Posts Tagged ‘hedge funds’
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it from the weekend: a CFP for a Science Fiction Film and Television special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”
* Call for submissions: Accessing the Future.
* Today’s twenty-first-century political weirdness is the Scotland referendum on independence. The Guardian. MetaFilter. The economic case. Schroedinger’s Kingdom. John Oliver. Why Scotland thinks it can survive as an independent country. I’m Guardian editor Matt Wells. Got questions on Scottish independence? Ask away!
* Alison Bechdel, certified genius. Some professors won too.
* Postdoc of the year: “The Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University invites applications for its 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellowship program. The successful candidates will couple their own research and publishing agenda with their contributions to the Center’s Collective Memory Project, a wide ranging oral history of the George W. Bush Presidency.” Friend, do I have a story for you.
* Chris Ware is serializing a novella in the Guardian: “The Last Saturday.”
* Unpopular opinions watch: Carceral progressivism.
* More Weird Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Original Star Trek.
Roddenberry believed there was no chest hair in the future.
The dream never dies.
* A day in the life of a data mined kid.
* This Is What Happens To Transgender Kids Who Delay Puberty.
* The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World.
* World War II and the creation of the paperback industry.
* Cruel optimism watch: Are More MLA Faculty Jobs on the Way?
* The madness of crowds: Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s.
* Hamburg wants to be the best city in the world in 20 years.
* Burlington nipping on its heels.
* Calvinball in Wisconsin: the rules on voting just changed again.
* Study: 30 percent of former NFL players will get dementia or Alzheimer’s.
* Don’t look now, but the US prison population is growing again.
* The University of California is just literally a hedge fund now.
* What Are the Real Odds That Your Birth Control Will Fail? Pretty frightening.
* A King Kong prequel, because we haven’t even come close to hitting bottom yet.
* BREAKING: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization.
* In decades of public debate about global warming, one assumption has been accepted by virtually all factions: that tackling it would necessarily be costly. But a new report casts doubt on that idea, declaring that the necessary fixes could wind up being effectively free. The price is too high!
* BREAKING: Immigrants aren’t stealing your jobs.
* A feminist history of Wonder Woman.
* Every panel of Watchmen, sorted by average lightness, ascending.
* Understanding the Tortoise and the Hare.
* Because you demanded it: “Play It Again, Dick,” the weird quasi-Veronica-Mars nega-sequel, is finally here.
* Necrocapitalism in the Anthropocene: Govt may do away with tribal consent for cutting forests.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Thievery marring Little Free Libraries.
* Anti-monuments in Milwaukee and beyond.
* May 2015 can’t come fast enough.
* And no one could have predicted: Apple releases U2 album removal tool.
Sunday™ Reading™ Accept No Substitutes®
* Put the Student Union of Michigan in charge! In the end, the university’s rationale for the campaign relies heavily on a narrative of state defunding. For example, as a Detroit News article relates, “President Mary Sue Coleman called the campaign ‘audacious’ and said no gift is too small since universities need philanthropy with states no longer able to support them to the degree they must for schools to be globally competitive.” This narrative seems difficult to square with the actual role of the endowment in funding university operations. The endowment contributes only 4.5% (of its total holdings) to the general operation funds of university each year. The principal stays invested. Thus, if we look at the breakdown of revenue sources at the university in 2010 the endowment contributed only $253 million. Student tuition however generated over $1 billion, while state funding totaled $315 million. The endowment clearly has very little to do with making up for lost state funding. Its purpose lies elsewhere. And that elsewhere is in the university’s move to behave more and more like a hedge fund, mobilizing donated capital to secure new revenue streams. It does this by taking advantage of its tax-exempt status to build up a hoard of money that it then invests around the world in shady funds and places it would rather the university community did not know about. In so doing, the university is slowly becoming an important player on Wall Street but to play with the “big boys” it needs more and more capital, which requires constant fundraising campaigns. This money is destined for investment not students. Little of it will ever reach students in the form of scholarships or be used to offset increases in tuition. (via)
* Meanwhile: The University of California Invests in Prisons.
* Yanis Varoufakis on ponzi austerity.
