Political Equinox

On Tuesday, November 11-just a week after the election-myself and a crowd of just over 1,000 people joined Former Senator John Edwards at the IU Auditorium for a lecture running for public office and the future of America. While I enjoyed the lecture and the event showed the speaking power of the man, I felt it was missing an intellectual ingredient. Senator Edwards seemed to gloss over many of the issues we’re seeing America battle and I can’t honestly say I was inspired much by his rhetoric. He didn’t offer up any important changes we need to make, instead I heard a candidate making his case for issues.

I was expecting …

Tags: America, Barack Obama, candidate, china, economy, healthcare, joe lieberman, John Edwards, obama, president, Universal Healthcare

Professor Charles Franklin from the University of Wisconsin lectured at Indiana University on Tuesday, September 30. Franklin is the Co-Director of Pollster.com, a website that tracks presidential polling and aggregates data from a variety of polling sources.

Franklin states two criteria for effective display of data on Pollster. First, the data must be “put in perspective.” You can’t spin the data attempting to turn it into som

ething that it doesn’t say. Second, there should be “No cherry picking.” Franklin emphasized that you cannot select certain polls to include in your aggregation to bias results in one direction. If you do this then you’ve eliminated the entire worth of the …

Tags: America, Barack Obama, candidate, economy, IRS, John McCain, money, obama, president, web

Last Thursday evening I had the honor of witnessing an intriguing lecture by St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard who received his PhD is Economics from Indiana University.

Bullard spoke specifically on the topic of the recent financial crisis focusing on systemic risk, which he defined as “the possibility that the failure of one firm will lead to the failure of other firms.” However, Bullard said the difficulty lies in defining when there is adequate systemic risk to call for government intervention.

Three Pillars of Systemic Risk

Interconnectedness – Recent examples of systemic risk has focused on investment banks interconnecting themselves with complex financial instruments. For example’s sake, suppose Bank A purchases an option from Bank B to hedge risk, if …

Tags: economy, fannie mae, fannie mae and freddie mac, federal reserve bank, financial, government intervention, interconnectedness, investment banks, james bullard, mortgage backed securities, president, systemic risk, tution