And you are here why?

I'll let CEPR just say this That's the question millions will be asking when they see the new paper   by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story about the relationship between debt and GDP growth than the one that Reinhart and Rogoff have been hawking. Just to remind folks, Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) are the authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises,   This Time is Different . They have also done several papers derived from this research, the main conclusion of which is that high ratios of debt to GDP lead to a long periods of slow growth. Their story line is that 90 percent is a cutoff line, with countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above this level seeing markedly slower growth than countries that have debt-to-GDP ratios below this lev...

You've all heard of The London Whale , right?  The dude(s) at J.P. Morgan's Chief Investment Office in London who managed to lose $6 Billion on botched investments ? The gory details on what happened are out, and they are dry - seriously dry - reading.  But there is one part that stands out - the role of spreadsheets in all this. From FT Alphaville - [...] the model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another[...] Yeah, you got that right.  Our Financial Overlords use Excel and copy/paste in their overlord-ian activites.  (We are so doomed) You pretty much know where this is leading, right? an operational error in the calculation of the relative changes ... [s]pecifically, after subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. Brilliant. Turns out that th...