The 2007-09 financial crisis and bank opaqueness

Doubts about the accuracy with which outside investors can assess a banking firm’s value motivate many government interventions in the banking market. The recent financial crisis has reinforced concerns about the possibility that banks are unusually opaque. Yet the empirical evidence, thus far, is mixed. This paper examines the trading characteristics of bank shares over the period from January 1990 through September 2009. We find that bank share trading exhibits sharply different features before vs. during the crisis. Until mid-2007, large (NYSE-traded) banking firms appear to be no more opaque than a set of control firms, and smaller (NASD-traded) banks are, at most, slightly more opaque. During the crisis, however, both large and small banking firms exhibit a sharp increase in opacity, consistent with the policy interventions implemented at the time. Although portfolio composition is significantly related to market microstructure variables, no specific asset category(s) stand out as particularly important in determining bank opacity.Banks and banking ; Stock market ; Financial crises

A 100-MIPS GaAs asynchronous microprocessor

The authors describe how they ported an asynchronous microprocessor previously implemented in CMOS to gallium arsenide, using a technology-independent asynchronous design technique. They introduce new circuits including a sense-amplifier, a completion detection circuit, and a general circuit structure for operators specified by production rules. The authors used and tested these circuits in a variety of designs

Market evidence on the opaqueness of banking firms' assets.

We assess the market microstructure properties of U.S. banking firms' equity, to determine whether they exhibit more or less evidence of asset opaqueness than similar-sized nonbanking firms. The evidence strongly indicates that large banks (traded on NASDAQ) trade much less frequently despite microstructure characteristics. Problem (noncurrent) loans tend to raise the frequency with which the bank's equity trades, as well as the equity's return volatility. The implications for regulatory policy and future market microstructure research are discussed.Bank stocks ; Bank assets

Linear scaling computation of the Fock matrix. IX. Parallel computation of the Coulomb matrix

We present parallelization of a quantum-chemical tree-code [J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 106}, 5526 (1997)] for linear scaling computation of the Coulomb matrix. Equal time partition [J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 118}, 9128 (2003)] is used to load balance computation of the Coulomb matrix. Equal time partition is a measurement based algorithm for domain decomposition that exploits small variation of the density between self-consistent-field cycles to achieve load balance. Efficiency of the equal time partition is illustrated by several tests involving both finite and periodic systems. It is found that equal time partition is able to deliver 91 -- 98 % efficiency with 128 processors in the most time consuming part of the Coulomb matrix calculation. The current parallel quantum chemical tree code is able to deliver 63 -- 81% overall efficiency on 128 processors with fine grained parallelism (less than two heavy atoms per processor).Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure