The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s

by Laura Pappano

William Klein’s story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.

It wasn’t that there weren’t other jobs out there. It’s that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master’s. “It’s pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to,” Mr. Klein says.

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers’ new master’s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he’d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master’s. Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.

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Amy Winehouse (September 1983 – July 2011)

Goodbye, Amy.

How Google Makes the Big Bucks

[click for larger graphic]

Google is now making $3 billion a month in advertising — the majority of which comes from little text ads next to search results.

You might wonder how that’s possible, and who’s spending that much money on search ads.

The answer, according to Larry Kim — the founder of a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns — is in industries where a customer is worth a lot of money over the long-term.

Wordstream, Kim’s company, analyzed search terms that advertisers pay the most to have their ads show up next to, and grouped the top 10,000 by industry, using its own software. They multiplied the so-called cost-per-click — what advertisers pay Google for each time someone clicks on their ads — times the number of times people search on that word. They then divided that pie up by keywords that fit different industries.

The top industry? Insurance, where companies eager to outbid their rivals for new customers pay Google more than $54 for a click. Together they make up 24 percent of Google’s revenues from search advertising, according to Wordstream’s calculations. Companies in the business of issuing loans come second, with CPC rates of more than $44 — providing nearly 13 percent of Google’s revenues.

“There are lots of lawyers finding clients,” Kim said. “Even if they have to pay for 50 to 100 clicks to get a client, they can get that back in a court case that last for years, all the while billing $500 an hour. The same thing happens with CRM software, where companies pay a high month fee.”

(For more on how Google prices ads and tries to ensure ads are relevant, check out this great feature story from Wired Magazine about the money-making machine that is Google ad auctions.)

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Monroe or Einstein

You probably know whether or not you're near-sighted, but some people get so used to seeing things a certain way that they ignore a vision problem, squint a lot, and end up with unnecessary eye strain at the computer. The double-image above cuts straight to the point: If you see Albert Einstein while sitting a normal distance from your computer, you're seeing things as you should. If you see Marilyn Monroe, you should probably be wearing glasses or contacts.

I've got glasses, so I can easily A/B test by taking my glasses off (I see Monroe) and putting them back on (I see Einstein). If you aren't near-sighted and you want to see the image how near-sighted folks do, you can squint or just walk away from your computer until you see Monroe.

We're no optometrists, but it's easy to ignore a vision problem that's snuck up a little bit at a time and doesn't hurt to check.

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Frank Zappa

The Loudness Wars

by Mike Barthel

The loudest album of 2010 was almost certainly Sleigh Bells' acclaimed Treats, a collection of songs with the volume and distortion of nearly every element pushed into the red. Drums became blasts of noise, the lyrics were nearly impossible to decipher, and even though it was very much a pop album, it was almost painful to listen to. That, of course, was precisely why it thrilled.

Sleigh Bells had designed the album to sound that way. "I love the physical aspect of music," guitarist Derek E. Miller said in an email to The Atlantic. "I want people to have that experience of standing in front of a rack of sub-woofers, being blasted with air and feeling the center of your chest crush a little. I usually blur the vocals so people spend less time thinking about the lyrics and more time responding on a purely emotional level. Overdubs, hard pans, extremely short delays."

Then one day, his own music took him by surprise. "Our song 'Tell 'Em' came on a friend's playlist once sandwiched between a few songs, and I jumped," he said. "It kind of annoyed me."

The phenomenon Miller experienced with his own song is familiar to anyone who's put their iPod on shuffle. You turn the volume up for an older song like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," but then you have to turn it way down again if, say, Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You" comes on next. That effect is the outcome of what's been called "the Loudness Wars," a phenomenon that NPR saw fit to include as one of the major stories of music in the '00s. Through a technique called brick-wall limiting, songs are engineered to seem louder by bringing the quiet parts to the same level as the loud parts and pushing the volume level of the entire song to the highest point possible.

