sub Initialize

  dim s as new NotesSession
  dim db as NotesDatabase
  dim c as NotesDocumentCollection
  dim doc as NotesDocument
  dim item as NotesItem

  set db = s.CurrentDatabase
  set c = db.UnprocessedDocuments
  set doc = c.getFirstDocument

  if doc.HasItem("Body") then
    set item = doc.GetFirstItem("Body")
    if item.Type = HTML then
      Call doc.PutInFolder("HTML Body Messages",true)
    end if
  end if

end Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

You've probably guessed that I wouldn't be asking if this code was safe if the answer was 'Yes', so can you see why the answer is really 'No'?

Today's news about Oracle buying Sun is certainly enough to wake me up. It's a bigger shake-up by far than it would have been if IBM had done it. This will re-shape business relationships throughout the IT industry. Judith Hurwitz has some interesting thoughts/speculations here.

Will Oracle make a move toward the consumer space? Perhaps with an acquisition in mobile technology? Palm?

What will happen to the recent Database Machine hardware alliance with HP? No idea..

Most important to the Lotus community, of course, is that Oracle will own Java. What will they do with it? How will this impact IBM's long-standing committment/devotion to Java? There are certainly other languages out there gaining in popularity on the web, but nothing near as ubiquitous in the industry as Java. With Oracle now in the hardware business for real, and possibly poised to go after a major acquisition in the services space, will IBM draw itself closer to Microsoft?

The next few years will be very, very interesting.

But when the credit crisis hit, and oil prices plummetted, I asked myself who was more likely to stop bidding on oil futures -- real users of oil, or highly leveraged speculators whose credit lines were dissolving. I once again started questioning the supply and demand explanation.

Now, according to a report on CBS's 60 Minutes, it seems that I was right in the first place. It was speculation.

This not to say that the supply and demand situation isn't changing. It is . This is not to say that demand in India in China hasn't gone up and won't continue to go up. It has and it will. There's still no question that the oil-consuming world will have to deal with this. But demand from India and China didn't cause ~$150/barrel oil this year.

First, there's a two-parter, starting with The End Of The Financial World As We Know It. With a title like that, I was hoping that part two would be called "And I Feel Fine", but it's really How To Repair A Broken Financial World. These articles are written by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, and you might recognize the former as the author of another very interesting article that came out several weeks ago called The End. The new series begins with the story of Harry Markopolis, who had been waving red flags in front of the SEC regarding Bernie Madoff for years, and the authors use this story to illiustrate their point: "What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it." and they then make the same point about the inherent problems throughout the financial system: that it wasn't necessarily that nobody saw warning signs. It's that nobody had incentive to do anything about the warning signs. Not regulators, ratings agencies, traders, executives, boards, stockholders, or investors -- not to mention elected officials.

The other article is just called Risk Mismanagement and it is about the use (or mis-use, or abuse... take your pick) of models that put a dollar figure, known as "VaR", on financial risk. It seems that this number started out as a useful 40,000-foot management tool with known limitations, but it took on a life of its own. It was a number, therefore it must be All-Important, right? Wrong! It was a number and a probability -- and the probability was 0.99, so if the number was X that meant that the model predicted that 99 times out of 100 the risk of loss from a firm's transactions was X or less. The fact that it was expected to be wrong 1% of the time was ignored, and there was never a second number for the multiple of X that might be lost in the 1 in 100 case. By putting too much faith in VaR, risk managers systematically ignored the worst risks, and then the Rand cum Greenspan philosophy that financial institutions are inherently better than regulators at understanding their own risk kicked in: VaR became the accepted formula for determining reserve requirements. That's despite the fact that VaR gave no information at all about the outlier scenarios in which reserves are critical to a financial institution! And to top it all off, the risks that the model considered didn't include the risk of a liquiditiy crisis so even if outliers were considered, the worst-case outlier would still not be accounted for.

Very interesting stuff.