This well-argued response to Felix Salmon suggests not. It suggests that companies know that Goldman often acts in its own best interests, and that it can be horribly conflicted, but hires the firm anyway. The explanation is that the conflicts arise precisely because the firm is the best connected and networked; and that it is this network that makes Goldman worth the fees.

This is an argument I have heard privately in the City before (in relation to bulge bracket banks more generally), so I’m interested that it’s surfaced here too. I particularly like the line:

It’s always funny how, in the minds of pundits everywhere, those conniving and all-powerful one-percenters who sit on corporate boards become impotent and completely incapable of independent decision-making once an investment banker walks into the room.

The piece is also good on the little realised distinction between banking gruntwork and the value added from networks and contacts. As a graduate, I thought that it was the long hours that delivered the value. Now I realise that’s a pretty low value-add activity. The real money is made at the art gallery opening, or on the golf course.

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information.

Bassett’s response was correct and proportional. This is not a legitimate demand. If his profile was shielded from public view, it is unlikely to damage the prospective employer. As such, they have no justification for asking to inspect such information. I am glad Bassett was not desperate for work enough to hand this over. It sets a poor precedent. In a pre-Facebook world, asking you to surrender your private correspondence and journal would not be acceptable, and that is the relevant comparison.

the correlation of domestic prices with world prices drops by 20% when a game is on

Thankfully, England’s narrow victory over France in the Six Nations yesterday was outside of trading hours, and we’re not sure if this covers rugby.

Let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting?

I’d say Monday. Others would say Friday. There was a lively debate at Boing Boing and Marginal Revolution, which both linked to the research.

This misunderstanding occurred in my office today. A colleague asked if I would mind moving a 4pm meeting “back an hour”. He wanted it to start at 3pm. He is a ‘Friday person’.

The fundamental problem here is that we use forwards/backwards in contradictory ways in relation to time. Did Christmas 1955 occur before Christmas 1985? Yes. So in some ways, Christmas 1991 should be considered closer to the ‘front’ or ‘start’ of time – the Friday interpretation. However, if you fired up your DeLorean and time-travelled to 1955, you’d say that you were going ‘back’ in time (the Monday interpretation), even though 1955 is closer to the ‘front’ or ‘start’ of time than today. Both interpretations are valid, which is so problematic that in Indian English, it has seen fit to coin an incredibly ugly word to reduce confusion.

Interestingly, Monday people are supposedly happier. But rather than feeling smug, it’s probably better to be a little more specific with your requests for moving meetings, and to seek clarity if others are not: you could be encountering a ‘Friday person’ for the first time.

It isn’t. It’s a bad idea. It will cost small business money, hinder local shoppers, and provide extra jobs only for those who are administering the ridiculous scheme. Those who promote alternative currencies are (sometimes well-meaning) nitwits. Their projects harm, rather than help their local areas.

I say this as an enthusiastic supporter of local businesspeople, who really do not need the hassle of cashing up and accounting in two currencies, who need to put their cash in a bank, who need to pay providers of goods and services from outside the area, and who don’t need to train their staff to detect a range of new possible forgeries, nor to end up with a pile of worthless paper when the scheme inevitably collapses.

But fundamentally, I say this from a modicum of understanding of monetary economics. Say you have two banknotes, £10 Sterling and £10 Bristol. You can exchange the former for £10 of goods in any shop in the country, or place it in a bank. You can exchange the latter for £10 of goods in a few shops nearby (or take it to a counter somewhere to swap it for Sterling). The former is more flexible and therefore has a higher value. This differential is reinforced by the greater potential for local currency default and for counterfeit notes. So despite the nominal peg to Sterling, the Bristol Pound will always be worth less than Sterling. Nobody in their right mind would prefer to own £10 Bristol when they could own £10 Sterling. Have you ever asked your employer if they would pay you in book vouchers because you really like reading?

After that, you have the cost of the scheme. Who pays for the currency to be printed is one question. A more fundamental question would be why. If you wanted a currency that was hard to exchange outside the local area, you could start using Malaysian Ringgit, Disney Dollars, or the national currency of Bhutan. There would be no printing costs, no monitoring costs, and the currency could be exchanged at the few Bureau de Change that stock minority currencies.

Local currencies are a step backwards for local areas. They take local businesses into a parochial realm of rusticity, with all of its inefficiencies and inconveniences. They encourage customers to spend on the basis of local affiliation rather than the quality of the goods or services. They benefit only those who draw a salary from the scheme, at a cost to all those who naïvely participate. The Bristol Pound is a very bad idea indeed.

Damage to the “commons,” known as “externalities” has been discussed for decades, although the most threatening one – loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion – has received little or no attention. There have been no useful tricks proposed, however, for how we will collectively impose sensible, survivable, long-term policies over problems of the “commons.”

This is total bunk. This ‘useful trick’ has been around for at least 50 years.

A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011…. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed…. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards.

From The New York Times.

Is there a clearer demonstration that incentives matter? Tabarok and Cowen look at the secret privatisation agreements that Chinese farmers signed, taking charge of their own destinies from the oppression and hopelessness of Communism.

(This article also made me notice See the Invisible Hand Resource Bank, which I hadn’t previously come across, since I haven’t bought the Modern Principles book.)