My Virtual Display
 Random thoughts and notes to self

I just released version 0.4 of the include_HTML plugin.  Nothing changed in how you use it, so if your installation already works, there’s no pressing need to upgrade.  What did change, however, is how the plugin functions.

Prior to version 0.4, the plugin retrieved external data by using file_get_contents() function.  Some Web hosting companies, however, disable the use of this function on remote URLs for security reasons by setting PHP configuration directive allow_url_fopen to Off; consequently, include_HTML wouldn’t work on systems configired this way.

The alternative, of course, is to use the Client URL (cURL) extension, which would work regardless of allow_url_fopen setting, but may or may not be available on a specific system.

Starting from version 0.4, include_HTML begins by checking if the cURL extension is available on the host system.  If it is, the plugin relies on it to retrieve external data.  If it isn’t, the plugin falls back on the old file_get_contents() mechanism.

It is hoped that this modification would improve the plugin’s portability.  A big thank-you to VickiLH2 for suggesting and testing out the cURL data retrieval.

Just a note to self: to make a scheduled Windows XP task run invisibly, schedule it to run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:

A great (and very accessible to the non-technical audience) summary of what the differences between saltwater and freshwater economics are all about… The original is here.

September 6, 2009

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.

Read the rest of this entry »

In some instances, it is desirable to disable generation of RSS feeds by WordPress.  Akuna Matata presents a simple solution to this problem.  Just add the following to your theme’s functions.php:

/**
 * Disable Our Feed Urls
 */
function disable_our_feeds() {
	wp_die( __('<strong>Error:</strong>' .
		'No RSS Feed Available, ' .
		'Please visit our <a href="'.
		get_bloginfo('url') .
		'">homepage</a>.'));
}

add_action('do_feed', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);

From Business Week:

Equipment: a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437 laptop (AMD Turion 64 X2, 2,048 MB DDR2 SDRAM, 200 GB HDD, DVD SuperMulti optical drive, 802.11b/g wireless network card) running Vista Home Premium.

Problem: an atypical Black Screen of Death.  In most cases, the Black Screen of Death appears at boot; often, the mouse cursor is visible and draggable.  In this case, however, the Black Screen of Death would appear randomly during the computer’s operation, causing the computer to freeze, power button being the only way to regain control.  This would happen about once a day.  Typically, Vista would reboot in normal mode without a problem, but every once in a while it would have to go through a lengthy restore process before booting up (I think the behavior at reboot depended on whether the computer was doing anything sensitive when it froze).

Possible solutions that didn’t work: (1) disabling event logging; (2) setting processor minimum to 100%.

Solution that worked: upgrading BIOS software to the latest version available from Toshiba Support.  So far, over a week without a single black-screen incident.

From International Tax Review:

Cayman Islands agrees to tax information exchange with Netherlands

The Cayman Islands signed a tax information exchange agreement (TIEA) with the Netherlands on July 8. This brings the number of TIEAs signed by the Cayman Islands to 11, one short of the OECD’s requirement of 12 required to be recognised as being compliant with international requirements.

McKeeva Bush, the Cayman Islands’ new leader of government business and minister for financial services, has signed tax treaties with the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands since his election on May 20.

Bush’s government is in the advanced stages of negotiation with several countries, including Italy, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Canada.

There has been some indication that the OECD may look at the quality of the agreements rather than just the number in determining whether countries are removed from the grey list of those that have signed up to information exchange standards but have not implemented them.

“I realise there are some concerns being aired regarding the possibility of the OECD moving the goal post so to speak or that the stated number of 12 agreements may be changed. However based on the discussions I have had with OECD officials, this is highly unlikely,” said Bush.

Just a note to self…  To install fonts (in this example, the Arial family) on a Fedora system:

1. Log in as root
2. Change to the font storage directory:
   cd /usr/share/fonts
3. Create a subdirectory to hold the Arial family of fonts:
   mkdir arial
4. Copy the Arial fonts into that directory.
5. Make the font files accessible systemwide:
   chmod 0775 -R arial
6. Run fc-cache on the new directory to cache the new fonts:
   fc-cache arial

That should be it…

From Business Week:

In China, a Burst of Corporate Bonds

Thanks to streamlined regulations, more companies are issuing debt cheaply and fast
By Frederik Balfour

Hong Kong – Here’s a little-known fact: Chinese companies now issue more corporate debt than their counterparts in Japan, making the yuan-denominated bond market the world’s No. 3, after those for dollars and euros. In the first five months of 2009, mainland companies sold $82 billion worth of debt, vs. $51 billion for the Japanese. “The growth in issuance has been phenomenal,” says Liao Qiang, credit analyst at Standard & Poor’s (MHP) in Beijing.

Bond sales in China started to come to life when the mainland’s equity markets headed south in late 2007. As sellers parked their stock proceeds in deposit accounts, banks found themselves flush with money they couldn’t lend because of government limits on loans. To give banks somewhere to put their excess liquidity, regulators in April 2008 streamlined rules on bonds.

Before the changes, corporate bonds had to be listed on the stock exchange. That required approval by exchange regulators, which was costly, time-consuming, and subject to political whims. So most issues were enterprise bonds—money raised by state-owned companies to finance big infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam or new railways. These all had state guarantees and offered identical yields.

The new rules make things simpler. While all issues require a credit rating, they no longer need to be traded on the exchange. The market got an added jolt last September when Beijing halted new domestic stock offerings as Shanghai shares tumbled. That forced companies to look elsewhere for capital. And with interest rates down worldwide, bonds have become yet more appealing. In the first five months of 2009, corporate bonds accounted for 22% of all debt issued in China, including government debt, vs. 3% in 2007.

