Welcome to the investment grade version of the 66th edition of the Cavalcade of Risk and also to Political Calculations!

For those of you who are regular blog carnival goers, but perhaps haven't encountered us previously, we're the permanent home of On the Moneyed Midways. Each week, usually on either Friday or Saturday, we present the best posts we find in the best of each week's money and business-related blog carnivals, selecting one as being The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere! The best way to think of OMM is as being your one-stop access point for all worthwhile business and money-related blog carnival reading!

In short, we have lots of experience in reviewing and rating hundreds of blog posts on a weekly basis. In fact, just for the Cavalcade of Risk, we've created a carnival blog post rating guide to distinguish the good contributions from the okay ones and especially from the just plain awful ones. The table below presents the system we came up with, which is pretty similar to those bond rating systems used to communicate financial risk to investors:

Blog Post Rating System for Blog Carnivals
Topicality [Capital Letter]	Information Quality [Small Letter]	Readability [Number]
A - Fully On Topic B - Related Topic C - Way Off Topic D - Spam	a - Makes You Smarter b - Makes You Informed c - Makes You Stupider	1 - Highly Readable 2 - Average Quality 3 - Potentially Painful

So, in using this system, a post with the ranking Aa1 is one that is fully on topic, will make you smarter and is highly readable. By contrast, reading a post with the ranking Dc3 would be like splashing acid in your eyes and then rubbing them with sandpaper, but less pleasant. As a quick aside, we do know that "c" should say "Makes you more stupid," but we figure that if you read enough of those kind of posts that your language processing skills will be shot anyway.

What makes this the investment grade version is that we've only presented those posts contributed to the Cavalcade of Risk that are either fully on topic or that are related in their topic, but make you smarter while still being fairly readable, so that makes the Ba2 designation the cutoff for inclusion in this version of the carnival. If you'd like to see all the contributions for this week's carnival and how they ranked, you'll find them presented here.

But wait, that's not all! We've engaged our dynamic table technology so you can sort the entries in the table below just by clicking the appropriate column heading. Go ahead, try it out, and enjoy this 66th edition of the Cavalcade of Risk!

Cavalcade of Risk #66: Investment Grade Version

Date Contributed	Post	Blog	Rating	Remark
2008-11-20	This Risk Register Has Sharp Edges. DO NOT TOUCH THE EDGES OF THIS RISK REGISTER	Scope Crêpe	Ab2	Rich Maltzmann highlights the value of the Risk Register as a practical tool for reducing the variability in the way risks are communicated.
2008-11-23	Read Financial Footnotes, Invest Wisely	Qovax	Ba2	Qovax explains how to read the footnotes in financial documents to identify potential red flags.
2008-11-28	Mind-Numbingly Stupid Industry Tricks	InsureBlog	Aa2	Hank Stern uses recent statements made by a health insurance lobbying group to launch into a no-holds barred rant on the presumptuousness of "Big Health Insurance."
2008-11-29	Financial Risk and Medical Care: U.S. vs Canada	Healthcare Economist	Ab2	Jason Shafrin contrasts the differences of how poor economic times affect individuals in the U.S. and Canada given how each nation divides up the financial risk of paying for health care.
2008-11-29	Survive a Recession, Think Long Term	Digerati Life	Ba1	The Silicon Valley Blogger has an eleven point list for making it through an economic recession in good shape. Survival tip number one? "Spread your risk, be diversified!"
2008-11-30	Why Life Insurance Is More Popular Than Disability Insurance	moneyblog	Aa2	Insurance claims ratios suggest that insurance customers have it backwards when it comes to how much life and disability insurance coverage they buy. Brian Lenehan uses the work of Milton Friedman and George Szpiro to explain why.
2008-11-30	Florida - The End of the Happy Times	Managed Care Matters	Aa2	Joe Paduda takes on Florida's three member panel that oversees the state's workers compensation system, who would appear to have substituted their own judgment for sound risk management principles.
2008-11-30	Stay a Healthy Weight to Slash Alzheimer's Risk	DietBlog	Aa2	Ali Hale has news on how gender and being either overweight or underweight during middle age may increase one's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
2008-11-30	I Won't Follow This Advice #4 - Uninsured by Choice	My Wealth Builder	Ab2	The Super Saver reflects on an MSN Money article in which he observes that some people are marginalizing the risks associated with not having health insurance in choosing to go without it.
2008-11-30	Weight, Older Women and Breast Cancer Risk	Straight from the Doc	Ab2	Gloria Gamat discusses a new study linking breast cancer risk and weight.
2008-11-30	The 3 Laws of Risk, and Their Implications for an Inter-connected Financial System	Rogue Economist Rants	Ab2	The Rogue Economist discusses the impact the "three laws of risk," which are loosely patterned after a hodgepodge of Newton's laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics, have upon global banking, especially credit.
2008-11-30	Love Handles Increase Death Risk: Study	Everything Livia	Ab2	Everything Livia reports that those cute "love handles" may actually be indicators of increased risk for an early demise.
2008-11-30	Prostate Cancer Risk Factors	Cancer Knowledge	Ab2	Although we don't know what exactly causes prostate cancer, Cancer Knowledge 6 identifies a number of factors that may increase one's risk of developing it.
2008-11-30	Guest Post: Protect Yourself from Financial Loss	LivingAlmostLarge	Ac3	In this case, "guest post" means nobody wanted to put their name on the disjointed ruminations that kind of center on discussing liability coverage for auto insurance. Total waste of time. Hurts to read. Will make you stupider. Don't say you weren't warned.
2008-12-01	Eight Reasons Why the Health Insurers Are Agreeing to Community Rating & What It Means to Disease Management	Disease Management Care	Aa1	Jaan Siderov explains why "Big Health Insurance" wants mandated health insurance coverage and spells out the resulting impact. A very strong candidate for The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere! for this week's edition of On the Moneyed Midways. Tune in this weekend to find out for sure!
2008-12-01	Mandatory and Guaranteed Health Insurance	Colorado Health Insurance Insider	Aa2	Louise picks up the arguments favoring the health insurance industry associations' recent advocacy for mandating health insurance coverage.
2008-12-02	Should You Stop to Put Gas in the Car?	Political Calculations	Ab2	The latest tool at Political Calculations helps find your threshold for risk in driving on a nearly empty fuel tank!

More About Political Calculations

In addition to being the home of On the Moneyed Midways, we're also the blogosphere's tool chest. We frequently present tools that you can use to answer a variety of questions. We can tell you things like the odds of the U.S. going into recession a year from now, or find the rate of return for an investment in the S&P 500 between any two months of its history, or even how long your marriage might last.

Beyond that, we occasionally explain things like the real connection between dividends and stock prices, what's driving teenagers out of the job market and also why a seemingly simple solution that might eliminate the disparity in racial health outcomes in the U.S. isn't quite as simple as it sounds.

Basically, we ask questions we don't already know the answers to, then answer them. The bottom line: We solve problems.

Labels: carnival, risk

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