Category: Longform
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It's the Wrong Time of Year for Shorts
At least in the northern hemisphere.
When I watched the film The Big Short last year, I doubted that it would help people gain real understanding of financial markets and the problems that caused the crash of 2008-9:
You might come out of this film with a better understanding of the events that led to the 2008 financial crisis — or you might not. More likely, I think, you’ll sort-of understand it while you’re watching, but be none the wiser when it’s all over.
I count myself very much in that none-the-wiser position, then and now. In particular, while I knew that the ‘short’ involved somehow betting that the price of a share would go down, it had never clicked with me exactly how the ‘short seller’ could make a profit.
Until today, when I saw this tweet, apropos of the members of a subreddit bringing a hedge fund to bankruptcy, by taking advantage of the fund’s short position. The tweet contains a screen grab of the written explanation, unfortunately, and the tweeter doesn’t know the originator of the text, but here it is:
Thank you to whoever explained this - @reddit is incredible
— Jimmy Kelly (@_jimmykelly) January 28, 2021
😩🤙🏻 pic.twitter.com/zKRlbP41gJ
The key step that I had never understood was the the short seller borrows the shares, and then sells them at the current price. If they drop in price, the seller buys them back and returns them to the original owner. I don’t think I ever realised that you could borrow shares. If you can own something, you can borrow or lend it, I guess, even if it’s imaginary, so it does make sense. If I had ever thought of it, I would have thought, well why would you borrow something that you can’t do anything with?
But you can do something with it: sell it.
Four Years Gone
Four years ago, in a piece called ‘Which is Worse?,’ I wrote that:
Brexit is worse than Trump, because Trump is only for four years — less if he gets impeached or twenty-fived, which is almost certain; but Brexit is forever.
– Me, Which is Worse?
Who would have thought, back then, that, while Trump would be gone (having been impeached not once but twice) but Brexit, in its final form, would only be getting started?
I use the word ‘final’ facetiously. David Allen Green has been writing about this too, and he avers:1
In 2016, American voters (via the electoral college) elected Trump for a term of four years, while those in the United Kingdom voted for Brexit with no similar fixed term.
One decision was set to be revisited in four years, the other was not.
[…]
There will be no cathartic Biden-like ceremony to bring Brexit to a close.
This is because of the nature of the 2016 referendum (which, unlike the election of Trump, was not a decision for a fixed period); and because of the dynamic structure of the new relationship as set out in the trade and cooperation agreement; and because of the unsettled politics both internally in the United Kingdom and of its relationship with the European Union.
And so, to a significant (though not a total) extent, the United States was able to bring what it decided in 2016 to a formal and substantial end, the United Kingdom cannot similarly do so.
For the United Kingdom, 2016 is here to stay.
– David Allen Green, The United States had its cathartic post-2016, post-Trump ceremonial moment – but the United Kingdom cannot have a similar post-2016, post-Brexit moment
His ‘here to stay,’ and my ‘forever’ could be overstating the case. I feel sure that the United Kingdom, in some form, or at least parts of it, will join the European Union again one day. How far away that day is, and what form the accession country or countries of the time will have, we can only learn by living through it. It will be more than another four years, that’s for sure.
-
As he loves to do. It would be hard to find one of his posts without the word ‘aver’ in it. I think they get inserted by automatic operation of law.
He also loves a long title: ‘The United States had its cathartic post-2016, post-Trump ceremonial moment – but the United Kingdom cannot have a similar post-2016, post-Brexit moment’. ↩︎
Performing Pages
Every month Google, or specifically the ‘Google Search Console Team’ sends me an email showing the ‘Top performing pages’ on my site. Presumably that means the ones to which they, Google, have sent the most people.
Consistently, the top one is a post from 2012, about a particular use case of Pandoc. Specifically: Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files.
So it’s clear that if I want more engagement here – or at least more drive-by readers – I should write more technical-support-type articles.
That’s unlikely to happen at the moment. That page was a complete mess, though. There were artifacts left over from WordPress plugins, and the whole thing was displaying at the wrong width for reasons that I don’t understand. So I’ve cleaned it up, and now at least it looks a bit more welcoming for the hundreds of visitors who come every month.
I’m not even sure what it describes is still necessary – Pandoc has had a lot of changes since then – but it’s not wrong, so oh well.
A Pasta Mystery
I’ve never heard of the pasta shape called bucatini before (though the Mac spellchecker has), but it sounds fabulous, and I want to try it now. I won’t be able to, though (even if you can get it in the UK). This article by Rachel Handler in New York magazine is great: both hilarious and fascinating by turns.
Things first began to feel off in March. While this sentiment applies to everything in the known and unknown universe, I mean it specifically in regard to America’s supply of dry, store-bought bucatini. At first, the evidence was purely anecdotal. My boyfriend and I would bravely venture to both our local Italian grocer and our local chain groceries, masked beyond recognition, searching in vain for the bucatini that, in my opinion, not to be dramatic, is the only noodle worth eating; all other dry pastas might as well be firewood. But where there had once been abundance, there was now only lack. Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now? Why us?
– Rachel Handler, What the Hole Is Going On? The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020.