"I'm done blowing things out," Sleigh Bells' Derek Miller says. "Not a single thing is in the red, and I couldn't be more excited about it."Think of a song like the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." Without limiting, the volume of the loud parts in the chorus would be at a 7 and the volume of the quiet parts in the breakdown would be at a 4. With limiting, it's like someone's sitting next to your stereo, playing with the volume knob so that both the quiet and loud parts are at 10. They still have the same emotional feel—Brian Wilson isn't playing the piano any differently—but everything sounds louder.

This dynamic limiting both tires the ears and makes instruments sound worse, turning bright drums into dull thuds and letting small details get lost in a blaring wash of sound. But because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song. As a result, for a period, each new release came out a little louder than the last, and the average level of loudness on CDs crept up to such a degree that albums actually sounded distorted, as if they were being played through broken speakers. It's a phenomenon that began with the advent of CDs and digital sound processors in the early '90s, and only got worse as time went on. (This is the sort of thing that's better explained through sounds than words, so you may want to give a quick watch to a good YouTube video on the subject before moving on.)

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Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

Jacquelin de Leon
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Friday Book Club - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

by Geoffry Wolfe

In most of these 22 short fictions, the objects of Raymond Carver's close attention are men and women out of work, or between jobs, at loose ends, confused and often terrified. If they are kids, they play hooky. Husbands and wives lie beside each other in bed, touch cautiously, retreat, feign sleep, lie, each bewildered by what has just happened and by what might happen next. The stories themselves are not at all confused; they have been carefully shaped, shorn of ornamentation and directed away from anything that might mislead. They are brief stories but by no means stark: they imply complexities of action and motive and they are especially artful in their suggestion of repressed violence.

No human blood is shed in any of these stories, yet almost all of them hold a promise of mayhem, of some final, awful breaking out from confines, and breaking through to liberty. In the title story a man extracts from his wife the confession that years earlier, following a drunken party, she betrayed him with a friend. The husband goes on a bender, returns to his house and stands above his sleeping wife. He is capable now of anything: "How should a man act, given these circumstances? He understood things had been done. He did not understand what things now were to be done. The house was very quiet."

In the event, he and his wife make love. Such turmoils are, as in all of these stories, elliptically revealed, and potent with division as well as coupling. They are menacing, as are the spells of quiet and tensed apprehension that characterize Mr. Carver's method. His prose, for all its simplicity, carries his mark everywhere: I would like to believe that having read these stories I could identify him on the evidence of a paragraph, or at most two. His effect, which suggests but does not in any way duplicate the effect of Harold Pinter, is a function of accumulation. No single sentence lodges in the memory, but, taken together, Mr. Carver's locutions, exact and suggestive as they are, insinuate themselves into a reader's imagination and provoke startling, even shameful, expectations.

In his choice of plots and materials Mr. Carver is in the modernist train of Kafka. Odd and threatening messages come as though by magic through the mails or by telephone. Strangers invade one another's lives and offer preposterous challenges to one another. In the customary literary execution of such procedures, identities shift, characters are misled into taking enemies as friends, conspiracies develop or are, at the least, apprehended. Mr. Carver, by contrast, anchors his men and women, his children, even his dogs and cats, in stable identities. With a speed common to all his stories he fixes the special tic or manner he wishes to develop: "I was out of work," says the narrator of "Collectors" in the story's first sentence. "But any day I expected to hear from up north. I lay on the sofa and listened to the rain. Now and then I'd lift up and look through the curtain for the mailman."

That rain and lassitude, the dangerous quality of expectation and delay, is "Collectors'" signature. A vacuum-cleaner salesman invades the house, moves busily through it and occupies it. The salesman's disjunction is revealed by a few phrases and gestures. He wears slippers: "He saw me staring at the slippers and said, W.H. Auden wore slippers all through China on his first visit there. Never took them off. Corns." In its context, the observation is comical, but for some entirely magical reason, having to do with Mr. Carver's control, it is also terrifying, and in this conjunction of the comical and the ominous these fictions resemble Thomas Pynchon's.

