I have been using AVG for anti-virus and ZoneAlarm as a personal firewall for many years now. Unfortunately, AVG started to inform me that some ZoneAlarm dll’s had been infected by “Trojan horse Agent_r.CX”. After some poking around, it was evident that this was a false positive. I have been having strange problems with ZoneAlarm (I seems to continue to prompt for things I’ve already granted permission to access the Internet with the “Remember” option checked), so I decided to try out another personal firewall: COMODO. So far so good…
October 13, 2008
Market Volatility and Interbank Lending
The markets have been taking a wild ride these past few weeks. Those of you who crave volatility must be having a field day however; one can’t help but be puzzled as to what’s causing the recent market swings.
We know that the roots of the current financial crisis lie in the securitization of sub-prime mortgages and a general failure in containing risk within these portfolios. We know that there are significant funds being made available to the financial institutions to make loans as well as to purchase toxic assets off the balance sheets of these institutions. So why all the uncertainty and when will recent measures actually bring stability to the markets?
Banks form the base of the economic pyramid given that businesses depend on them for loans for various projects that otherwise would not be carried out. At the end of the day, banks make money from these transactions and have typically relied on the ability to borrow from each other should they experience a shortfall of cash reserves at the end of each business day. The recent revelation regarding financial institutions with unprecedented levels of toxic assets on their books has resulted in a disintegration of trust among banks. This has caused banks to start hoarding cash instead of freely lending to each other.
Interbank lending rates such as LIBOR can be used as a rough proxy for the measure of trust between banks. Despite cuts of the benchmark lending rates by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada, LIBOR has jumped to the highest levels since December of last year. In other words; banks do not trust each. After all, without clarity on how these assets will be divested, they could end up lending money to insolvent institutions. Furthermore, banks have no reason to believe that borrowing banks will no longer engage in the activities that got everyone in this mess to begin with. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no notable change in regulations, executives or boards of directors at any of the offending institutions. Perhaps there is a concern that any such move would be interpreted as an admission of wrongdoing. In any case, it is unclear when banks will free up capital and when business will have access to prior levels of debt financing. While this is the case, I am not sure that we can expect stable markets anytime soon.
October 10, 2008
Brainify Sneak-Peek
I had the pleasure of presenting Brainify to a select group of attendees at the Sauder School of Business BAMA 513 (eMarketing) tradeshow. During this sneak peek, most of the conversation with the 50 or so attendees was about what Brainify could do for them. While we did not go into the specifics of the application, one thing was clear – everyone wanted to get their hands on the application. We got that message loud and clear and the engineering team at Brainify continues to endeavour to launch as soon as possible. Thank you all for your attendance, encouragement and feedback.
