a blog about a lot of things

Pricing Football Transfers: The market is flawed Football transfers have been increasing the maximum asking price possible for a footballer since the beginning of the professional era in the early part of the last century. It is not expected that transfer prices would decrease since due to inflation the price of few things have decreased from the last century to now. However, football players exist in a market that has become increasingly flush with money due to revenues from television and the cost of a football player now is far in excess of what would be expected under inflation. Football transfer fees are difficult to estimate in terms of being a good deal because there is little that is sure. Football and form is fragile and a good player in the past is not guaranteed to be so in the future. Furthermore, young players frequently fall short of expectations. A football transfer has to capture the current worth of the player, the worth of the potential of the player (w...

The job market is, like every other market, affected by the laws of supply and demand. When I graduated in June 2010, the West Texas Intermediate WTI crude price was $81.25. That was the lowest value oil would be at until October 2014 when the slide in oil prices which had huge effects on several economies, such as Russia and Venezuela, began.   I have never worked in the oil and gas industry. It’s not from lack of trying.Working for an oil company allows regular travel opportunities and travel has always been a huge motivation for me. Nominally, according to my undergraduate degree, I’m an engineer (though I haven’t worked as one for almost three years). Oil companies have more demand for engineers than several other degree specializations, yet whilst the oil price stayed above $100 for the vast majority of my job search, I was continuously out of luck. However, I was not an exceptional graduate and was closer to the mid-level band of my graduating class than the upper pe...