Saturday links: sub-optimal risk taking

The weekend is a great time to catch up on some of the reading you skipped during the week.  We hope you enjoy this set of long-form links.

Finance

Andrew Haldane, “‘We have arrived at a situation in which the ownership and control of banks is typically vested in agents representing small slivers of the balance sheet, but operating with socially sub-optimal risk-taking incentives.”  (London Review of Books)

An exploration of low volatility investing.  (Advisor Perspectives)

Relative strength in portfolio management: a primer.  (Systematic Relative Strength)

Hedge fund manager Seth Klarman is in a battle over a Canadian mega quarry.  (Fortune)

Farming is the new banking.  (Reuters)

Companies

Is Apple ($AAPL) a software company or a hardware company?  (Daring Fireball)

How Nike ($NKE) has remade their marketing machine.  (Fortune via TRB)

On the huge opportunity standing before BillGuard.  (Pando Daily)

T. Rowe Price ($TROW) has found it tough going cracking the Indian market.  (WSJ)

How McKinsey & Co. “hijacked the NHS.”  (Daily Mail via The Browser)

Economics

Francis Fukuyama talks innovation and stagnation with Peter Thiel.  (The American Interest also Noahpinion)

Christina Romer with five books to help you understand the Great Depression.  (The Browser)

More money is not necessarily the best fix for US infrastructure.  (Bloomberg)

What does a post-campus America look like?  (Megan McArdle)

What would your plan for Greece be?  (Crooked Timber via TRB)

Psychology

Jonah Lehrer, “The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions.”  (New Yorker)

Alexandra Samuel, “The new unplugging doesn’t require you to quit Facebook or throw out your iPhone. What it requires is careful attention to the sources of our discomfort; to the challenging qualities of online interaction, or of simply living in a networked world.”  (The Atlantic)

What Jeremy Lin tells us about the difficulty in identifying talent.  (The Frontal Cortex)

How laptops transformed one school district (for the better).   (NYTimes via Apple 2.0)

Book excerpts

How companies learn your secrets an excerpt from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.  (NYTimes)

Excerpts from Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.  (Slate, part 2, part 3)

To what degree are musicians made or born, a look at Gary Marcus’ Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning Saturday links: sub optimal risk taking.  (Brain Pickings)

The Wall Street bombing that made J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.  An excerpt from Tim Weiner’s Enemies: A History of the FBI. (Bloomberg)

Mixed media

Author Tess Gerritsen on what constitutes a great thriller.  (The Browser)

The geography of investment grade wines.  (New Geography)

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