Pre 'Dark Side of the Moon', post 'Ummagumma' is by far the most interesting phase of the band, and also the most ignored. I'll go... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ZXFsAmGY0

For fantasy my favourite is Gene Wolfe's 'The Book of the New Sun' series. For SciFi, 'Dune' amd the 'Hyperion Cantos', also loved 'Cryptonomicon', but I'm not sure what genre that book falls into, 'nerdcore' maybe?

As anybody who knows day trading will tell you most traders trade at the start and the end of the day, but anyway I don't know for sure what the effect would be, nobody does.

>I think you are right about unintended consequences of a Tobin tax. I think it'd be more effective to simply put a minimum amount of time that you must hold any given asset. Trades are timestamped, so it would be easy. Even 1 hour would probably be an improvement.

Doing this would cause massive volatility, everybody would be stampeding in and out of assets at the same time. If you really want to stop HFT (which on the evidence available is actually nothing to do will the current market woes) you could simply make order cancellations more expensive, this would stop them all in their tracks. But I think this would solve nothing in the longer term.

>IMHO. It was too easy for Greek politicians to take the easy road when Germany's good credit was feeding their addiction. I really don't see the EU coming under one effective fiscal policy, and I think that is the only real solution. For that reason, I think the Euro is probably going to die.

Still seems like a political decision to me, the whole reason for the crises lunching from drama to drama is the refusal to let the euro die. But of course politicians would rather do any amount of damage than see their power bases eroded.

You put a tax on a financial market, liquidity drains out of the market as there is always a cheaper place to do business. What you end up with are thin markets with increased volatility and getting far less than you anticipated in tax return due to the lower participation rates caused by the introduction of the tax, plus probably putting a bunch of people out of work in the process. It solves nothing, transaction taxes would not have stopped the 2007/2008 fiasco either, it's not about the amount you regulate, it's about what you regulate. Euro-zone countries spending more than they make has nothing to do with financial markets and everything to do with short sited political decision making.

God forbid we actually try and fix the real problems behind the euro crises, tax those evil traders, that will fix it! This has been tried before, suffice it to say, there were 'unintended consequences'. Sarkozy is just trying to deflect attention away from his mismanagement of the French economy, anyone who thinks the same politicians who got the euro-zone into this mess know how to get it out need to get their heads examined. The markets make easy political scapegoats due to the general lack of understanding of what role they actually play.