Bruno Michel Iksil, as he has been named by the Washington Post, is French-born, based in London and worked for the Chief Investment Office which has been at the heart of the bank’s recent losses.

In his Bloomberg trading profile he reportedly compared himself to Jesus by saying he could ‘walk on water’. He is also nicknamed the ‘London Whale’ and the ‘White Whale’.

He graduated in engineering from the Ecole Centrale in Paris in 1991, and was brought into the CIO unit to head its credit desk, an asset class the unit had not previously covered.

Little else is known about the trader, who was the subject of a Wall Street Journal report last month which revealed his ‘bets’ were so large they could ‘move prices in markets worth trillions of dollars’.

Bloomberg also said his group of traders had a $200billion portfolio and made a staggering $5billion in profits in 2010.

Neither the bank or Iksil, who has not commented on the reports, have been accused of legal wrongdoing.
But critics of their alleged speculative trading have called for legislation to prevent government-insured banks taking big risks on the markets with their own money.
Today’s speculation came after the U.S.’s larges bank said yesterday it lost $2billion in the past six weeks in the trading portfolio designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money.

via JPMorgan Chase trader Bruno Michel Iksil ‘thought to be behind $2bn loss’ | Mail Online.

Wheel of Fortune Pamela Anderson Video

MAD TV Skit of Wheel of Fortune featuring the lovely Pamala Anderson as a Contestant, *DISCLAIMER* All credits go to MADtv, FOX, QDE Entertainment

via Hot Contestant on Wheel of Fortune.mpg – YouTube.

Consider:

•The SpaceX ship scheduled to launch May 19 from Cape Canaveral as the first privately financed cargo delivery vehicle to the International Space Station is powered not only by liquid fuel but by millions from PayPal mogul Elon Musk.

•Paul Allen, billionaire Microsoft co-founder, announced last year that his Stratolaunch Systems firm would build a jet with a 385-foot wingspan — longer than a football field — to launch light rockets from high altitudes into space. Allen funded aerospace designer Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004.

•Last month, X Prize foundation chief Peter Diamandis announced that Bellevue, Wash., start-up Planetary Resources plans to put vehicles into space to capture and mine minerals from near-Earth asteroids in about a decade. Its financiers hail from the ranks of America’s superwealthy, including Google tycoons Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film director James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) and Ross Perot Jr., the real-estate-developer son of the onetime presidential candidate.

“We’re now seeing a new generation of (hundred)-millionaires and billionaires who are interested in space,” space entrepreneur Diamandis says. “This is smart money investing in one of the largest commercial opportunities ever: going to space to gain resources for the benefit of humanity.”

via Billionaires back ambitious space projects – USATODAY.com.

Compared with older Americans, young adults were more than twice as likely to be underemployed and 50% more likely to be unemployed.

The 32% of 18- to 29-year-olds last month who were either unemployed or working part time but seeking full-time jobs was up 2 percentage points from March and marks the highest since May 2011. Gallup’s measurement is not seasonally adjusted.

For older Americans, April underemployment was 14.0% for those 30 to 49, 13.6% for 50- to 64-year-olds and 12.7% for those 65 and up.

In April, the unadjusted unemployment rate for young adults was 13.6% — the same as in April 2011 — compared with the overall rate of 8.3%. The March jobless figure for the 18-t0-29 group was 12.5%.

via Gallup: 1 in 3 young Americans underemployed in April.

Viral Video Stars Video

The “ROFL” in “ROFLCon” is an outdated web acronym — Rolling on the Floor Laughing — basically an old-timey way of saying “LOL.” ROFLCon uses it ironically. The vintage webspeak is characteristic of the event — a conference that is equally concerned with the past, present, and future of Internet culture. The two-day event, held at MIT last weekend, combined the best elements of a fan convention with a truly academic conference. Don’t let the goofy names of panels, like “Adventures in Aca-meme-ia,” fool you; the featured panelists and giddy audience members were all too eager to dive into serious discussion.

Inflation is explained beautifully in this info graphic from the now non-existent blog site mint.com.

I found this neat graphic on cracking credit card codes. It also shows you how to validate a credit card.

via mint.com/blog

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.

“I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,” said Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, which has been gathering data on the subject for 30 years.

Nearly 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the United States to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, double the number who did so a decade earlier. The number of Mexicans who moved to the United States during that period fell to less than half of the 3 million who came between 1995 and 2000.The trend could have major political consequences, underscoring the delicate dance by the Republican and Democratic parties as they struggle with immigration policies and court the increasingly important Latino vote.

via For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enter – The Washington Post.

Hotel Built in 6 Days

The Ark Hotel Video is copyright free. Please feel free to use it for any purpose.

via Ark Hotel Construction time lapse building 15 storeys in 2 days (48 hrs) – YouTube.