Regulators, mount up

I came across an interesting tidbit today. Apparently, although Walmart is very strongly anti-union, it tends to support minimum wage laws and minimum wage increases. The theory is that Walmart competes on the fact that it has a better supply chain and better negotiating power than smaller competitors. Since wages make up a smaller part of Walmart's costs, higher employee salaries would hurt smaller shops more. So, Walmart lobbies for higher minimum wages in areas where it faces competition from smaller retailers.

I think this is an example of how even an otherwise well-functioning market can incentivize participants to break it. Can we really expect rational politicians to resist passing a law that both appeases the interest of large corporate donors and makes them look good to populist voters? How do you fix a situation in a capitalist democracy where everyone thinks it's a good idea to break the system, even though the average citizen will be worse off afterward?

Where are the important charts?

wikiInvest.com looks like a great site. It has lots of relatively well thought-out investing content, and, like many other sites (e.g., Google Finance) has stock charts that you can embed in your own web site. It also takes the concept a step further by allowing people to annotate the charts to try to explain price movements.

But why are there no embeddable charts for the really big markets? I'm talking about the $25 trillion dollar U.S. bond market for example - or the even the credit markets in general. Where's the yield curve I can put on my Google homepage, or the CDS spread widget that shows me how likely companies are to go bankrupt? These are huge markets, and even if they're not as sexy as equities, they have just as large of an impact on individuals' financial well-being.

MARB

Bloomberg is really an amazing piece of software. I have always been interested in learning about risk arbitrage, but Bloomberg's Merger Arbitrage screen ("MARB") makes it easy to narrow down my focus. Over the next few months, I'm going to try to run a test portfolio (portfauxlio?) focusing on the smaller deals that hopefully aren't as appealing to professional merger arb analysts.

Related reading: http://www.focusinvestor.com/MergerArb.pdf