"The Twenty-First Century Will be the Age of Inductive Economics"

Long but worth reading.

Personality test

(Following another QA, Do Quoc Anh's blog.)

I share this test on Facebook to test if there would appear this information on people's profiles. I expect there will be and the results will be different from the result from ppl who might take this from this site. The number of people who will take this test I doubt, will be more if I put my own result on Facebook rather than sharing only the link.

Just keeping it here for myself and for few interested. Cheers!

Travel with the Dow

It's cool, it's thrilling in the so-called 'security'. Enjoy!

Vietnam and China on The Economist

(Click on the link above)

The issue has arisen a lot of dicussions and angers among Vietnamese, especially the community of bloggers (Everywhere Land is an example). Now it appears on The Economist, April 25th 2009.

'With foreign direct investment 40% lower in the first quarter of 2009 than it was a year before-and most rich nations short of cash-Vietnam needs Chinese money now more than ever.' So will Vietnam be a colony, in one way or another way, in the end? The issue is to which country it chooses to be a colony to!

A sour conclusion: 'But reality is that in straitened economic times, beggars cannot be choosers'.

The Crisis and Emerging Markets

Some statistics prepared for CIB class to put together with the report from the Financial Stability Report April 2009, first chapter.


Large outflows experienced in 2008 from emerging economies. It is predicted to still in their outflow in the coming years.




Emerging economies (will) suffer badly from global crisis, especially exporters in East Asia. Take a look at this article.

Summer Reading List

Came across this post a long time ago, by Greg Mankiw. Post here again to remind me reading one or some of these in the summer. Would die if there's nothing to do while others will leave me or get occupied by some other things. :)

• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
• Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
• Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
• Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
• P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich
• Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
• Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
• Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
• John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
• William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

Hanoi stays in the first place for searching 'blog'

Follow this article, Google Trends is used to see the trend of blog searching. The results displayed are all over the world.


Rankings in regions and in languages



Google Trends uses IP address information from the server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site where the search originated.


From seeing trend and analyzing figures on a daily basis, a lot of things can be done to project (and prevent) some future events.

'Fluctuations in the frequency with which people search for certain words or phrases online can improve the accuracy of the econometric models', argues Hyunyoung Choi and as Alan Greenspan's work in his early career. (He's not popular with the belief that the market is right and can self-correct at this moment. Yet there are always something to be learnt irrespective of right or wrong.)

American banks' liquidity ratios

American banks like Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JP Morgan are posting positive profit. Below are some of my findings in the thesis about Bank Liquidity Risk Management. Looking at the ratios of WFC back in September 2008, there could be a rational hope that WFC would be doing well.

Graphs were drawn based on figures from the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve taken from November 2008.


Core deposit on the balance sheet of Citigroup has been very low since 2005 yet there was only problem to be seen when it came to the instability in the market.



Liquid assets comprises of trading assets, securities and papers, which could also explain one of the main sources of income in JP Morgan, Citi... who are active in buying and selling these papers.



The gap between the red and blue columns can be a measure in liquidity risk. And look at the red column, net loans and leases over core deposits of Citi!

(Non-core funding dependece = non-core liabilities - short-term investments/ long-term assets)

Again, Citi with a very high non-core funding dependence, the ratio to measure the degree to which banks fund long-term assets with non-core funding.

Some figures on Money Laundering

(Prepared for CIB class)

Scale of Money Laundering: 1,500 - 2,850 bln USD each year ( around 20% GDP of the US)

Overview by country:


Countries active in ML by rank order:
- Luxembourg
- United States
- Switzerland
- Cayman Islands
- Austria
- Netherlands
- Lichtenstein
- Vatican
- United Kingdom
- Singapore
- Hongkong
- Bermuda

Countries potential for ML:
- Bahamas
- Cayman Island
- Cook Islan
- Dominica
- Israel

Types of financial instruments reported on the SAR

Many types of financial instruments were involved in the suspicious activity reported on the SAR-SFs (Securities & Futures Industries)

Types Of Financial Instruments Reported	SAR-SFs	Percentage of Total SAR-SFs Reviewed
Cash or Equivalent	276	49.7
Other	101	18.2
Money Market Mutual Fund	45	8.1
Stocks	37	6.7
None	35	6.3
Mutual Fund	33	5.9
Bonds/Notes	25	4.5
Other Non-Securities	13	2.3
Other Securities	6	1.1
Commercial Paper	1	0.2
Warrants	1	0.2
Foreign Currencies	1	0.2