Why the U.S. was never on the brink of disaster
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
http://www.amazon.ca/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691142165
Audiobook: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Why the U.S. was never on the brink of disaster
Why the U.S. was never on the brink of disaster
After Months of Partisan Wrangling, Wall Street & Pentagon Emerge Victorious on Debt Deal
After months of a bitterly partisan stalemate, the U.S. House of Representatives has voted 269 to 161 in favor of raising the federal borrowing limit and avoiding a default on the national debt. The final count showed 174 Republican ayes, with Democrats split evenly—95 on each side. The vote came just hours before a Department of Treasury deadline that potentially would have seen the United States run out of cash and default for the first time in its history. The bill is expected to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by President Obama today. The deal includes no new tax revenue from wealthy Americans, provides no additional stimulus for the lagging economy, and will cut more than $2.1 trillion in government spending over 10 years, while extending the borrowing authority of the Treasury Department. The debt deal was a victory of sorts for the Pentagon. Rather than cutting $400 billion in defense spending through 2023, as President Barack Obama had proposed in April, it trims just $350 billion through 2024, effectively giving the Pentagon $50 billion more than it had been expecting over the next decade. We speak with William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, and Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Gerald Celente: 'Deal or no debt deal, the debt still exists'
The debt standoff continues and still lawmakers cannot come to terms on a deal. August 2nd is the day that the US is supposed to default and many are concerned on how this will affect the US's AAA rating. Gerald Celente, publisher of the Trends Journal, tells us the numbers don't lie.
Peter Schiff: Problem is the debt, not the ceiling
The country which holds more U.S. debt than any other, has hit out at the failure of Congress to reach a deal over its debt ceiling. China says the political deadlock in Washington threatens the entire global economy.
So far Republicans and Democrats have delayed a vote over limiting what the country owes, as they haven’t agreed on rival budgets. They have until Tuesday to avoid a potentially devastating default. Earlier in the week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Beijing to reassure Asian leaders, that America will not fall back on its debt payments. But Peter Schiff from investment company Euro Pacific Capital, thinks China could well dump the dollar as its main reserve currency.
So far Republicans and Democrats have delayed a vote over limiting what the country owes, as they haven’t agreed on rival budgets. They have until Tuesday to avoid a potentially devastating default. Earlier in the week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Beijing to reassure Asian leaders, that America will not fall back on its debt payments. But Peter Schiff from investment company Euro Pacific Capital, thinks China could well dump the dollar as its main reserve currency.
No Debt Ceiling Deal, Gold and Silver Going Much Higher, Libya-Gaddafi Can Stay: Weekly News
The debt ceiling is the big story once again this week. It is looking more and more like the U.S. will miss the August 2nd deadline to avoid default. Trillions of more dollars were spent by the Fed propping up the world during the 2008 meltdown than we were originally told. What a surprise! Gold and silver are not in a bubble, and I'll tell you why in this week's Weekly News Wrap-Up for Friday 7/29/11.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Geoff Mulgan: Post-crash, investing in a better world
As we reboot the world's economy, Geoff Mulgan poses a question: Instead of sending bailout money to doomed old industries, why not use stimulus funds to bootstrap some new, socially responsible companies -- and make the world a little bit better?
It's hard to believe that it's less than a year since the extraordinary moment when the finance, the credit, which drives our economies froze. A massive cardiac arrest. The effect, the payback, perhaps, for years of vampire predators like Bernie Madoff, whom we saw earlier. Abusive steroids, binging and so on. And it's only a few months since governments injected enormous sums of money to try and keep the whole system afloat. And we're now in a very strange, sort of twilight zone where no one quite knows what's worked, or what doesn't. We don't have any very clear maps, any compass to guide us. We don't know which experts to believe anymore.
What I'm going to try and do is to give some pointers to what I think is the landscape on the other side of the crisis, what things we should be looking out for and how we can actually use the crisis. There's a definition of leadership which says, "is the ability to use the smallest possible crisis for the biggest possible effect." And I want to talk about how we ensure that this crisis, which is by no means small, really is used to the full.
I want to start just by saying a bit about where I'm coming from. I've got a very confused background which perhaps makes me appropriate for confused times. I've got a Ph.D. in telecoms, as you can see. I trained briefly as a Buddhist monk under this guy. I've been a civil servant, and I've been in charge of policy for this guy as well.
