XBRL for Dummies

After I fiddled my time with skimping through specification of XBRL 2.1, XBRL Dimensions 1.0 and XLink 1.1, I decided to get untechnical for a glimpse. Here you go, XBRL for Dummies, written by Charles Hoffman aka Father of XBRL and Liv Watson, one of the founders of XBRL.

400+ damned pages albeit pretty light materials, it took me few days to finish the reading. Although the depth is shallow since the book is for Dummies, it provides quite delicate coverage of XBRL regime with pointers to case studies, reference materials, state of the art landscape of products and services and some enlightments of how to make value out from XBRL. It's definitely one of the up-to-date introductory literature you just can't miss.

Essentials of XBRL

While my recuperation from Wisdom extraction is in progress, I managed to finish the reading of this book during the dull weekend. Pains still intact though.

This book is targeted for the audience from the group of C-level, hence you can imagine how above-50,000-feets the materials can be. Nonetheless, it does provide a very important perspective on how XBRL can portrait itself as a valuable corporate asset and not just another technology.

It is only 200+ pages and with a lot of spaces in between the lines for easy sighting of old folks. Lolx.

Anyway, the book is focused on elaborating the evolutionary power of XBRL in the accounting field, particularly how it will transform accounting firms and corporate accounting department. However, I guess it would be more valuable if it can includes more emphasis on other stakeholders such as regulators and software vendors and not just a breeze on them.

Moving forward.

The Telco Churn Management Hand Book By Rob Mattison

I've finished the reading of this book as part of the preparation works for one incoming POC exercise. Not a hefty one, just a near 400 pages traverse of churn related matter in telecommunications industry. It did inspired me about some direction about how to better concoct an arsenal of stuffs to tackle churn. The book is pretty high level in the sense that besides the strategic direction and some tactical means of handling churn, it doesn't really craft down any specific implementation models which directly adaptable. It is inspiring yet you will crack your head yourself to think about the how-to.

Read it here

Time is running out and I got to do more knowledge churning.. literally!

A less wonderful life for bankers - Jimmy Stewart is Dead

A less wonderful life for bankers
Review by Martin Sandbu



Jimmy Stewart is Dead
By Laurence Kotlikoff
Wiley ($27.95)


A reader of Jimmy Stewart is Dead could be forgiven for thinking that its author is an angry young man. The book describes the financial crisis in prose of populist wrath that would not be out of place in the “tea party” movement. It parades a procession of villains, from deposed Wall Street titans to Uncle Sam himself, and sends them packing in verbal tar and feathers.

In fact, the author is Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University professor whose research record extends to such rarefied topics as Ricardian non-equivalence in strategic altruism. But here his tone is more the agitator’s than the academic’s as he explains “in plain English and simple terms the big con underlying the big game”.

Hardly any part of finance escapes Kotlikoff’s whip. Executive compensation, subprime mortgages, derivatives, credit rating, bail-outs, even deposit insurance are so many forms of theft or snake oil, which only deliver so long as people believe they can. The basic problem, he says, is “multiple equilibria”: economies shift from growth to paralysis depending on whether consumers and investors expect things to hum along nicely or fear a collapse.

This is what almost kills the Bailey Building and Loan Association in It’s a Wonderful Life, the feelgood film starring James Stewart as an honest banker. Faced with a run on his bank, Stewart’s character educates shocked savers in the realities of fractional reserve banking: deposits are not held in a vault but recycled in loans to the community. If enough depositors worry about a bank’s safety, they cause the very failure they fear by demanding more than it has at hand.

Kotlikoff sees the current crisis as such a flip from good to bad expectations. In the film, Stewart regains the trust of the townspeople, who avert disaster by putting their money back in. But in our world, faith cannot be restored: Jimmy Stewart – or the kind of finance he represents – is dead.

If you cannot have trust, it helps to know that what you see is what you get. Kotlikoff has a simple and radical substitute for trust. “Limited purpose banking” would turn every financial product into a mutual fund and every limited-liability financial institution into a mutual fund provider.