Whereas in standard Ponzi (growth) schemes the lure is the promise of a growing fund, in the case of Ponzi austerity the attraction to bankrupted participants is the promise of reducing their debt, so as to liberate them from insolvency, through a combination of ‘belt tightening’, austerity measures and new loans that provide the bankrupt with necessary funds for repaying maturing debts (e.g. bonds). As it is impossible to escape insolvency in this manner, Ponzi austerity schemes, just like Ponzi growth schemes, necessitate a constant influx of new capital to support the illusion that bankruptcy has been averted. But to attract this capital, the Ponzi austerity’s operators must do their utmost to maintain the façade of genuine debt reduction.
* “I am as American as April in Arizona”: Nabokov interviews at The Paris Review.
* Student Debt is Crushing the Economic Future of the Young.
* Joyless Nihilism: Adam Kotsko on the Abramsverse Star Trek, Family Guy, and zombie postmodernism.
* The Life and Times of an Aging Superhero Captured in Oil Paintings by Andreas Englund.
* In education, the problem is still poverty.
* America is a country made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe.
* Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt.
* The environmental scandal that’s happening right beneath your feet.
* And the Philippines estimates at least 10,000 died from super typhoon. No words.
All the Midweek Links
* CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education. CFP: Anthropocene Feminism at the Center for 21st Century Studies.
* By now my students were getting a bit restless. The confidence with which they had gone into this testing situation was beginning to dispel. Just a bit. There were still 102 questions left to answer.
* Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown. Amtrak Is in Trouble, But Congress Won’t Care. Government shutdown ends North Carolina WIC benefits. Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut. DC Can’t Spend. Here’s how it’ll mess up higher ed (including freezing student loans). Secession by other means. Back Door Secession. Avenging the surrender of the South.
* The horror: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.
* Former Graduate Student Collects Placement Data He Wishes He’d Had.
* (Another) Intern Couldn’t Sue For Sexual Harassment In New York Because She Wasn’t Paid.
* A recent report shows that graduate students generate nearly a third of all education debt.
* Pay It Forward is a bad idea that doesn’t seem to make sense even in its own terms.
* “Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.”
* Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty–student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty–student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.
* How to Kill a Zombie: Strategizing the End of Neoliberalism.
* How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds.
High fees and black boxes are just part of the story. Some funds also allow their managers to make undisclosed side bets by trading ahead of or opposite to the fund’s trades.
Chicago-based Grant Park Futures Fund LP, which is marketed by Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says on page 90 of a 180-page, April 2013 prospectus that David Kavanagh, president of the $660.9 million fund’s general partner, may place such personal trades. “Mr. Kavanagh may even be the other party to a trade entered into by Grant Park,” it says.
* Adam Kotsko’s Contribution to the Critique of White Dudes.
* Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale.
* Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.
* Vulture has an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.
* Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from League of Denial, on the NFL’s concussion denialism. You can also watch the Frontline documentary here.
* Soviet board-games, 1920-1938.
* In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.
* Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The L.A. Times will no longer publish letters from climate cranks.
* But the kids are all right: Arin Andrews and Katie Hill, Transgender Teenage Couple, Transition Together.
Monday Morning Links
Building on last night’s late-night Sunday links:
* Adam Kotsko with my secret work history revealed.
* Because every cop is a criminal: The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
* The UK is the most unequal country in the West. They’ve got a pretty huge gender wage gap, too.
* Malcolm Harris on Shakespeare behind bars.
* And you’re in luck: the fratbros are hiring.
Luckily, due to the tough job market, my dad has agreed to let me access my trust fund early (mid 7-figures) to start a relatively small hedge fund, ___ Ventures, after graduation. I’m emailing you guys today to let you know that, for the rest rest of the year, I will be recruiting 2 full-time employees and 1 intern to help me get this off the ground…
Tuesday Links
* “A higher education system worth defending or reclaiming has never existed”: Education’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” Moment.
* This piece is admirably forthright about what’s at stake with MOOCs.
How can this lead to cost reductions? The savings can accrue rapidly if the course is massively enrolled and subsections are taught by less well-paid individuals; or if the course lasts several years and the designers and lead professor may be paid over time.
