Posted by Bradley in : financial regulation ,
On Friday I will be at a conference at the College of Law of the University of Iowa on the topic:
Global Meltdown: Examining the Worst Global Financial and Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression. I'll be talking about the regulation of credit rating agencies, presenting a
paper with the title: Rhetoric and the Regulation of the Global Financial Markets in a Time of Crisis: the Regulation of Credit Ratings.
Posted by Bradley in : gender ,
I have been reading about
"digital moms":
Digital moms are multidimensional in their online behaviors, and their interests extend beyond parenting. Digital moms are more likely to connect with friends than with family using digital technologies, and they are not afraid to seek advice or companionship from known or anonymous friends. Additionally, interests like Clothing/Fashion and Cooking/Food remain the most popular, and consistently so, regardless of a woman’s age; while other category interests like Baby/Parenting, Telecommunications, Medication/Medical Condition are lifestage-oriented and change as their children grow.
Multidimensional, and with interests which "extend beyond parenting" - really ?? What about the transnational financial crisis and financial regulation? Don't we want to know about that? I suppose it's not relevant as it doesn't help with marketing stuff. Or maybe the focus comes from the "survey group":
To investigate these topics, CafeMom recruited a random sample of CafeMom active members to take an in-depth survey. The study was fielded in October, 2008. Insight Express programmed the CafeMom created questionnaire and captured the responses. Key findings are based on the 1,740 CafeMom members who completed the survey. Actual CafeMom.com social network usage data was then appended to each member’s survey responses; the survey data and online behavioral information were used to create and validate a segmentation analysis.
I guess if you choose to run a survey through a
website which defines itself as follows you might end up with the results they got:
CafeMom is a place for moms and moms-to-be to connect with one another. We invite you to take a look around CafeMom and join the moms who are already sharing, supporting, and having fun with one another at CafeMom.
I only saw this because it arrived in my mailbox as part of
SIFMA's SmartBrief.
Posted by Bradley in : food ,
Although the EU is
concerned about animal welfare, that won't stop financial aid to reindeer slaughterers in Norway (a member of the EEA, not the EU). The EFTA Surveillance Authority
recently said that such aid wouldn't constitute unlawful state aid under the EEA Agreement:
Reindeers and products processed from reindeers, in so far as they do not fall under Chapters 25 to 97 of the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) or are specified in Protocol 3 to the EEA Agreement, fall outside the general scope of the application of the Agreement.
Posted by Bradley in : gender ,
Via
feminist law professors I just read about
a study of underarm sweat - it seems that male underarm sweat smells like cheese and female sweat smells like onions, and the independent smell assessors (a job I don't think I'd like to have) liked the cheesy smell better. We can't even get that one right. But really - how do we know the smell assessors were really independent ? Perhaps they suffered from a pro-cheese bias.
Posted by Bradley in : consultation ,
Now that keeping money under the mattress is looking like a sensible financial strategy, the EU Commission is
consulting on ensuring access for Europeans to a basic bank account.
Posted by Bradley in : consumers ,
In a
speech the other day, Luis Aguilar of the SEC argued for greater representation of consumers' interests in the rule-making process (which is
one of my preoccupations):
A complementary proposal is the formation of a federal advisory committee to make recommendations for improving retail investor participation in Commission business and for improving the usefulness to retail investors of Commission rules. As we seek to improve our regulatory process and adopt better rules, I think it is important to provide retail investors with an active voice in our policymaking, since much of what we do often affects retail investors who do not routinely have contact with members of the Commission or its staff, too often do not submit comment letters, may not be well-versed in the securities or administrative laws, and may not effectively be represented by industry groups. Establishing a federal advisory committee under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (or FACA) consisting mostly of retail investors to provide advice and guidance on our rules and on our ways of interacting with these investors could be very useful. I believe direct retail investor input would be helpful toward restoring the confidence of retail investors in the SEC — they can again know that we work for them and are their advocate. Such a committee also could play a key role in our efforts to address issues of importance to retail investors and provide a useful forum for their views to be more effectively incorporated into the Commission’s work.