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You call that an "impressive run up"? The attached chart is an impressive run up. Yours is a wee little pop :).

Well, first we need to get through the Scottish and Catalan referendums (referenda?)... Once we get over these things, it will be time for Britain to vote.

Housing bubble? Occurring in peripheral countries, other than Spain and Ireland? Not to my knowledge, that's fo' shizzle. If you look at the budget deficit/surplus for the peripheral countries, Spain and Ireland were running surpluses during 2004-07. During the same period, Italy, Portugal...

That's a very misleading statistic, though. Spanish budget surpluses were generated by the various housing activities, including the highly leveraged ones. Needless to say, that value added was, how to put it gently, illusory?

France is anything but financially stable... The younger generation within the Eurozone periphery is fleeing the austerity being imposed by the core countries, whether rightly or wrongly. They're fleeing "The Tab". It's inter-generational warfare at its most extreme. The paradox in the...

I just read that blurb and it really is quite silly. The guy just doesn't get it...

It's complicated... If you really want to get into the history of the Japanese economy properly, read "Princes of the Yen" by Richard Werner.

I know all about the "holes" in B-S. The fact that a model is flawed doesn't make it less useful or wrong. Like in the example I've given before, the fact that classical mechanics-based view of the world isn't always applicable doesn't mean that Newton's laws are useless. Just because there's...

Priceless... Grayson the Genius strikes again.

Don't be silly... The formula is not "flawed". It's a result of a model. Models are not perfect representations of reality, as everyone in the mkts knows. Saying that Black-Scholes is flawed is like saying that Newton's laws of motion are flawed.

It's "Gaussian copula", not "kopula"...

There's also FX Concepts... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/09/markets-forex-fxconcepts-idUSL1N0HZ1E220131009

Because if there's a default (especially a technical one, as the case at hand), the curve flattens aggressively. The bonds that suffer the most are the really short-dated ones (e.g. bills, 2y, etc), as you can observe even today. At the same time, the back end outperforms because of the hit to...

Indeed, good trade... Illustrating yet again that, in the famous words of Del Boy Trotter, "he who dares, wins".

Not the price that's for sure... As a specific example, in FX people commonly look at two measures to characterize the skew: 1) the (25D) risk reversal, which is the difference between the OTM call and put vols (most commonly, using 25 delta options); and 2) the (25D) butterfly, which is...

The strikes where the OTM options are 25% delta. I know it sounds unhelpful, but it IS the answer.

1) ASW is an abbreviation for "asset swap". Simplistically, an asset swap transaction is where you buy/sell an asset (such as govt bond), hedged with a derivative (such as an interest rate swap). 2) These are trades that are done using forward-starting swap. For instance, 5y5y refers to a...

Putin was Mayor of St. Petersburg? When was that? I was only referring to what happened to religion in Russia during the time he was president.

Well, we will just have to agree to disagree on this... Classification of values as "highest" and practices as "best" is a very subjective business, innit? Your "highest" values can easily be my "lowest" and vice versa. Finally, don't think being "relatively more exceptional" computes for me.

I wasn't actually being sarcastic. Like VV, I very much dislike the whole "American exceptionalism" meme. I think it's a propaganda tool that's better than anything the Soviets have ever come up with. As to VV not being religion-friendly, I think I'd beg to differ. During his rule...