, quantum physics is relatively new. We have yet to prove the...

Here's one example: data reconciliation. Let's say you work in middle office, and your IB recently purchased another IB. You now have to transfer all of their trades from their systems to yours. Of course, the trade details, cashflow information, curve data, etc. will differ between systems, so...

I think you're making an incorrect assumption here. X and Y are two events based on two separate, independent series of coin tosses, from coins A and B, respectively. Here's an example: Coin one: T-T-T-T-H-H Coin two: H-H-H-T-T-T Event X (two heads in a row from coin A) occurred after...

I'm a bit confused as to how you could have narrowed down your choice for undergrad study to financial engineering without knowing what financial engineering is. What is it you're looking for in a course of study, exactly? My suggestion is to take a step back and think about what you're...

I call "survivorship bias". Think of all the Civil War letters lost to the ages because of the physical impermanence of paper and ink. GMail has practically every e-mail I've ever sent or received (that wasn't spam) for the last five years saved on its servers. Meanwhile birthday cards...

If someone joins the government and uses his or her time there to raid the Treasury, directing its dollars towards his or her old employer, can that truly be called "public service"? Put another way: How much should I tip my waiter for his exemplary service if he picks my pocket while I'm...

Farther back than that, I'd say. It was Archimedes who said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

I don't know of anyone who has chosen to leave the NYC area (or the United States) because of high taxes. Sweden has some of the highest taxes of any nation on earth, and its citizens rank among the happiest people in the world. People love to complain about taxes, but if people actually moved...

You know which state has really low taxes? Delaware. This must be why the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Delaware is over $1,000,000, and why Delaware is always mentioned as the economic powerhouse of the USA. New York City, on the other hand, has such incredibly high taxes that...

That's kind of a misleading ratio, for two reasons. First, income taxes are not the only taxes. If anyone ever tells you that people who make under a certain amount of income don't pay taxes, that person is either confused or lying to you. There's sales tax, payroll tax, and various governmental...

Wasn't there some guy a few years back, maybe in 2000 or something, who wanted to put the Social Security trust fund in some sort of "lockbox" so that the Congress couldn't raid it to cover up shortfalls in spending? I wonder whatever happened to him...

I suppose the question should be asked, "What does it mean for a career to be king?" Does it mean a career that a large number of young people are clamoring to enter, a career promising fame, power, and respect to the precious few who manage to claw their way to the top? I'd say film and TV...

I'm not sure exactly how this would work. Let's say I'm a private investor and I'm interested in purchasing a bond. In your world, I'd have to pay Moody's to get a rating for that bond. But let's say that the bond is rated AAA, and it really is that well-rated because in your world, we...

Try creating a column to the right of the dollar values, and using this formula: =VALUE(D1) ...or something like it. D1, of course, would refer to whatever cell your un-add-able dollar value is in. Then, try adding the results of the VALUE formulas. If this works, then at least you know...

And then there's this... xkcd - A Webcomic - 1000 Times

A quick idea for increasing page views on Quantnet: Format the site to look, at first glance, like an Excel spreadsheet. Those of us killing time at work can then peruse the site at our leisure, leaving our bosses and managers none the wiser.

It's the same prank. The Googlebomb (that's what it's called when bloggers set up a phrase like "miserable failure" to lead to a particular site on a web search) was set up in 2004 to point to the whitehouse.gov, because that was GWB's website. Now it's Obama's site, but the URL remains the...

Today we have an executive order mandating that all interrogations follow the guidelines laid out in the Army Field Manual, thus ending the practice of torture, effective immedately. This was followed by another executive order mandating that the Guantanamo Gulag be closed within one year. If...

You're probably not going to want to hear this -- I certainly didn't when I was just out of college -- but you're supposed to be miserable in your 20s. Your 20s are the decade when you're supposed to take some crappy job you don't really want while trying desperately to figure out what the hell...

I think there's an important difference between the Baltic seccessionist movements and the states' rights movements in America. First, the Baltic states had been somewhat autonomous, ethnically distinct regions prior to the Soviet Union's annexing of them. This is not entirely true of the...

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control. I...

Ah, but Andy, the question posted on QuantNet posited that O'Neal had a freethrow percentage of strictly less than 60%. The question on the Putnam exam had a percentage of strictly less than 80%. That 20% makes all the difference between YES and NO.

True. Otherwise we might end up causing a systemic crash in the comedy markets, too.

Well, yes. But that's a bit like saying "All maps are useless" because you can't navigate the streets of London with a New York subway map. A model of a market can only be expected to model the market it is designed to model. If the market changes, one would expect the model of that market to...

Anyone know where I can find a copy of that Joel Hasbrouck PowerPoint presentation? I did a quick Google search, but all I found were various repostings of this (rather awesome, IMHO) Raines essay.

Are you really arguing that raising your taxes slightly is comparable to the Holocaust? That is deeply insulting to the memory of six million murdered innocents. You need to drop this argument NOW.

I was in and out in about 30 minutes. The polling place was packed, but the lines moved pretty quickly. Go Brooklyn! Two friends of mine, however, waited over two hours in line at a polling place in midtown last week just to get their absentee ballots, and my girlfriend had to wait about an hour...

