Mortgages and Contract Innovation

In which Prof. Cochrane points out that the US mortgage market is an extremly artificial construct that exposes banks to trememdous risk, leading to the only entity being able to finance it being the US government. And of course, the effects on ever increasing housing prices and stunted innovation that comes from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

IBM, Design a new System/360

What we need is everything in one box, all the latest technology, and easy to scale up. Can IBM deliver? Probably not but we can dream.

It is beyond time for IBM to not only create a converged platform for its customers, but also beyond time for the company to create datacenter-scale infrastructure that can represent the future of enterprise computing. That was what I was talking about last week when I was lamenting the departure of Jim Whitehurst, formerly chief executive officer of Red Hat and formerly president of IBM. As the title of that story implies – Historical, Functional, And Relevant – if I had a wish, it would be to create a system that was integrated (meaning it has everything that customers need) and scalable (meaning it could span from a single-core system for deskside use in the smallest of companies all the way up to a full-blown datacenter). And when I say system, I mean system: Compute, network, and storage, and as much offload and processing in the network as possible and only applications on the server processors.