Awww, yeah. What could be more appropriate on election day than a sequel to the original Keynes-Hayek rap battle?

Through a series of strange events, this afternoon I found myself at a job fair catering to MBA and Finance students. Let’s not dwell on how this came about, and let’s especially skip the uncomfortable part about being the only person in jeans and sneakers in a business formal conference hall. Errors were made. While I was there, though, I took a look around.

There was a good cross-section of government and consulting companies. The Treasury and State departments were there. So were Ernst & Young, Capitol One, IBM, Deloitte, Legg Mason, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Each of these booths was surrounded by sweaty students in business suits carrying resumes.

At one of the booths there was a large banner advertising for entry-level hedge fund associates. Current public opinion being what it is, there was no one clustering around the table to interview. This meant that their selection of swag was on full display.

Gentle reader, I cannot make this up. They had a big bowl of squeezable stress balls, each painted like the globe.

To be fair, I recognize that hedge funds are useful in the financial world, and if I ever end up as part of a successful start-up I guess it’ll be nice to have people wildly buying up our stock in bulk at the IPO. I’m sure that the vast majority of people involved in hedge funds are perfectly decent human beings who probably believe that their work is having a positive net impact on the world. Being neither an economist nor a financial analyst I’m not really in a position to intelligently argue with them on that last point.

But these guys have got to know how they’re perceived right now. Maybe tempting prospective employees with tiny worlds you can crush in your fist isn’t the best image to be projecting.

To prove that this actually happened, I went up to the booth, feigned an interest in algorithmic trading, and got my own little stress globe. It has the company logo branded across the North Pacific.

In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram¹ documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.

While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.

¹ Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.

The whole article’s good, but I especially love this point:

… economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth… the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Pointedly ignoring the differences between a beautifully abstract model and the messy underlying reality that it (supposedly) represents? Well I’ve certainly never been guilty of that particular intellectual sin.

This is something I’ve dreamed about for years. I never thought it would actually exist.