Wednesday, July 3, 2013

In Which I Become Cliff Clavin From Cheers

In the season eight (1990) Cheers episode "What is.... Cliff Clavin?" Cliff is a contestant on Jeopardy! and is greeted with the categories:

"Civil Servants" | "Stamps from Around the World" | "Mothers and Sons" | "Beer" | "Bar Trivia" | "Celibacy"

This made Cliff happy.

Today, FT Alphaville's Further Reading post included the links:
"WTI outperforms."
"The LME says it’s sorry it made it easier to hoard.
"The immortal life of Enron e-mails."
"The rise of real yields."
along with six others.

The first link is to our oil in backwardation post, the second concerns one of the most important yet obscure stories in commodities which we looked at most recently in Monday's "End Users Close to Telling LME, Warehouses: 'Go To Hell'", the third, regarding the “Enron e-mail corpus,” is something we posted on as early as 2009's "Fun With Enron Emails":
...Anyhoo, I was at Trampoline's Enron email database and remembered some of the finds that other people had unearthed:
RE: Lunch
This week is not good. I have too large a pile of documents to shred.
Next week is better. I suggest Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.
And again in 2012's "Fun With Enron Emails II (ENE, JPM)".

Finally, real yields are something we've been paying attention to since the compiler of the "Further Reading" list wrote one of smartest commodity articles I've ever seen in last December's "Capping the gold price" on the relationship between TIPS and gold. (five day's later gold topped at $1715, $1249 last)

"Alex, I'll take Izzy for the game." 

Here's Cliff:
(and here's the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions gameboard, double Jeopardy! round, Alex has a sense of humor)