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Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, what did I do all these days?  Thursday, I do remember that I came home early, not feeling too well, after I spent the morning at work and the early afternoon at out-of-the-office meetings.  I slept for two hours, then did a bunch of work. Friday was a full day at work, with many meetings, and then staying late doing admin stuff. Frustration over my emails, which don’t blast out and faxes that don’t transmit. Amazing how something that normally takes five seconds to do will all of a sudden take 25 minutes. My colleague Arush and I headed out for some food, then down to Clarke Quay’s Home live house to hear some live music. We just caught the last one minute of one of the bands, then there was an interval, and Kegs came on. Declan is a blonde-headed chap who plays a groovy Manic Street Preachers-inspired set with great guitar intros and fun vibes. He’s got great chops and good stage presence, while the bass player and the drummer are very good too. Too bad that the stage setup means that you can’t see the drummer at all with the bassist standing right in front of him. The original songs were good, so were the new songs that they debuted/played for the second time live, and there were a few covers: a Manic Street Preachers song “Ocean Spray” from the 2001 “Know Your Enemy” CD, and “For Your Eyes Only”, the Sheena Easton song from the Bond film of the same name. Home is a pretty cheap place to drink beer, as a pitcher is only $22, so we had two of them. Spacedays were up next, starting off with their cool title track “We’re Spacedays”, before slipping into their other songs. Mamat did most of the vocals, and chugged away on his cool silver guitar that looks very Spacedays. While he seemed a bit stiff onstage, not really his goofy self from the old Pinholes performances I’ve seen, he did play some great, fluid solos, and even broke out the wah from time to time.  Great stuff. They had a short set, probably because they’re a new band and don’t have that many songs together yet (they told me later that they’ve got nine songs), but they also mentioned that they were totally starved and needed to get some food, ha ha. We bought the debut EP, released only the day before, and took a photo onstage, then hung out with the bands and the audience afterwards, then headed off to the subway to get home.

Spacedays live video!!

Kegs live video!!

Original song “Fan the Flames”

Manic Street Preachers’ “Ocean Spray”

Spacedays and we!!

There it is, my new GT-500, being turned on by my big hairy toe.

Burger King really knows how to make posters depicting people who really love their burgers.

The stupidest copy I’ve ever read before – is this some sort of a satanic message?  What world do these people live in?

CD, DVD, Movie and Book reviews:

Spacedays EP: “We Are Spacedays” – this is a band from my friend Mamat Mat, great guy, who used to be in a cool Singapore band called The Pinholes, a very cool band with a charismatic lead singer that Mamat used to play guitar while gracing us with his crazy and cool antics. Listening to these three guitar pop songs, it’s easy to hear a lot of Manic Street Preachers, some Big Star, and a little bit of Bowie, especially in the title track.  The band is a bit restrained and not really going crazy, but the songs are good fun. “All The Days” is a bit unenthusiastic, with languid vocals and a standard song structure, but a nice enough chorus. “Get Higher” is a boozy, poppy booster with droning vocals and a cool funky guitar riff. “We Are Spacedays” is just sweet wackiness, with Alladin Sane vocals and cool crunchy riffs.

Iron Man 2 – Zen and I were greatly looking forward to seeing this, since we had both enjoyed the first Iron Man so much. As is to be expected, this movie is not as good as the first, but for strange reasons: first of all, every single part of the plot is shown in the trailers, with the exception of the Nick Fury scenes, which are short anyway. There’s some choppy editing, a few crappy lines (in an otherwise good screenplay), and a totally non-interesting corporate villain played by Sam Rockwell, an otherwise fine actor who had played the geek/creep villain perfectly in Charlie’s Angels (in this movie, he was much more geek than creep). Jim Rhodes was not so fantastic – now why, exactly, did he turn the armour over to the military? Tony’s feud with Pepper Potts seems pointless, and the scientific discovery element of the movie was pretty corny. There was also not much Iron Man suit action in the film, and no real sense of a buildup. Mickey Rourke played creepy quite well, but his motivation with bringing down Iron Man is not clearly understood.

All of this would make it sound like I didn’t like the movie. It was still a lot of fun, and Jon Favreau was pretty good as Happy Hogan, and we see him do a bit of boxing and rough and tumble stuff with Scarlett Johanssen. The Pepper Potts thing is still a bit irritating – this isn’t the kind of thing that Gwyneth Paltrow should be so annoying in – but in the end its all in good fun. Perhaps the best part of the film were the scenes that Samuel Jackson is in, he gets the best lines and he’s way cooler than Robert Downey Jr. The other highlight of the film is the scene after all the closing credits, which is both funny (when seen in context of an earlier scene), and inspiring. Stick around for the close, and get a glimpse of that last split second.