Under LPB, mortgage lending, for example, would be done through “mortgage mutual funds” whose managers would pick loans to invest in. Mortgage applicants would provide the information they do today, and different funds could bid for their custom. The lenders would be investors owning shares in the mutual funds. At no point would any bank actually hold the mortgage on its books.

Indeed, banks would not hold anything on their books at all except the modest assets needed to manage a fund – computers and offices – and the matching equity. They would not be allowed to borrow and certainly not to trade with borrowed funds.

In LPB “cash mutual funds”, fully backed by cash, take the place of deposits. If this sounds like narrow banking, it is because it is – but LPB extends the principle to all of finance. Insurance and derivatives are replaced by funds issuing different shares, whose claims on the funds’ holdings depend on how specified events turn out. Crucially, this means all contingent liabilities are fully backed by capita!l.

Kotlikoff also wants independent custodians and a single agency verifying and publishing details on every investment: one would be able to look at each mortgage a fund holds before choosing to invest in it.

LPB would in one sense change a lot; in another, very little. Virtually every financial product in use today could be recreated as a mutual fund. But with all warts and blemishes exposed and no doubt that end-investors carry the losses, some would be priced out of existence. No bad thing with value destroyers presently masquerading as triple-A – but the worry is that LPB would take us from too much credit to too little.

“Financial life will be . . . smoother”, writes Kotlikoff, “because LPB will [reduce] the risk of fraud and systemic collapse.” Perhaps, but risks remain. It would be hard to stop non-financials from engaging in financial activities. Nor are mutual funds immune to runs: when a money market fund broke the buck in 2008, the US government rushed in with a backstop. But one big source of panic disappears under LPB. Banning leverage in financial intermediation makes it impossible for intermediation itself to collapse if a leveraged bubble bursts.

LPB may not be the answer, but it is a serious attempt to seek solutions at the required scale. Kotlikoff does us a great service by pointing out that only radical reform can fix finance. For that reason alone the ideas in this book deserve to be taken seriously.

Author of 100 Things To Do Before You Die has died

Eddy said: So Ironic!

Author of 100 Things To Do Before You Die has died before completing his list
Dave Freeman, the co-author of best-selling travel guide "100 Things to Do Before You Die" has died aged 47, before completing his irreverent list.

By Lucy Cockcroft

Dave Freeman tried out every task he wrote about had managed to tick off around 50 of the adventures recommended by his book, including land-diving on the Pacific island of Vanuatu and running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

His father, Roy Freeman, said he died on August 17 after falling and hitting his head at home in Venice, California.

An advertising agency executive, Mr Freeman co-wrote the 1999 guide - subtitled "Travel Events You Just Can't Miss" - with friend Neil Teplica.

The book poignantly starts by saying: "This life is a short journey. How can you make sure you fill it with the most fun and that you visit all the coolest places on earth before you pack those bags for the very last time?"

Relatives said Mr Freeman visited about half the destinations on his list before he died, and together he and Mr Teplica had been to nearly all of them.

"He didn't have enough days, but he lived them like he should have," Mr Teplica said.

The book's recommendations ranged from well-known pursuits and events, such as attending the Academy Awards or Royal Ascot, to the extremely obscure.

The more bizarre suggestions include taking a voodoo pilgrimage in Haiti, nude night surfing in Australia and competing in a yelling competition in North Carolina.

Each of the 100 entries were accompanied by a rating which indicated where they were on the scale between "grandma friendly" and "down and dirty".

One of Mr Freeman's favourite events was the Las Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain, where firework-filled papier-mache effigies of politicians and celebrities explode at midnight.

He tried out every task he wrote about and listed land-diving in the South Pacific as the most exhilarating adventure.

The centuries-old tradition, which he called the "original bungee jump", involves leaping off tall towers with just a vine attached to the leg. One Vanuatu islander fell to his death during a 1974 ceremony witnessed by The Queen.