Small quibble here. Everyone in this country pays taxes. Every single last person. Some may not pay income tax, but many pay sales taxes. Many pay Social Security and other payroll taxes. Tariffs on imports are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. There's a tax on gas...

I call Godwin's Law! You lose this argument by reductio ad Hitlerum.

I know what you mean. When I think about how, in the event that my salary magically increases to over 250k/yr, my income taxes will be just as high as they were under Bill Clinton, I can't help but weep. How, I ask you, how can a person making 250k possibly eke out a living if 39% of that goes...

This is it, folks! Get to your polling place and do your thing. Remember, if you don't vote now, you can't complain later.* *Non-US citizens exempt.

Seriously, dude. I mean, who does Paul Krugman think he is? A Nobel prize winning economist or something?

A household with double income does not get taxed like a household with single income. One person earning 125k won't get a tax raise. Now if two people each earning 125k get married, they are a single household with a 250k income. Filing jointly, they will not get a tax raise, either. It is no...

Well, in a worst case scenario, the 72-year-old (and statistically likely to have a recurrence of melanoma) John McCain could find himself, for any number of reasons, unable to complete his first term. This would make Sarah Palin the President of the United States. I'd say that's quite a bit of...

Right on, Ilya. I've also never understood why people would ever want to vote for someone they'd rather have a beer with. I know the people I like to have beers with, and I wouldn't want them anywhere near the nuclear button. I don't want my President (or Vice President) to be someone like me; I...

Just ask the Google. I find a market cap today for Citi of 122.52 billion.

This is kind of inside baseball, but the reason those extra provisions are attached to the Senate bill is because of some parliamentary procedural issues. The Constitution states that only the House of Representatives may initiate appopriation bills, so the only way that the Senate can vote on...

There's a self-interest argument to be made in favor of limited government aid towards helping people pay their mortgages, or at the very least avoid defaulting. Let's say you and your neighbor own your respective houses... and then your neighbor is unable to pay for his house and defaults...

Hill Clashes on Rescue Plan; Dollar Drags Down Markets - washingtonpost.com I'm focusing on the following parts: and Don't we want to be detering companies from participating? Don't we want to take punitive measures against companies whose poor business practices have led us to take...

Careful, Ilya. Your monarchy is showing. This is exactly why Goldman should not be receiving any government money. They got it right. They are not in danger of failing. This $700b is supposed to be a bailout for failed companies to keep the economy afloat, not a bonus pool. But hell, what do...

Paulson has asked for $700b with absolutely no governmental oversight over how he spends this cash. And we're supposed to just trust him? Why? Executive power without oversight is the definition of despotism. If he had any idea how to fix this mess, don't you think he would have done something...

Is any future regulatory regime going to have any real teeth? Perhaps. It stands to be remembered, after all, that this current mess has been caused by, among other things, massive over-leveraging of the independent IBs, which has only been legal since Phil Gramm snuck in a 262-page amendment...

The "great unwashed"? Really? I guess you weren't kidding when you were asking for a new Neitzsche. Mozart may have wanted to be an independent composer, but he wasn't. He was popular entertainment for the Imperial Court, and his work was awesome nonetheless. But that's neither here nor...

Astoria? Washington Heights? South Park Slope? The HORROR!!! Yeah, the 20-40 minute subway ride to Midtown sucks, but when rents were cheaper the streets were filled with crime, drugs, homelessness, and creepy squeegee guys. If that's the tradeoff, I'll happily take the inconvenience of living...

As a former actor and current quant/developer, I cannot disagree that the cost of living in NYC and creating art is high nowadays. Manhattan's expensive, Brooklyn's expensive, and it's only a matter of time before Queens and the Bronx get gentrified, too. And yes, the artistic life is hard, what...

Another option is to simply rewrite the INDIRECT function. Quick and dirty gets you... Function BINDIRECT(strRange as String) As Range Set BINDIRECT = Range(strRange) End Function =OFFSET(BINDIRECT("CumRisk_"&TermX&"_OFFSET"),0,0,1,1) should work just fine.

This seems to be a known bug in Excel, and I'm not terribly shocked that they haven't fixed it in 2007. Sorry to say, I've got no simple solution for you. In this particular case, I don't really see the need for using dynamic ranges in the first place. Is this just a test case you sent...

The other important question is: Is this a one-time process you need to complete now, or is this a process you'll need to repeat over and over with new sets of data each time? How you go about solving this problem (and how much time it's worth dedicating to it) will depend heavily on this...

There's an easier way than creating a second range. The third Friday for any given month will have a Day value of 15 through 21. Not only that, any Friday with a Day value of < 15 or > 21 will be a first, second, fourth, or fifth Friday of a month. Therefore, you can check to see if a date is...

Let's assume you put 20% down on a 700k condo. (Any less than that and you have to pay mortgage insurance, which is an extra couple hundred dollars a month, and what's the point of that?) At a 30-yr fixed rate of 6.5% APR, your monthly payment will be $3,539.58, according to the PMT function...