Except that Mr. Carver is more sparing in his reliance on the surreal; once only, in "What's in Alaska?", conventional causalities are upset: "Carl set the glass on the coffee table, but the coffee table smacked it off..." And in this comic turn, drugs have disrupted the predictable flow of action and consequence, as they have jumbled language and correspondence of every kind. And once again Mr. Carver's tact and precision are marvelous: he indulges in no psychedelic effects, no light shows or undersea swims, no anti-gravitational hocus-pocus, but rather a clean shearing off of sequence.

Mt favorites among these stories are "Why, Honey?" (notice how often the titles form questions), about a governor who may have been a murderer as a child and whose mother fears for her life so long as her son knows where to find her, and "Nobody Said Anything," a perfectly realized story about a kid faking sickness to give the slip to school and spend a day fishing. This story has in its few pages two wholly realized characters, a suggestion of potential murder, accurately adolescent dialogue and one of the best erotic sequences (unrealized sexuality, as usual here) that I have ever read. Also it has an ending that is both astonishing and just. But the essential Carver curtain-close is that in "Ducks": a husband tries to awaken his wife beside him in bed: "She kept on sleeping. 'Wake up,' he whispered. 'I hear something outside.'" What he hears, what it means, what will happen next, is for you to imagine. Mr. Carver's work here is done, and wonderfully.

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In Rural Alaska, a Promise Unfulfilled

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.

[ed.  An extensive four-part report on Alaska Native Corporations' special SBA 8(a) contracting exemption.] 

NOME, ALASKA - They wander the streets of this chilly city just steps from the arctic tundra, native people who have little money and nowhere else to go. Some come from villages without plumbing. Others drift among the city's bars or hold down low-wage jobs. Wearing flannel shirts and tennis shoes, they are among America's poorest corporate shareholders.

They came by their holdings in the Sitnasuak Native Corp. as a birthright, when Congress established more than 200 Alaska native corporations, or ANCs, 40 years ago to provide land and money for indigenous people who had long been mired in deprivation and dislocation.

Each of the 75,000 original Alaska native shareholders received a stake in one of the new corporations, which held out the promise of economic development and a better life. The corporations have received extraordinary exemptions that have enabled them to receive $29 billion in federal contracts in the past decade.

But the original promise remains largely unfulfilled.

Native shareholders have gotten relatively little of the contracting largess. In many cases, the bulk of the money and jobs has gone to nonnative executives, managers, employees and traditional federal contractors in the lower 48 states, a Washington Post examination has found.

Under pressure to spend quickly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and other federal agencies took unprecedented advantage of the special contracting privileges given to the ANC-owned firms, including the ability to receive contracts of any size without competition. The result was one of the largest contracting booms for a minority group in U.S. history.

The Defense Department and civilian agencies have used the Alaska corporations as a shortcut for a dizzying array of work: intelligence analysis, base security, satellite support, janitorial services, bioterrorism research, computer systems, water tanks in Iraq, support for the drug war in Colombia.

Few addressed the obvious question: How could small, inexperienced native companies handle giant government contracts? The answer was to hire nonnative executives and workers and partner with established firms, including major Pentagon contractors. ANC-owned firms won contracts and passed on much of the work and revenue to the nonnatives and major contractors, audits and other records show.

Child’s Play, Grown-Up Cash

[ed.  Words fail.  Slideshow here.]

by Kate Murphy

Apart from the open bar by the swimming pool, the main attraction at parties held at the Houston home of John Schiller, an oil company executive, and his wife, Kristi, a Playboy model turned blogger, is the $50,000 playhouse the couple had custom-built two years ago for their daughter, Sinclair, now 4.

Cocktails in hand, guests duck to enter through the 4 ½-foot door. Once inside, they could be forgiven for feeling as if they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.

