Contabilidade da Alibaba investigada

O Alibaba, gigante chinês do comércio digital, está sendo investigado por órgãos reguladores americanos por causa de suas práticas contábeis.

A companhia, que representa cerca de 80% do e-commerce na China, revelou a investigação da SEC, órgão regulador do mercado americano, nesta quinta-feira. Segundo o Alibaba, os órgãos reguladores solicitaram documentos e informações relacionadas às práticas de consolidação de ganhos e transações, entre outras coisas.

A empresa alegou que está cooperando com as investigações e que foi orientada pela SEC a não interpretar a solicitação de documentos como um indicativo de violação de regras de segurança.

O Alibaba abriu seu capital nos Estados Unidos em setembro de 2014.

Fonte: Aqui

Preço das commmodities continuarão em baixa

Les matières premières ont fait le grand plongeon. Nul ne peut le nier. Reste à savoir combien de temps cette situation durera. « J’estime que les prix vont rester durablement déprimés, peut-être même jusqu’à la fin de la décennie », affirme Philippe Chalmin, professeur à l’université Paris-Dauphine et président de la société d’études Cyclope qui publie, mardi 24 mai, son rapport annuel sur l’état et les perspectives des marchés des matières premières.

« A la recherche des sommets perdus », le titre que s’est donné cet ouvrage collectif pour son édition 2016 donne bien la mesure des interrogations d’un secteur secoué par la brusque dégringolade des cours. Des décrochages quasi généralisés. Que ce soit le pétrole, bien sûr, avec un baril de brent qui a plongé sous la barre des 30 dollars (sous les 26 euros) en janvier. Qu’il s’agisse de la tonne de fer, tombée sous le seuil symbolique des 40 dollars en décembre 2015 ; ou celle du cuivre négociée à moins de 5 000 dollars. Sans oublier le prix du boisseau de maïs, inférieur pour sa part à 4 dollars.

Des points bas qui ne sont pas sans rappeler quelques souvenirs à M. Chalmin. Lorsqu’il a lancé Cyclope, en 1986, « les marchés mondiaux étaient en plein contre-choc, qu’il s’agisse du pétrole, des minéraux et métaux, des produits agricoles. Les matières premières passaient au second plan derrière l’explosion des marchés financiers puis l’apparition de la “nouvelle économie” que l’on imaginait totalement...

Fonte: aqui

Rir é o melhor remédio

Em tempos de digitação...

Claude Shannon, o pai da Teoria da Informação

[...]

As is sometimes the case with encyclopedias, the crisply worded entry didn’t quite do justice to its subject’s legacy. That humdrum phrase—“channel capacity”—refers to the maximum rate at which data can travel through a given medium without losing integrity. The Shannon limit, as it came to be known, is different for telephone wires than for fibre-optic cables, and, like absolute zero or the speed of light, it is devilishly hard to reach in the real world. But providing a means to compute this limit was perhaps the lesser of Shannon’s great breakthroughs. First and foremost, he introduced the notion that information could be quantified at all. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” his legendary paper from 1948, Shannon proposed that data should be measured in bits—discrete values of zero or one. (He gave credit for the word’s invention to his colleague John Tukey, at what was then Bell Telephone Laboratories, who coined it as a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.”)

“It would be cheesy to compare him to Einstein,” James Gleick, the author of “The Information,” told me, before submitting to temptation. “Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in the relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication. He’s one of these people who so transform the world that, after the transformation, the old world is forgotten.” That old world, Gleick said, treated information as “vague and unimportant,” as something to be relegated to “an information desk at the library.” The new world, Shannon’s world, exalted information; information was everywhere. “He created a whole field from scratch, from the brow of Zeus,” David Forney, an electrical engineer and adjunct professor at M.I.T., said. Almost immediately, the bit became a sensation: scientists tried to measure birdsong with bits, and human speech, and nerve impulses. (In 1956, Shannon wrote a disapproving editorial about this phenomenon, called “The Bandwagon.”)

Although Shannon worked largely with analog technology, he also has some claim as the father of the digital age, whose ancestral ideas date back not only to his 1948 paper but also to his master’s thesis, published a decade earlier. The thesis melded George Boole’s nineteenth-century Boolean algebra (based on the variables true and false, denoted by the binary one and zero) with the relays and switches of electronic circuitry. The computer scientist and sometime historian Herman Goldstine hyperbolically deemed it “one of the most important master’s theses ever written,” arguing that “it changed circuit design from an art to a science.” Neil Sloane, a retired Bell Labs mathematician as well as the co-editor of Shannon’s collected papers and the founder of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, agreed. “Of course, Shannon’s main work was in communication theory, without which we would still be waiting for telegrams,” Sloane said. But circuit design, he added, seemed to be Shannon’s great love. “He loved little machines. He loved the tinkering.”

[...]

Fonte: aqui

Dívida pública vai a 73% do PIB no fim de 2016

O governo do presidente interino Michel Temer estima que a dívida bruta encerrará o ano em 73,4% do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) ao fim deste ano, na esteira do histórico rombo primário nas contas públicas para o qual busca ganhar sinal verde do Congresso Nacional. Em 2015, a dívida bruta correspondeu a 66,5% do PIB.

Considerada o principal indicador da solvência de um país, a dívida pública bruta já estava em 67,3% do PIB em março, conforme dados mais recentes divulgados pelo Banco Central. A projeção de 73,4% consta em projeto de lei da nova meta fiscal, enviado nesta segunda-feira ao Legislativo.

Sem conseguir economizar para o pagamento de juros da dívida pública, o endividamento segue em alta. Sua evolução nos últimos anos é retrato da deterioração fiscal do Brasil, impactada, de um lado, por elevados gastos obrigatórios, e, de outro, por receitas em franco declínio por causa da recessão econômica.

[...]

Fonte: aqui

História da Teoria da Utilidade Esperada

É bom lembrar que a teoria da utilidade esperada não é muito útil pra modelar escolhas sob incerteza, apesar de muita gente achar que serve pra alguma coisa.


Resumo:

Expected utility theory dominated the economic analysis of individual decision-making under risk from the early 1950s to the 1990. Among the early supporters of the expected utility hypothesis in the von Neumann–Morgenstern version were Milton Friedman and Leonard Jimmie Savage, both based at the University of Chicago, and Jacob Marschak, a leading member of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. Paul Samuelson of MIT was initially a severe critic of expected utility theory. Between mid-April and early May 1950, Samuelson composed three papers in which he attacked von Neumann and Morgenstern's axiomatic system. By 1952, however, Samuelson had somewhat unexpectedly become a resolute supporter of the expected utility hypothesis. Why did Samuelson change his mind? Based on the correspondence between Samuelson, Savage, Marschak, and Friedman, this article reconstructs the joint intellectual journey that led Samuelson to accept expected utility theory and Savage to revise his motivations for supporting it.

Fonte: Moscati, Ivan. 2016. "Retrospectives: How Economists Came to Accept Expected Utility Theory: The Case of Samuelson and Savage." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(2): 219-36.

Coisas que pessoas muito e pouco privilegiadas dizem

“I don’t have a TV!”

“I never eat meat!”

“I walk ten miles a day!”

“My diet is making me lose a lot of weight!”

“I use my own waste to grow food!”

“My children aren’t vaccinated!”

“I have a very small carbon footprint!”

“I don’t vote — the system is too corrupt!”

Fonte: aqui