LyrArc Article Gist
Ideas from experts for fixing the banking system with some big changes that make sense. None of these ideas from Stiglitz, Kotlikoff and others are making it into the financial reform bill in Congress.

LyrArc Article Gist
Isaac Tshuva, a immigrant from Libya in 1948 as an infant, makes a beginning in construction and builds a large stake in the Delek Group, Israel's second largest chain of gas stations. Investments by Delek Group in natural gas exploration pay off after many years leading to the finding of the Tamar and Dalit fields in 2009.

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Fabrice Tourre joined Goldman Sachs in 2001 right out of Stanford University. He worked in the mortgage securitization trading operation. Emails written by him are helping the SEC investigate whether Goldman knew but did not share with investors the way in which hedge fund John Paulson & Co. helped select the underlying mortgage backed assets he was going to bet against. One former SEC lawyer says, the SEC may be hoping that Fabrice Tourre, the 27 year old Frenchman who joined Goldman right out of Stanford University, would be easier to put pressure on to reveal what he knows and other fradulent transactions.

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Fred Brooks, IBM executive who led the development team for the IBM System/360 mainframe, is the author of Design of Design and of an earlier book Mythical Man-Month that sold 500,000 copies. His unique insights into completing large development projects have helped many tech companies. Brook's law from Mythical Man-Month is that it is futile to simply add engineers to projects in the hope of getting things done faster, as there are a lot of other factors to consider. This is stated by programmers as: "Adding manpower to a project only makes it later." The original design team has to bring newcomers up to speed, and the added distraction is one of the many factors that slow down the project. Brooks offers many new insights in the book Design for Design. One is that constraints are friends which help shrink the designer's search space. Another is that Design is a lot more about art as it is about science. Simply improving the process does not get you great design, it gets you from bad to average....

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Taiwanese engineer, William Wang, who earlier ran a failed computer monitor company Princeton Graphics, started Vizio in 2003 in Irvine, California. He started Vizio as a low priced brand with a focus on high tech HD sets and a supply chain in Taiwan to make HD sets at lower prices. He negotiated agreements with Foxconn and AmTran Technology giving them equity stakes in Vizio. Costco provided shelf space for the early HD sets. Vizio still manages to make 4% in operating margins on $2 billon in revenue with an efficient supply chain. Wang's insight was that televisions would go the way of PC's where lower prices were the norm. Sony Electronics U.S. Division chief, Stan Glasgow, says it is harder to charge premium prices as technology and improving quality rapidly converge in the television industry, similiar to what is happening in PC's. The story of Vizio at the low end, and S. Korean manufacturer Samsung at the high end, is also the story of the decline of Japanese companies in the television business. In 2010 after seven years Vizio passed Sony to become the second largest television brand in the U.S., with sales of 6 million LCD TV's. This is up from 3.6 million in 2008, according to research firm iSuppli....