I do find the many favourable reviews for this film puzzling. This cialis otc in canada seems to bend over backwards to find good things to say about it. I find the reader comments after the review much more honest.

Where the Wild Things Are – In one way, adapting Where The Wild Things Are, the classic children’s book, should have been easy – adults everywhere have vivid images of the amazing Wild Things, and designing clever suits in Hollywood could instantly bring them to life. But then again, there isn’t much story to work with considering that this is only a 37-page book, of which 21 pages contain text (in some cases only phrases, not full sentences, the shortest of which being “… and grew…”). Of course, there is an opportunity to explain a bit of back story – some reasons as to why, on that day, Max put on his wolf suit and got up to mischief of one kind and another.

Greater mysteries arise when Max arrives on the island of the Wild Things and the movie swerves unmistakably into Dave Eggers territory, the author of the vain and preposterously-titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, who creates reindeer games for the film’s vain and preposterous wild things to play. Sure, it’s fun hearing the voice of Tony Soprano coming out of head Wild Thing Carol, but the kids won’t get that, and I don’t even think they’d enjoy this film since there’s so little real fun in it. Halfway through the movie, you get the sinking feeling that it’s going to be a dull flick, and the visual style, aptly described by Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com as “depressive and shaggy and tired” means there’s little to do after the film ends but turn the TV off and silently go of to sleep.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil DVD – For those who love Anvil for those that love the Anvil movie, there’s nothing like owning a copy signed by Lips and Robb.  I’ve cialis 40 mg vs 20 mg, but the DVD does offer a few interesting tidbits, the most “interesting” (not sure that’s the right word) is the full interview with Lars, where we see what director Sacha Gervasi had to go through to get a soundbite out of rock’s most eager interviewee (this guy can talk and talk and talk).

Other extras are three deleted scenes (“Children’s Catering”, “Former Band Members”, “Lips’ Brother”) and a scene of Sacha drumming with the band’s performance of “School Love” in Japan. Of the deleted scenes, “Former Band Members” should have been in the film, as it interviews two of the five ex-Anvil guitarists and bassists. INterviewed is Dave “Squirrelly” Allison, a formerly skinny metalhead who’s turned into a middle-aged Canadian hoser with a mullet, baseball cap and mustache driving a pickup and chilling out at his cottage up north. More interesting is former bass player Ian “Dix” Dickson, who was a handsome Steve Harris-type young metaller who has turned into a successful artisan/goth/lutist with a home arts and crafts studio. Drinks his coffee from a cool skull mug.

The “Children’s Catering” scene is extended out of scenes that are in the movie, the most part of it shows Lips driving to work, talking about his life and the jobs he’s had (delivering flowers, delivering fish), his aborted studies in cinematography, the end of a fifteen year relationship chronicled on the “Worth the Weight” album, a.k.a. the death album (death of Robb’s father, death of Lips’ marriage, flower deliveries to funeral homes where he saw his first dead bodies, etc.). That is also the theme of the segment Lips’ brother Jeffrey, who has been diagnosed with a neural degenerative disease and only has a short time left. The clip shows Lips with siblings Jeffrey, Gary and Rhonda in Birmingham, Alabama, it is a very sad, private moment.

How To Train Your Dragon – A good fun movie for the kids that describes the sassy young Hiccup, and how he cracks the secret of the dragons that regularly attack his Viking village.  Yes, they’re Vikings, but they speak with Scottish accents… except for Hiccup, who has an American accent.  And why not?  The Vikings admired the Scots and the Americans, didn’t they?

The most interesting part of the story is what Hiccup does when the warriors are away chasing dragons. He goes into dragonfighting training, where brute power is more important than anything else. Hiccup doesn’t have much of that, but he’s smart and eventually figures out what makes dragons tick. One of the more interesting elements is how he manages to turn all of the tough kids in school, the ones who were once scornful of his wimpiness, into his biggest fans once they see that he’s figured out how to turn ferocious dragons into pussycats. He also manages to down train one of them, proving that all dragons just want to be tamed.

The less interesting part of the movie is at the end, when the obligatory “big bang ending” is sort of tacked onto the end. But by then we’ve already fallen in love with the movie and its vaguely Ghibli studio-esque characters (see Nausicaa for some reference).