Built in the same Cape Cod style as the Schillers’ expansive main house, the two-story 170-square-foot playhouse has vaulted ceilings that rise from five to eight feet tall, furnishings scaled down to two-thirds of normal size, hardwood floors and a faux fireplace with a fanciful mosaic mantel.

The little stainless-steel sink in the kitchen has running water, and the matching stainless-steel mini fridge and freezer are stocked with juice boxes and Popsicles. Upstairs is a sitting area with a child-size sofa and chairs for watching DVDs on the 32-inch flat-screen TV. The windows, which all open, have screens to keep out mosquitoes, and there are begonias in the window boxes. And, of course, the playhouse is air-conditioned. This is Texas, after all.

“I think of it as bling for the yard,” said Ms. Schiller, 40.

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Nelly

[ed.  Stay cool.]

Antimicrobial Wipes and Soaps May Be Making You (and Society) Sick

by Rob Dunn

A few weeks ago as I was walking out of a Harris Teeter grocery store in Raleigh, North Carolina, I saw a man face a moment of crisis. You could see it in the acrobatic contortions of his face. He had pulled a cart out of the area where carts congregate, only to find that its handle was sticky with an unidentifiable substance. He paused and looked at the handle, as if to imagine the nature of the offense. Gum? Meat juice? Chewed marshmallows? So many vulgar possibilities. Forlorn, he reached for an antibiotic wipe conveniently placed by the door. He scrubbed his hands VERY diligently and then pushed the cart back for someone else to rediscover [1].

Scenarios like this one are playing out all over America. There is an epidemic of sticky, dirty and otherwise gross handles on shopping carts. But it isn't just carts. Disgusting doorknobs have also been found, as have cryptically damp table-tops in restaurants and even, sad as it is, slimy back rests on the weight machines in gyms! Increasingly, the world seems to be rife with contamination. Fortunately, all of the main companies producing hygiene products have offered a solution--sanitary, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antibiotic, wipes, and soaps to kill anything that dares to creep into our wholesome lives. These salves will cure us of the demons that dare to grow near us.

The really intriguing news--a kind of breakthrough--is that the main compounds in antibiotic wipes, creams and soaps, triclosan and/or the chemically similar triclocarban, have also been sprinkled around our lives more generally. A recent study notes that triclosan is now used to "impregnate surfaces and has been added to chopping boards, refrigerators, plastic lunchboxes, mattresses as well as being used in industrial settings, such as food processing plants where walls, floors and exposed machinery have all been treated with triclosan in order to reduce microbial load." You can now go home, wipe your world down and live a happier life, surrounded by an antibiotic force field. Be especially sure to wipe your children down. Children are just about the grimiest thing in the world.

Yet, although I hesitate to digress or cause trouble, the devil on my shoulder, that voice of so-called reason, is urging me to avail myself of more than the vague suspicion that everything around me is contaminated. Maybe, the devil says, we should glance, just for a second, at what scientists like to call--in their nasally ivory-tower voices--"the evidence." I do not mean anything too fancy… Let's just take a moment to look at a study here and there that might be relevant as we go about coating our lives--from underpants to kitchen pans--in antibiotic wonder.

For example, what if we just considered whether people who wipe down the world around them with antibiotic soap or wipes are less likely to be sick. Of course, they must be. The world is gross and they are, God bless them, clean, but let's just check.

OK, we shouldn't have checked. There are some problems. One is the actual evidence, or just as often, lack thereof. Case in point: along with her colleagues, Allison Aiello, a professor at the University of Michigan, recently surveyed all of the experimental or quasi-experimental studies published in English between 1980 and 2006 on the effectiveness of different hand washing strategies [2]. Aiello focused on studies that compared different strategies, for example the use of normal soap versus the use of antibiotic soap, in terms of their effect on the probability of developing gastrointestinal or respiratory illness. Our intuition is that antibiotic soaps and wipes should make everyone healthier. Aiello's results were something else entirely.

