I think the article oversimplifies. The Milky Way doesn't rotate as one single piece. It's made up of billions of stars (duh!) which revolve around the center at different velocities. So, the question is, is the quoted speed the speed at which the Sun revolves around the galactic center or the average speed of the arms (which move much slower than the stars)? Maybe more later if I can find the paper on arxiv.org

Risk, in financial terms, is a measure of the variability of returns, i.e. the standard deviation of the returns. A well-diversified portfolio generally reduces the variability due to the individual risks of investments being uncorrelated. Harry Markowitz, the father of portfolio theory, pointed out that these quants all assumed that a basket of mortgages is highly uncorrelated and thus well diversified. However, in a broad real estate downturn, they all become very highly correlated. Therefore, if your standard deviation WAS 10%, it suddenly becomes 50% or more, which rapidly changes your VaR from a handful of millions to several billion overnight. VaR, being an oversimplification, didn't take that into account and all the big investment firms suddenly had billions of dollars at risk and billions of dollars of losses without realizing it. It's simply a matter of garbage-in, garbage-out, something my Portfolio Analysis prof drilled into our head and hopefully gets drilled into the heads of Wall Street CEOs.

The comment at the end of the post, "On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset." irked me. In accounting terms, goodwill isn't the warm fuzzy feeling that corporations hold for us. Goodwill is simply the difference in the book value of an acquired company and the actual sale price. Since the assets of the acquired company need to be added to the balance sheets of the acquiring company at book value, the difference between book and market price needs to be held as a seperate item to keep the book balanced.

The comment at the end made no sense whatsoever and goodwill doesn't even seem to be in TFA, so can anyone explain why it's in the post?