Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Discussion (110) ¬

1. 
   sirius

   October 19, 2010, 6:44 am | #

   “Off topic” — but do you see the pat­terns and connections ?

   “
   In July, hedge fund Arma­jor pur­chased in a sin­gle trade a quan­tity of cocoa beans equiv­a­lent to 7% of global pro­duc­tion, help­ing push cocoa prices to their high­est level in over three decades. Arma­jor had effec­tively cor­nered the world mar­ket in ware­housed cocoa beans.
   “
   “
   The report pro­vides a clear analy­sis of how finan­cial mar­ket dereg­u­la­tion has cre­ated a world in which the price of vir­tual food, traded through exotic finan­cial instru­ments, can drive move­ments in the price of real food — and with it drive up the num­ber of hun­gry, which in 2008 sur­passed one bil­lion peo­ple.
   ”

   http://cms.iuf.org/?q=node/552
2. 
   Jason Murphy

   October 19, 2010, 8:51 am | #

   Folks I have enough ideas to keep me going for weeks! Thanks for the lit­tle direc­tional nudges.

   The time has come to build! [Though I expect the first attempt will be very much the stick man of models!]
3. 
   TruthIsThereIsNoTruth

   October 20, 2010, 11:38 am | #

   there is no such thing as con­tin­u­ous time, either in trad­ing or eco­nomic events, but also there is not such this as con­tin­u­ous time in com­puter sim­u­la­tion. Even Vis­sim must dis­cre­tise the sim­u­la­tion somehow.

   The key to dis­creti­sa­tion is get­ting it right, sim­ply trans­form­ing the equa­tion into it’s dis­crete coun­ter­parts may seem like the right thing to do but in fact it is not. The cor­rect way to do it is with a Tay­lor expan­sion, I’m not pre­sum­ing this is not known but the descrip­tion of the symp­toms sounds like the dis­creti­sa­tion may not be done prop­erly. But we may also be talk­ing about dif­fer­ent things altogether.

   In terms of the agent sim­u­la­tion, in my opin­ion there must be an ele­ment of ran­dom­ness in the agent behav­iour. You may argue that agents actions are not ran­dom, but when aggre­gated they are effec­tively ran­dom, I would be look­ing at repli­cat­ing a dis­tri­b­u­tion of out­comes rather than an out­come from a spe­cific macro model.
4. 
   Mike Stasse

   November 27, 2010, 7:53 am | #

   Well that’ll learn ya! I gave up on win­doze more than ten years ago. THIS lap­top came with win­doze 7, but I [almost] never use it.… a CONSTANT source of aggro and frustration.

   As soon as I bought this com­puter, I loaded it with Ubuntu, my favourite dis­tro of Linux, and have never looked back.…. never crashes, never catches ITD’s (Inter­net Trans­mit­ted Dis­eases) and is eas­ier to use. And it’s FREE! As is every other piece of soft­ware that works in it, and I use scientific/graphic/communications spe­cial­ist stuff.

   Ubuntu comes with a “soft­ware cen­tre” which allows you to down­load HUNDREDS of dif­fer­ent kinds of soft­ware, all free. Just yes­ter­day my wife needed new busi­ness cards.… down­load a small pro­gram that did a great job. FREE.