Thursday, November 20, 2014

Questions America Wants Answered: Alphaville's Pub Quiz Edition

We'll just try to forget that I actually thought "Obese metropolitan oenophile punters" was a call for contestants.
From the electron-stained wretches toiling in nameless/unbylined obscurity at FT Alphaville:

Questions from last night’s New York pub quiz
Thanks so much to everyone who attended last night’s pub quiz at Ainsworth Park in New York. Below we post all the questions we used. The winning team, which styled itself Lower Expectations, scored 45/60 in the first three rounds, and then 7/10 in the tie-breaker.
See if you can beat them! The questions without the answers are first, followed by both the questions with the answers further down.
FT ALPHAVILLE AND MARKETS PUB QUIZ
Finance in fiction, TV and the movies
1. In the movie “Margin Call”, the death of which character causes Sam Rogers, played by Kevin Spacey, to break down in tears?
2. In which movie that ISN’T Wall Street 1 or 2 did Michael Douglas play a character with a job in finance — in this case an investment banker in San Francisco? (Hint: this movie was directed by David Lynch.)
3. In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, what famous piece of financial advice did Polonius give to Laertes?...

...Economic and financial history
17. Alfred Winslow Jones was the inventor of which investment structure?
18. Which economist is famous both for the debt-deflation theory of recessions and for saying that the stock market had reached a permanently high plateau just before the crash of 1929?
19. Name the former Wall Street CEO who said to Michael Lewis, in reference to Liar’s Poker, “Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours”. He is also the executive who said, according to the book: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears.”...