Most consumers don’t think to themselves “I expect rates vol to rise in the future, so I’d better be long gamma right now.”

This is an economic structure that doesn’t particularly make sense: Fannie and Freddie are in the business of using the government’s implicit guarantee as a source of cheap capital; they borrow cheaply and lend not-so-cheaply, and pocket the difference — or used to. Now, the US Treasury pockets the difference. So, economically, what happens is that the US government issues debt, buys mortgages, and turns a profit on the gap. As far as anyone knows, the reason the deal’s legal structure doesn’t match that accounting structure is that Fannie and Freddie have a lot of debt, and the government doesn’t want to consolidate it on their balance sheet. So Fannie and Freddie are a highly-levered off-balance-sheet structured credit play.

Proponents of the GSEs note that while the GSEs wrote their assets down to the point of insolvency during the crisis, realized losses were lower; they wrote stuff back up eventually. But that’s an appallingly irresponsible argument. Anyone can make money on levered bets if the loans never get called in. Here’s a surefire strategy: lever up 20 to 1 in equity index futures. When you get a margin call, let it go to voicemail.

A obvious conclusion here is that, even among those who respond to my twitter polls, a substantial fraction have set hair-triggers for offense. For example, it seems >20% say merely asking if the world would have been better off if Nazis had won justifies a high enough chance of a Nazi author to be offensive. Explicit denials may help, but if the offended are much more vocal than are others, a vocal choir of objection seems largely inevitable.

In Infanrix Hexa we found

chemical contamination from the manufacturing process or cross-contamination with other manufacturing lines; chemical toxins; bacterial peptide toxins; insoluble and indigestible macromolecule that reacts to the protein assay, but cannot be recognized by any protein databases.

We have not found:

Protein antigens of diphtheria toxoids, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, haemophylus influenzae B, Poliomyelitis 1-2-3;

Formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde, phenoxyethanol, antibiotic residues indicated in the composition;