The guide was born out of a regular website feature called "The Coolest Place on Earth".

As readers sent in accounts of their experiences at wacky festivals around the world Mr Freeman and Mr Teplica decided to dedicate themselves to trying them all out.

The success of "100 Things" went on to inspire dozens of spoof imitations, with titles such as "100 Things Project Managers Should Do Before They Die" and "100 Things Cowboys Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die."

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash

"The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash"



Author: Charles Morris

Sometimes in the markets you get to be wise, sometimes just lucky. Charles Morris, it would seem, is both. A couple of years ago, Morris, an American financial author and former lawyer who has worked with complex credit products, became concerned that a bubble was forming in the credit world. He embarked on a book, with the aim of publishing it later this year, because he expected "the mother of all crashes" in 2008.

In the event the crash started a year earlier. But Morris's publisher has rushed the book out at top speed, thus ensuring that his work has the honour of being the first to offera credible and readable account of the current credit turmoil. This means that what Morris has to say looks highly relevant, especially in a month when banks keep reporting more bad news.

For, as his eye-catching title declares, Morris calculates that the likely cost of the credit crunch will be some "trillion dollars". Three months ago, when his book went to press, that estimate might have seemed bold. After all, last year Washington was cheerily insisting subprime losses could be "contained" at about $100bn (£50bn). These days, the pain having spread, the trillion dollar number no longer looks outlandish.

Morris offers a detailed explanation of how he has reached this sum, and points out that the pain extends well beyond subprime. More sobering still, he warns that this sum could rise further if the authorities mishandle policy. "We are accustomed to thinking of bubbles and crashes in terms of specific markets - like junk bonds, commercial real estate and tech stocks," he observes.

"A credit bubble is different. Credit is the air that financial markets breathe and when the air is poisoned there's no place to hide."

In addition to this gloom, Morris offers a timely - and eminently readable - potted history of how we got into this mess. In his eyes, the story starts back in the 1970s, when Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, killed the inflation demon and restored confidence to the financial markets.

Morris considers this to have been a fabulous achievement and a central lament of his book is that the US seems to lack a 21st-century Volcker - in the sense of someone who was both willing to take on Wall Street and had the moral courage and stature to do so. But Morris concedes that Volcker's success formed the seed for today's mess, because the new climate of stability left banks confident enough to crank up their leverage and risk-taking.

That, coupled with technological change and a steady slide to a more laisser-faire regulatory regime, triggered an explosive burst of financial innovation, which spun out of control in the current decade.

Morris's solution to all this is clear. Because no one is willing to step into Mr Volcker's shoes yet, the US gov-ernment must return to regulating markets more tightly in order to restore balance.

"My personal belief is that the 1980s shift from a government-centric style of economic management toward a more markets-driven one was a critical factor in the American economic recovery of the 1980s and 1990s," he writes. "But the breadth of the current financial crash suggests that we've reached the point where it is market dogmatism that has become the problem, rather than the solution."

He stops short of offering any detailed prescription, however, and simply concludes that "a very long agenda" of steps is now required.

Such reticence is perhaps understandable given that the crisis is still unfolding. But it also highlights a limitation of the book: namely that Morris's account ends pretty early in this financial drama.

Moreover, what this book does not do is offer much "on the ground" feeling of what it was actually like to be inside the financial machine in recent years, as innovation went mad. That is a pity because Morris was an insider for a while: in the late 1990s he was president of a software company that analysed structured finance, and thus presumably saw the craziness develop at close quarters.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Morris's book is both thought-provoking for experts and a readable primer on events for the layperson. His work clearly highlights the central policy challenge for America's political leaders. If you give credence to the "trillion dollar" loss estimate (as I do), the banking system faces a clear challenge in accessing capital.

And that, in turn, begs the central question: how can you plug this gap if western shareholders are reluctant to recapitalise the banks?

Stand by for the next act in this drama, trillion dollar or otherwise.

The writer is the FT's capital markets editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Head First PMP

Head First PMP

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