* For the love of the game: The other day, Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz decried the spreading influence of money in college athletics. This is funny for several reasons, but you don’t really need to go past the fact that Ferentz is paid $3.8 million a year to coach Iowa’s football team, and does so while providing a comically small return on investment. In situations like this, schools would normally cut bait and fire the coach, but Ferentz is protected by a buyout that makes his contract look downright reasonable. … If Iowa were to fire Ferentz today, the school would have to pay a buyout of $17,531,360.
* ‘Achievement gap’ between older, younger kindergarten students persists into high school.
* Wisconsin City Fines Parents If Their Kids Are Bullies.
* I’m sure that academics will have objections, although Whedon has stood up to far worse than the Shakespeare (or Earl of Oxford) mob. He has been to Comic-Con. When Shakespeare’s done right, you can’t imagine him ever being done wrong. The clarity is blinding.
* Hedge fund manager suggests just firing all the teachers and just buying kids iPads. That’ll solve it.
* Third graders will now officially assess NYC teachers. Foolproof! What could go wrong?
* Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Marijuana Arrests. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
Marijuana usage rates are comparable among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are over 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
* If Comedy Has No Lady Problem, Why Am I Getting So Many Rape Threats?
* And Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes. Let’s go.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* Aaron’s latest Sunday Reading has a special section devoted to what’s going on in Turkey, if like me you haven’t been following as closely as you’d like. There’s lots of other good links too, of course.
* It also reminds me that I never got around to linking to this massive map of Arrested Development running gags.
* It really seems to me that Detroit will declare bankruptcy either way. The role of the emergency manager is to facilitate bankers’ looting the city first.
* Bottom line? Student evaluations are of questionable value.
* Ten Year Chicago Hotel Strike Ends in ‘Unconditional’ Defeat. Orbitz booked me at this hotel a few years ago and I was furious. I’d had no idea about the strike.
* Genetically modified wheat goes rogue in Oregon.
* Hedge fund’s wild side: The man who lost $8 billion.
* And God closes a door, opens a window.
Procrastination Won’t Procrastinate Itself
* 1959 memo lists government regulations for Yeti hunting.
1. Royalty of Rs. 5000/- Indian Currency will have to be paid to His Majesty’s Government of Nepal for a permit to carry out an expedition in search of ‘Yeti’.
2. In case ‘Yeti’ is traced it can be photographed or caught alive but it must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self defence. All photographs taken of the animal, the creature itself if captured alive or dead, must be surrended to the Government of Nepal at the earliest time.
3. News and reports throwing light on the actual existence of the creature must be submitted to the Government of Nepal as soon as they are available and must not in any way be given out to the Press or Reporters for publicity without the permission of the Government of Nepal.
* What could possibly go wrong? We Need To Start Running Schools Like Hedge Funds.
* The SAT never failed; why, it’s never really been tried!
* The Unbearable Lightness of Precarious Employment.
* Sarah Kendzior vs. the Boomers.
* Campus is about to be completely taken over by March Madness.
* And what could possibly go wrong? Billionaire unveils new ‘Titanic II’ cruise ship design.
The Charter School Scam
Under the New Markets program, a bank or private equity firm that lends money to a nonprofit to build a charter school can receive a 39% federal tax credit over seven years.
The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation.
By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.
Open Left links to a column from Juan Gonzalez (with more at Democracy Now) explaining how a Clinton-era tax credit makes investment in charter schools a guaranteed return for big banks and hedge funds—which may be part of the reason we’ve seen such a big policy push in that direction in recent years, with predictable results:
In Albany, which boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments, a nonprofit called the Brighter Choice Foundation has employed the New Markets Tax Credit to arrange private financing for five of the city’s nine charter schools.
The Henry Johnson Charter School, for example, saw the rent for its 31,000-square-foot building skyrocket from $170,000 in 2008 to $560,000 last year.
The Albany Community School’s rent jumped from $195,000 to $350,000.
Green Tech High Charter School rents went from $443,000 to $487,000.
Meanwhile, all the Albany charter schools haven’t achieved the enrollment levels their founders expected, even after recruiting hundreds of students from suburban school districts to fill their seats.
The result has been less money in per-pupil state aid to pay operating costs, including those big rent bills.
This Morning’s Must-Listen Economic Podcasts
…are Frontline‘s “The Warning” and “The Card Game.” Both are from earlier this fall.