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Fore!

by Larry Dorman

Tiger Woods has always demanded loyalty from employees and associates as a prerequisite for continued employment or association. His caddie, Steve Williams, was always the embodiment of the loyal employee, going to whatever lengths he deemed necessary to protect Woods on the golf course and off it.

And after Woods publicly announced the firing of Williams, his longtime caddie, friend and confidant, on his Web site, using the usual corporate niceties to put some positive spin on it, he might be wondering what happened to the nondisparagement clause in Williams’s contract.

This is quickly taking on the makings of a very ugly divorce.

Unhappy with the breakup, Williams fired back at Woods. On his personal Web site, after weeks of denying firing rumors that had popped up on other Web sites and on Australian television, Williams confirmed that Woods had let him go after the AT&T National tournament three weeks ago at Aronimink.

Then he wrote: “After 13 years of loyal service needless to say this came as a shock. Given the circumstances of the past 18 months working through Tiger’s scandal, a new coach and with it a major swing change and Tiger battling through injuries I am very disappointed to end our very successful partnership at this time.”

When he took to the airwaves, Williams ratcheted up the rhetoric on 3 News in New Zealand. This one may have started Woods wondering if the lawyers left the nondisclosure part out of the standard player-caddie contract, if there was a contract.

“You know, when I write my book, it’ll be the time I decide what I write,” Williams said. “It’ll just be one of those interesting chapters in the book.”

He is not talking about a yardage book or a record book, either. Woods might have been able to obviate some of this had he learned one other thing about Jack Nicklaus, whose major-championship victory record of 18 is still four ahead of Woods. He could have asked him how to fire a famous caddie.

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Carmageddon’s Big Surprise

by Timothy Egan

So, they shut down a 10-mile stretch of one of the world’s busiest freeways for repair last weekend, in the nation’s most driver-stressed metropolis, and gave it a scary name — Carmageddon. Predictions were that Los Angeles would look like Mike Huckabee’s arteries before he lost a hundred pounds, and that chaos and road rage would reign under the tired sunlight of the Southland.

Lo, the weekend came and went, and a miracle was proclaimed — “a historic moment” in traffic history, as Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky called it. The 405 freeway opened 17 hours ahead of schedule. Pollution and smog levels dropped. A trio of pedestrians even dined on linen in the middle of the empty road. Ya-a-a-ay for L.A.!

“They loved it,” said Yaroslavsky in an interview. “It was Carmaheaven. My e-mails and Facebook comments have been not just 95 percent positive, but effusive. People who live near the freeway heard birds chirping for the first time. They heard the sound of kids playing.”

As a nonevent, Carmageddon ranks with Y2K, the much feared global computer collapse at the millennium’s dawn. But as an urban epiphany, the weekend when Los Angeles became a small town was no small thing. It disproved some of the most worn-out clichés about the city, while offering students of urban behavior some tantalizing glimpses of a better future.

To cyclists, the peace and harmony of the weekend was proof that people can get around on two wheels instead of four. And yes, Los Angeles was a green dream for the 36 hours of the actual shutdown, but not necessarily because pedal power replaced internal combustion.

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Financial Crisis: Final Essay Exam

by Barry Ritholtz  

Good morning class.

This past academic year, we have studied the many causes of the financial crisis. We’ve looked at how this stock market collapse compared to others, the impact of bank bailouts on competition, and of course, the Great Recession. There are lots of moving parts in this saga, and understanding them all is our goal.

Your final examination is in essay form. Answer each of the following 10 questions, using specific data and facts to buttress your arguments. Note you will be penalized for unsupported assumptions and unproven theories. Ideological arguments that lack a factual basis will also penalize you.

You have 3 hours (~15 minutes per question).

Good luck. 

Final Examination

1. Following the dotcom implosion and 2000 market crash, the Federal Reserve lowered rates to 2% for 3 years, including a then unprecedented level of 1% for more than a year. Discuss the impact this had on various asset classes, including Real Estate, Fixed Income, Oil and Gold. What difference might a more traditional interest rate regime have made for these assets?

