Merrill Lynch Japan Internship

My former student, Takuji Okubo, is now chief economist at Merrill Lynch Tokyo. We have arranged for one student from the ITFD M.Sc. to complete an internship in his division in the summer of 2009. Tak wrote a thesis on "negative bubbles" -- the idea that big deviations from fundamental asset prices could just as well be negative as positive, and the way to detect these statistically. He applied this methodology to East Asian currencies in the late 1990s. Let's hope the incoming intern doesn't have to do analysis on negative bubbles in world stock and bond markets...