The development of contingency clauses: appraisal and implications for financial stability.

The sustained growth in corporate debt over the past decade has led to an increasingly widespread use of contingency clauses. These clauses, also known as “triggers”, are written into bond issue contracts or bank loan agreements, and aim to facilitate borrowers’ access to financing by offering a certain degree of protection to creditors. They result in a tightening of the company’s borrowing conditions (for example an increment in the coupon or an early repayment), should its financial situation deteriorate. These clauses may have significant effects on the functioning of financial markets. First, because they complicate both credit risk analysis and the valuation process of debt securities with such triggers embedded. Second, because they complicate credit rating agencies’ task of rating debt-security issuers. And lastly, because their triggering could result in the opposite effect to that sought, that is to say, instead of protecting the creditor, they may cause a sharp deterioration in the borrower’s financial position. At the same time, they may also result in a series of destabilising effects for financial markets, exacerbated by the fact that investors are often unaware of their existence. While these clauses must be used with caution by borrowers, adequate transparency is also essential so that rating agencies, analysts and investors might fully understand their potential effects.

Power Laws are Logarithmic Boltzmann Laws

Multiplicative random processes in (not necessaryly equilibrium or steady state) stochastic systems with many degrees of freedom lead to Boltzmann distributions when the dynamics is expressed in terms of the logarithm of the normalized elementary variables. In terms of the original variables this gives a power-law distribution. This mechanism implies certain relations between the constraints of the system, the power of the distribution and the dispersion law of the fluctuations. These predictions are validated by Monte Carlo simulations and experimental data. We speculate that stochastic multiplicative dynamics might be the natural origin for the emergence of criticality and scale hierarchies without fine-tuning.Comment: latex, 9 pages with 3 figure

Spontaneous Scaling Emergence in Generic Stochastic Systems

We extend a generic class of systems which have previously been shown to spontaneously develop scaling (power law) distributions of their elementary degrees of freedom. While the previous systems were linear and exploded exponentially for certain parameter ranges, the new systems fulfill nonlinear time evolution equations similar to the ones encountered in Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking (SSB) dynamics and evolve spontaneously towards "fixed trajectories" indexed by the average value of their degrees of freedom (which corresponds to the SSB order parameter). The "fixed trajectories" dynamics evolves on the edge between explosion and collapse/extinction. The systems present power laws with exponents which in a wide range ($\alpha < -2.$) are universally determined by the ratio between the minimal and the average values of the degrees of freedom. The time fluctuations are governed by Levy distributions of corresponding power. For exponents $\alpha > -2$ there is no "thermodynamic limit" and the fluctuations are dominated by a few, largest degrees of freedom which leads to macroscopic fluctuations, chaos and bursts/intermitency.Comment: latex, 11 page

"Profits: The Views of Jerome Levy and Michal Kalecki"

Profits are the incentive for production and therefore employment in almost all of the world's economies; they also may represent exploitation of workers and consumers. Jerome Levy, using a complex process, derived the profits identity during the years 1908-1914. Michal Kalecki, taking advantage of the development of national accounting, derived it in the 1930s. Levy viewed the equation as a tool for developing policies that would enable capitalist economies to achieve high rates of employment. Recent American experience gives weight to his views. Kalecki's insights from the identity strengthened his belief that unemployment was inescapable under capitalism. He would find empirical support in Europe's high unemployment rates during the past two decades.

"The Economics of Aging, Can We Afford Grandma and Grandpa?"

Levy presents a preliminary study of the consumption patterns of retirees and nonretirees during the 1980s, paying particular attention to the distribution of the national consumer product. The consumer product increased in aggregate size during the period, but the retirees' portion of it grew four times faster than the working households' share. Indeed, the standard of living for much of the working population declined. Levy finds that the incremental portion of the "economic pie" absorbed by retirees is tantamount to a "tax" on nonretirees that falls most heavily on lower-income people. Although analysts anticipate a peak in the proportion of retirees to workers in the population around the year 2025, Levy asserts that problems created by this situation are, to a serous degree, already present. He recommends raising the retirement age and encouraging retirees to engage in public service activities. He believes, however, that the fundamental issue in enlarging the economic pie for everyone is unemployment. Levy cites as results of unemployment the increasingly common early retirement programs and the unwillingness of employers to undertake the costs of training older workers. He also contrasts the policies of the early postwar era that emphasized economic growth and enterprise with contemporary policies that are influenced by the interests of retirees in preserving their income and wealth.

Profits: The Views of Jerome Levy and Michal Kalecki

Profits are the incentive for production and therefore employment in almost all of the world's economies; they also may represent exploitation of workers and consumers. Jerome Levy, using a complex process, derived the profits identity during the years 1908–1914. Michal Kalecki, taking advantage of the development of national accounting, derived it in the 1930s. Levy viewed the equation as a tool for developing policies that would enable capitalist economies to achieve high rates of employment. Recent American experience gives weight to his views. Kalecki's insights from the identity strengthened his belief that unemployment was inescapable under capitalism. He would find empirical support in Europe's high unemployment rates during the past two decades.

Multi-feed cone Cassegrain antenna Patent

Design and operation of multi-feed cone Cassegrain antenn

Applying Bag of System Calls for Anomalous Behavior Detection of Applications in Linux Containers

In this paper, we present the results of using bags of system calls for learning the behavior of Linux containers for use in anomaly-detection based intrusion detection system. By using system calls of the containers monitored from the host kernel for anomaly detection, the system does not require any prior knowledge of the container nature, neither does it require altering the container or the host kernel.Comment: Published version available on IEEE Xplore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7414047/) arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1611.0305

Recent Trends in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Coverage: Are Bad Jobs Getting Worse?

employer-sponsored health insurance