Bonus Question: Imagine you were FOMC Chair. Where would you have set rates in the 1990s? After the 2000 crash? Today?

2. The rating agencies — Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings — originally had business that were funded by bond investors, who paid for the NRSRO’s research. This changed in the 1990s to a Syndicators & Underwriter purchased ratings model. How did this business model change impact a) the performance of ratings agencies; b) the underwriting quality of syndicators?

Bonus question: Does finance still require NRSROs to evaluate complex financial products? What alternatives could replace these entities?

3. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 was an unusual piece of deregulatory legislation, creating a new world of uniquely self-regulated financial instruments — the derivative. What was the impact of this on risk management, leverage, and mortgage underwriting?

Bonus: What did a lack of reserve requirements for underwriting derivatives mean for AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers?

4. More than 50% of subprime loans were made by nonbank mortgage underwriters not subject to comprehensive federal supervision; another 30% were made by thrifts also not subject to routine supervision or examinations. What did this do to the supply/demand curve in the housing and mortgage markets?

Bonus: What was the role of changing credit standards in prior bubbles and financial crises?

5. In 2004, the SEC issued the “Bear Stearns exemption” — replacing Net Capitalization Rule’s 12 to 1 leverage limit to with essentially unlimited leverage for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Given that none of these companies exist today in the same structure as prior to the rule change, discuss the impact of this rule change on these companies.

Bonus: Changing broad legislation for only 5 companies is very unusual. What does this say about regulatory capture, democracy and the impact of lobbying on American society?

6A. Mortgage underwriting standards changed rapidly in the 2000s .Many lenders stopped verifying income, payment history, and credit scores.

6B. Traditional loan metrics also changed: Loan to value (LTV) went from 80% (20% down payment) to 100% (No Money Down) to even 120% (Piggyback mortgages).

6C. The loans themselves changed: “Innovative” new mortgage products were developed and marketed in the 2000s: 2/28 ARMs, I/O s, Neg Ams

Q: Discuss the correlation this had on a) home prices; b) new inventory build; and c) foreclosures.

7. Banks developed automated underwriting (AU) systems that emphasized speed rather than accuracy in order to process the greatest number of mortgage apps as quickly as possible. What was the impact of this on the RE market? How did this impact default ratios and foreclosures?

Bonus: Real estate agents and mortgage brokers were known to repeatedly use the same corrupt appraisers to facilitate loans approval. Did this correlate with AU? Discuss how and why.

8. Collateralized debt obligation (CDO/CMOs) managers who created trillions of dollars in mortgage backed securities and the institutional investors (pensions, insurance firms, banks, etc.) who purchased these appear to have failed to engage in effective due diligence prior to underwriting or purchasing of these products. Reconcile this in terms of the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Bonus: What does this mean for self regulation of the financial industry? Is it desirable? Even possible?

9. The Depression era Glass Steagall legislation was repealed in 1998. What impact did this have on the size of banking institutions? What did this do to the competitive landscape of financial services industry? Did this impact bank risk taking? Discuss.

10. Numerous states had anti-predatory lending laws which in 2005 were “Federally Pre-empted” by order of John Dugan, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). What impact did this have on states with anti-predatory lending laws default and foreclosure levels, pre- and post- pre-emption?

11. In 2006, more than 84% of subprime mortgages were issued by private lending institutions not covered by government regulations (McClatchy). Discuss what this means in terms of profit motive, government policy, and GSEs.

12. The Bank Bailouts “rescued” the system, but may have created additional issues int he future. Discuss the Moral Hazard of bailouts, what they mean in terms of competitive landscape and concentration of assets in the financial services industry.

Bonus: What impact might the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on lending and future credit bubbles?

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Composition VIII, by Wassily Kandinsky
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Andre Carillho
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