6 Free Financial Modeling Lessons...and More.

Okay, maybe all of you knew this already, but it came as a shock to me.

I was browsing in a bookstore in Paris earlier today, and I came across the French version of The Wolf of Wall Street. On the book jacket there was a streamer that read, "Soon to be a major motion picture by Martin Scorsese."

So I came home and looked it up, and sure enough, he's got it in development for 2010 and it looks like Leonardo DiCaprio is slated to play Jordan Belfort.

I've always considered Belfort a total blowhard, so when he mentioned they were going to make a movie of the book, I took it with a huge grain of salt. Now I'm kinda pumped to see it. I think if anyone could make a great movie of the Stratton Oakmont story it would definitely be Scorsese.

The Swiss government is refusing to allow UBS to turn over client data to the IRS, and has threatened to seize the data themselves to protect client privacy and enforce Swiss banking secrecy laws:

http://in.reuters.com/article/fundsNews/idINL84973...

File this one under "My Kind of Guy".

A rogue trader is being blamed for the spike in crude oil prices this week after a massive amount of unauthorized trades drove the price up on Tuesday:

Nice.

If you're gonna be a bear, might as well be a grizzly bear.

Somebody's gotta pay. Sure ain't gonna be the banks.

In what is becoming a major case of he said, she said, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke today denied reports that he bullied Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis into the ill-advised purchase of Merrill Lynch:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_bernanke

This is interesting in that former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson admitted under subpoena in December that he was pressured by Bernanke to deliver the threat to Lewis. This is what Bernanke had to say about that:

What desks within S&T tend to be more qualitative and macro-focused at the same time? Currencies/FX? Credit?

I believe that I have a good understanding of how the markets move in accordance with different trends and government actions, etc. but high-level quant analysis or programming has never really interested me. I'm more about the cause & effect relationships and the intuitive side of how markets function..

UPDATE: Here is an excellent analysis of the situation, and what it has done to the U.S. dollar:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/55865...

By now, we've all heard about the two Japanese guys busted at the Italian border with $134 billion in counterfeit U.S. bonds. That is a staggering amount of money, and the authorities are thinking the Mafia is behind the whole thing. Here are the latest details:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/82091ec2-5c2f-11de-aea3-...

In and of itself, this is a blockbuster story that isn't getting much press. But when I came across this commentary, it really put things in a new light for me (definitely worth a quick read):