Post-Crisis Risk Management, by Oyama Tsuyoshi – Mr Oyama is a great friend of mine, having met him through my company, The Asian Banker, at various company events. He was looking for a publisher some time ago for a book that he had written in Japanese on the recent financial crisis, and had told a colleague of mine that he was thinking of translating it himself for an English audience. I told him about the great people at John Wiley & Sons who had published my book, Asia’s Banking CEOs, and in no time there was a new book in the shelves – Post-Crisis Risk Management – to give an Asian perspective to the recent financial crisis. Mr Oyama is an amazing person, having worked for 20 years at the Bank of Japan as the deputy director-general in Financial System and Bank Examinations, he’s also worked with the Japanese banks’ nonperforming loans problem, Basel II risk management standards implementation for Japanese banks, and has worked in global bodies such as the Basel Committee on Bank supervision, the International Monetary Fund and the Global Association of Risk Professionals. What’s remarkable about Mr Oyama is not just his great expertise in risk management, but his exceptional ability to communicate it in English. In fact, I’d say that he speaks more eloquently than nearly any native English speaker that I know. This eloquence shines through in his book, which is imminently readable, which sentence-by-sentence contains universes of boiled-down wisdom. The book is relatively slim, covering a great deal of territory over its 188 pages, which are followed by six pages of references to works cited, and a four-page index.

Just reading Oyama’s table of contents is a clear run-down through the key issues in the current financial crisis, from its seeds (the pre-crisis summer of 2007, 2007, and the full-fledged crisis in mid-late 2008), an overview of its elements, reactions by governments and regulators, issues that set this crisis apart from others, reform of the risk management regime for banks, the Japanese and Asian perspective to the financial crisis, and a new conclusion that highlights significant post-crisis risk management issues. Early in the book he inspects lessons learned from the crisis that his country’s banks had gone through over a decade earlier, noting that high real estate prices had been the cause of both crises; but while attempts were made to solve the earlier bubble by introducing securitised products, the outcome was the same, if not amplified. “It is indeed an irony to note that lessons the system learned from the previous crisis have now caused another.” Lessons learned are a priority, and a raison d’etre for the book, since fixing the problems now would lessen the impact of the next crisis. One of these lessons is solving the problem of information asymmetry, w hich, as we’ve learned from the case of Goldman Sachs creating investment products for John Paulson, is at the heart of how Wall Street works. Information sharing is counter to capitalist principles, no matter what people might pretend otherwise. But in the lead-up to the crisis with it many years of steady property-linked growth, the information asymmetry became less of a concern as there rose an overconfidence in the various risk management techniques used to counter this information asymmetry, and Oyama feels that the basics of risk management were forgotten easily. Model risk was often ignored, and there was an over-reliance on calculating value at risk, without thinking any further.

But Oyama also notes the difficulty of management of top banks to understand the scope of their businesses, and when UBS gave a unit called Dillon Read Capital Management, which specialised in alternative investments, a great deal of authority within the organisation, it seems that the existence of such an important and complex business that clearly operated outside of upper management understanding of the kind of risk such an institution could take actually pushed the limits of what a company can manage under one roof, as the business nearly sunk the company. A similar case can be made for AIA, which profitably underwrote credit default swaps until the size of the business it was doing collapsed over it. The situation made a mockery of institutions that employed PhDs and were supposedly good at risk management, even earning high qualifications under Basel II only months before their companies were shamed by risk management deficiencies brought on by the financial crisis.

Again and again Oyama comes back to information sharing, which includes the information sharing of bank solvency issues between central banks and regulatory agencies, the lack of which was evidenced in the Northern Rock problem in the UK when the Bank of England and the FSA suffered from communication breakdown. It raises the question of whether a bank and its regulator should be kept under one roof, whether they should work in tandem, or whether they may be separated. Data and information does seem to be at the core of everything in this book, and Oyama makes an interesting point about identifying visible risks and “invisible risks” that cannot be statistically measured (also known as “Knight’s uncertainty”). While top US and EU banks may be good at managing visible risks through analysis, Japanese and Asian banks have a conservative culture and have stayed away from activities that could contain invisible risks, or whose potential upside they could not understand or believe.

But Oyama also asks important questions about the role of the regulators themselves – instead of asking banks to build up buffers, what kinds of buffers are they themselves building up to prepare for the crises that they know will come? This is perhaps playing the devil’s advocate, which Oyama does well, as regulators should not be bank managers, and vice versa. He also advocates better market infrastructures that increase information quality and expand risk tradability, starting from the establish a framework to motivate third parties, such as ratings agencies, to increase the quality of their risk assessments, clarify the definition of fair value accounting, while also increasing the disclosure of risk information. There would also need to be a greater sharing of information between major global regulators, such as those of Japan and western countries, a problem compounded by both language issues and budget constraints. Oyama can well testify to this, being one of the few Bank of Japan staff who is comfortable speaking English, and also one who travelled constantly to promote the cause of greater information sharing and better bank risk management.