A bit of conversation I've had with several of my friends over the last year... FRIEND: You're getting a degree in financial engineering? What the hell is that? ME: Well, you know all those hedge funds that are failing right now, and the whole mortgage backed securities fiasco that's...

That was George Box, I think...

I think Clinton has a stronger incentive to pick Obama as VP than Obama has to pick Clinton. He would add his supporters, his air of bipartisan compromise (which is my least favorite thing about him, to be honest), and his message of change to her message of competence and experience. I don't...

I don't think it's illegal, actually. Intrade.com uses real money, and it's totally above board.

Uh oh. My inner political junkie's coming out to play play devil's advocate here... The types of people who would trade in a political futures market would be the small subset of people who both follow politics and are risk-seeking enough to wager money on it. I don't think it's much of a...

I'd noticed that Spring 2007 link earlier, but I wanted to make sure those books were still required this year before making the purchases.

Besides these two books, are there any other required texts for 9845 this semester? Also, does anyone know what books are required for Structured Finance (9848)?

Oh. I think I see the problem here. Your problem is not a formatting issue. Your problem is a data entry issue. You want to type in 9 and have it converted automatically into 0.09. Yes, you'd rather have it then formatted as 9%, but formatting isn't the real issue. The real issue is that 9...

That's not been my experience, Andy. I just now opened up an Excel document, set a bunch of cell formats to the custom format I printed below, and entered values into the cells. Those values summed correctly in a SUM function, and responded as numbers in several other functions even though...

You can create a custom format to get a % sign without the scaling by 1/100. The format code is: 0.#"%" The double quotes around the % sign is key. If you don't include them, it will do the scaling. Also, the number of # characters you include after the decimal will indicate how many...

There seems to be an important part of the story missing here. Namely, when the questioner takes away one of the cups after the first guess, is it a given that the cup taken away does NOT have the coin? If it is, then it is clearly to your advantage to switch. The odds of picking the right...

Quick question for those of you who are more knowledgeable in C++... Let's say I have a two classes: class Matrix { private: int _rows; int _columns; }; class SuperMatrix : public Matrix { public: SuperMatrix(const SuperMatrix& sm2); const SuperMatrix operator=(const SuperMatrix& rhs)...

For whatever it's worth, I was a double major in Theater and English. Studied musical theater songwriting for a bit, as well. Somebody has to represent the liberal arts around here...

#include <iostream> using namespace std; void fillArray(char a[]); int main() { char t[22]; fillArray(t); for(int i = 0; i < 22; i++) cout << t[i]; cout << endl; return 0; } void fillArray(char a[]) { a[0] = 72; a[1] = 97; a[2] = 112; a[3] = 112; a[4] = 121; a[5] = 32; a[6] = 66...

In general, I try to avoid DoCmd.RunSQL. Unless you need to dynamically build the SQL statement at run-time, there's nothing you can do with RunSQL that you can't do easier by building the query in the query window and using DoCmd.OpenQuery. (And since queries built and saved in the query...

1. DoCmd.RunSQL will only work if the SQL statement being put into the first argument is an action query or a data-definition query. In other words, your SQL statement must be designed to alter the data in the database, not merely display it. As written, you are using a simply SELECT query...

Erica, To my knowledge, there is no factorial function or operator native to C++. If you want to compute a factorial, you'll have to write a function for it yourself. You can do this pretty easily with a loop or, if you're really determined to make life difficult for yourself, a recursive...

Where did the orange pages go on the Recent Posts list? (The ones that show posts that you haven't read yet.) Does Ajax not support those? I liked them...

At work we're all about the IE 6. We'll probably upgrade to IE 7 in a few years, once IE 9 rolls out. At home, however, I'm a Firefox guy. Haven't tried Opera yet, but I've heard nothing but great things about it.

My Vote: Thursday, July 12, 7pm I'll start the campaigning for Thursday, July 12, at 7pm. It's pretty much the same time as the regular C++ refresher, so hopefully few of us will have any plans to shift around.

Here's my rough and dirty suggestions for proceeding with this project... Open the Excel file, delete the header row with the merged cells, and save it as a .txt file. Go to Access, and use the File => Get External Data => Import menu option. DO NOT HIT FINISH!!! Instead, set the file import...

As an Access developer, I strongly recommend against importing data from Excel into Access. If it's at all possible (and since you want to automate the process, I'm sure you can) I would write a quick Sub procedure that converts the Excel file into a delimited text file. Once that is done, you...

A Very Simple Answer to #5 double multBy7(double x) { int i; double y = 0; for(i = 0; i < 7; i++) y += x; return y; }

The assumption, however, is that you're dealing with incandescent bulbs. Compact fluorescent bulbs don't generate heat, so this solution won't work if the room is eco-friendly. How's that for an inconvenient truth?

Another New Guy Hello, all. Count me in for the incoming MFE class. My name is Adam Bloom. I'm currently working as an application developer at JPMorgan and looking forward to starting the refresher courses next week. Speaking of which, does anyone know what textbooks we're going to need for...