Corporate bonds will be crucial to Beijing’s efforts to make the yuan a global currency. For that to happen, the mainland’s capital markets need to be far more sophisticated and better integrated into the international financial system than they are today. “The government is pushing to make financial markets more broad-based and mature, and without debt you cannot say that is complete,” says Frank Gong, chief China economist at JPMorgan Chase (JPM).

More than 100 companies have issued bonds. The largest offering to date came in May when Agricultural Bank of China raised $7.3 billion, priced to yield 3.3% for five years, vs. 2.4% on government bonds. Billions more are in the pipeline, including issues by International Commerce Bank of China, Bank of Communications, and Bank of China.

“STILL QUITE THIN”
But for cash-starved private companies the market is still hard to penetrate. The minimum flotation is $141 million, and issuers must have a AAA or AA+ rating from one of the five domestic or joint-venture ratings agencies that have been licensed. That precludes all but a handful of private companies from participating, so more than 80% of bond issuers are state-linked companies. And because most purchasers of corporate debt hold it until maturity, bond trading after issuance is “still quite thin,” says Frances Cheung, fixed income strategist with Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong.

The bond market could get a further boost once Beijing opens up the market in “panda bonds”—yuan-denominated issues by foreigners. So far, the International Finance Corp. and Asian Development Bank are the only organizations that have issued panda bonds, although HSBC (HBC) and Bank of East Asia have been approved to sell them in Hong Kong. And later this year locally incorporated subsidiaries of foreign companies may be allowed to issue panda bonds on the mainland. Among the first will likely be London-based Standard Chartered, which aims to raise some $500 million to shore up its mainland balance sheet. Although stocks are climbing and IPOs are set to resume, “we’ll still see strong demand” for bonds, says Chris Zhou, director of debt capital markets at UBS Securities in Beijing. “The bond market is a relatively easy and cost effective way to get money.”

From Institutional Investor:

At the Market Deal for Bank of America

03 Jun 2009
Steve Rosenbush

BofA issues stock to withstand market volatility.

Raising $33.9 billion in capital is no mean feat for a bank, especially given the violent mood swings that have gripped the financial markets of late. Nonetheless, such were the marching orders that the Federal Reserve Board handed Bank of America on May 7, when the Fed announced the results of its stress test of 19 U.S. lenders. The financial giant sprang into action the very next day, announcing that it would reduce a big part of the capital deficiencies identified in the stress test by issuing $13.46 billion in equity.

The issue took an unconventional form. Instead of executing the deal in one fell swoop, as companies commonly do, BofA parceled out the shares over the next eight trading sessions. This piecemeal approach, pioneered more than 15 years ago by utilities and real estate investment trusts, which recapitalize frequently, is known as an at-the-market offering, or “dribble out.” The bank’s ATM was the largest in history.

BofA had determined that the structure made sense, given the volatile nature of the market. Its own shares — whipsawed, like those of many big banks, by investor fears over the health of the industry — had plunged 93.6 percent, from a 52-week high of $39.50 on September 19 to a low of $2.53 on February 20, before recovering somewhat. “In a volatile market, the ATM structure is beneficial because it allows you to sell shares when you like the price and leave the market when you don’t,” explains Lisa Carnoy, global co-head of equity capital markets at BofA, which was book runner on its own deal. “It was a perfect approach for us. We were able to minimize dilution and maximize flexibility.”

Demand for the shares was strong, according to Carnoy. In an ATM, the sale of a fixed amount of equity can be stretched out over a month or more, but the company decided to complete the sale on the eighth day, in a so-called cleanup trade. The shares, which had rallied in anticipation of the offering, closed at $14.17 on May 8, dipped to an issue low of $10.67 on May 15 and finished the offering on May 19 at $11.25. The bank sold 1.25 billion shares at an average price of $10.77.

“In this environment, the ATM is a flexible way to raise money. However, with the capital markets open, it made sense to get the equity offerings behind them,” says Jason Polun, a large-cap-bank analyst at T. Rowe Price, a major holder of BofA shares. Polun has a favorable view of the company. And many apparently agree. Hundreds of institutional investors, including pension funds and mutual funds, lined up to participate in the offering. “We could have kept selling, but we just decided to get it done,” Carnoy says.

An ATM structure helps maximize price, minimize dilution and maintain flexibility with respect to size and timing of a deal. In BofA’s case, timing mattered because it had to coordinate the issue with other components of its capital raising plan, including asset sales and conversion of preferred shares. By June 25 the effort was all but complete.

The case for the ATM was bolstered by the disappointing performance of more-traditional offerings, says Carnoy, citing secondary placements this year that have priced as much as 15 percent below where they launched. Morgan Stanley issued $4.5 billion worth of stock in a follow-on offering on May 8 at $24 a share, an 11.57 percent discount, according to research firm Dealogic. And on May 12, bank BB&T offered $1.75 billion worth of shares priced at $20, which Dealogic pegs at an 11.11 percent discount. By May 28, BB&T shares had gained 5.95 percent and Morgan Stanley was up 19.21 percent, according to Dealogic. “If the market happens to be down on the day that you initiate a secondary offering, you are simply out of luck,” Carnoy says. BB&T says it was pleased with the demand for the issue.

BofA’s success with its ATM has already inspired one bank to follow its lead. Fifth Third Bancorp announced on May 20 that it would issue as much as $750 million worth of stock and sell the shares “from time to time” using the structure. It has hired BofA and Morgan Stanley as co–book runners on the deal.