Complaints about the book are generally few. I feel the index could have been a bit beefier, and the book does feel a bit dated – sure, any book on a crisis cannot be fully current, but the fact that this is a translation of an earlier piece extends the dating one generation. Even as I read his words, I often wonder what he would have added about things that had happened after January 2008, which seems to have been the cutoff point of his original work; January 2008 seems like a million years ago, and a lot has happened since. But no matter – there’s always room for a Post-Post-Crisis Risk Management.

No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos -

While the title of the book makes you think “teen angst” and the book’s choice of cover image that makes you think “Jack the Ripper”, you’d be surprised to learn that this is a book about the Securities Exchange Commission (yes, that’s right – the not-so-dreaded SEC). The book follows the mildly eccentric tale of the mildly eccentric Harry Markopolos, briefly and intermittently describing his journey through life, but getting quickly into the meat of how he set his sights on Bernie Madoff, first to try to replicate his gains and then, when the case flummoxed him, to prove that he was a fraud, and finally to prove that he was running a Ponzi scheme. Thinking that he needed help from some bigger guns, ie figures of authority with the power to do something to right the situation, Markopolos eventually went to the SEC to see if they could be interested in bringing a fraud to justice, but encountered resistance every time. And so, somewhere around the mid-way mark, Markopolos’ book becomes less a book about the evils of Bernie Madoff, and becomes a book about the evils of the SEC.

The book is interesting, funny, upbeat, and at times emotional, as Markoplos talks about friends and colleagues who didn’t make it – struck down by cancer, or who took their lives with their own hands – and those that nearly didn’t make it, like the colleague who had a disastrous yachting expedition with an inexperienced Russian first mate. He talks very little about the investors in the fraud, but explains carefully how he analysed the fund and could come to no other conclusion than it was a fraud. Then he explains it again. Then he explains how someone else had a theory that backed up his. Then he explains again how he checked his numbers. And then he tells about how he found supporting evidence. And then some more supporting evidence. Eventually you see see that it’s elementary, Dear Watson.

The book does get a bit weird at times, like when he explains how he feared for his life (is he imagining things? or is he underplaying the threat of some desperate people? He also mentions how he’s a germophobe who wiped down his keyboard with rubbing alcohol the day he left his job at an investment fund. Well, that was just a bit too much information.

Markopolos peppers his book with jokes, including the very apt one about life in investment banking which talks about the hunters who encounter a bear: one of them starts to run, knowing that he doesn’t need to outrun the bear – he just needs to outrun his companion. But some of his jokes begin to get tired after a while, and one page after he tells the bear joke he’s already telling the one about the guy (in this case a SEC investigator) who can only count to 21 if he takes his pants off. Jokes at the SEC’s expense fly fast and furious, and after a while we get a torrent of them “they couldn’t even catch a cold in the winter”, “they couldn’t spot the ocean from the shore”, “they couldn’t find the haystack that surrounds the needle that’s in the haystack”, etc.

One of the stranger anecdotes happens in a meeting with an SEC examiner, who broke down sobbing when she realised that heeding Markopolos’ earliest reports to the SEC could have stopped Madoff when his fund was only at $3 billion.

Markopolos ends his book with an epilogue that goes through fifteen wicked steps needed in order to turn the SEC into an effective regulator, the eleventh of which is to encourage whistleblowers, which he calculates to be 13 times more effective than regular SEC examiners. Of course, there’s some self interest here, as Markopolos is now a committed full-time professional whistleblower himself.

Markopolos takes apart the dysfunctional regulatory system in the US, which includes five separate units, each with their own politics, priorities, databases and information silos, where underpaid staff are easily hoodwinked by well-paid individuals who have been trained in diversion tactics and are usually much smarter than them who work at institutions that have been branded as too big to fail. Markopolos illustrates this with the point that “if the SEC can’t coordinate two examinations within its own agency, there is little reason to believe that five separate agencies can successfully coordinate their examinations.”

By the end he is scathing in his criticism of the SEC, and by now the book is barely about Madoff at all. That was all just a ruse, the book has graduated to bring about a much bigger message, which is about bringing to justice the people who shelter the bad people and allow them to steal the money from innocent people like you and me. And now we do see the SEC trying to do something, by taking on one of the biggest names of them all – Goldman Sachs. Of course, it may be too little too late, but it does show a regulator finally beginning to take its job seriously, now that it has a president behind it. But how long will that atmosphere last?

Click here to see a video report on Harry Markopolos.

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