But what I want to talk about begins when I was at this city, this university, as a student. And then as now, it was a beautiful place of balls and punts, beautiful people, many of whom took to heart Ronald Reagan's comment that, "even if they say hard work doesn't do you any harm, why risk it?"
But when I was here, a lot of my fellow teenagers were in a very different situation, leaving school at a time then of rapidly growing youth unemployment, and essentially hitting a brick wall in terms of their opportunities. And I spent quite a lot of time with them rather than in punts. And they were people who were not short of wit, or grace or energy, but they had no hope, no jobs, no prospects. And when people aren't allowed to be useful, they soon think that they're useless. And although that was great for the music business at the time, it wasn't much good for anything else. And ever since then, I've wondered why it is that capitalism is so amazingly efficient at some things, but so inefficient at others, why it's so innovative in some ways and so uninnovative in others.
Now, since that time, we've actually been through an extraordinary boom, the longest boom ever in the history of this country. Unprecedented wealth and prosperity, but that growth hasn't always delivered what we needed. H.L. Mencken once said that, "to every complex problem, there is a simple solution and it's wrong." But I'm not saying growth is wrong, but it's very striking throughout the years of growth, many things didn't get better. Rates of depression carried on up, right across the Western world. If you look at America, the proportion of Americans with no one to talk to about important things went up from a tenth to a quarter. We commuted longer to work, but as you can see from this graph, the longer you commute the less happy you're likely to be. And it became ever clearer that economic growth doesn't automatically translate into social growth, or human growth.
We're now at another moment when another wave of teenagers are entering a cruel job market. There will be a million unemployed young people here by the end of the year. Thousands losing their jobs everyday in America. We've got to do whatever we can to help them, but we've also got to ask, I think, a more profound question of whether we use this crisis to jump forward to a different kind of economy that's more suited to human needs, to a better balance of economy and society.
And I think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity. They bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream. They often lead to the acceleration of much needed reforms. And you saw that in the Thirties, when the Great Depression paved the way for Bretton Woods, welfare states and so on. And I think you can see around us now, some of the green shoots of a very different kind of economy and capitalism which could grow. You can see it in daily life. When times are hard, people have to do things for themselves, and right across the world, Oxford, Omaha, Omsk, you can see an extraordinary explosion of urban farming, people taking over land, taking over roofs, turning barges into temporary farms.
And I'm a very small part of this. I have 60,000 of these things in my garden. A few of these. This is Atilla the hen. And I'm a very small part of a very large movement, which for some people is about survival, but is also about values, about a different kind of economy, which isn't so much about consumption and credit, but about things which matter to us. And everywhere too you can see a proliferation of time banks and parallel currencies, people using smart technologies to link up all the resources freed up by the market, people, buildings, land and linking them to whoever has got the most compelling needs.
There's a similar story, I think, for governments. Ronald Reagan, again, said the two funniest sentences in the English language are, "I'm from the government. And I'm here to help." But I think last year when governments did step in, people were quite glad that they were there, that they did act. But now, a few months on, however good politicians are at swallowing frogs without pulling a face, as someone once put it, they can't hide their uncertainty. Because it's already clear how much of the enormous amount of money they put into the economy, really went to fixing the past, bailing out the banks, the car companies, not preparing us for the future. How much of the money is going into concrete and boosting consumption, not into solving the really profound problems we have to solve.
And everywhere, as people think about unprecedented sums which are being spent of our money and our children's money, now, in the depth of this crisis, they're asking: Surely, we should be using with a longer term vision to accelerate the shift to a green economy, to prepare for aging, to deal with some of the inequalities which scar countries like this and the United States rather than just giving the money to the incumbents? Surely, we should be giving the money to entrepreneurs, to civil society, for people able to create the new, not to the big, well-connected companies, big, clunky government programs. And, after all this, the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, "Governing a great country is like cooking a small fish. Don't overdo it."
And I think more and more people are also asking: Why boost consumption, rather than change what we consume? Like the mayor of São Paulo who's banned advertising billboards, or the many cities like San Francisco putting in infrastructures for electric cars. You can see a bit of the same thing happening in the business world. Some, I think some of the bankers who have appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But ask yourselves: What will be the biggest sectors of the economy in 10, 20, 30 years time? It won't be the ones lining up for handouts like cars and aerospace and so on.
The biggest sector, by far, will be health -- already 18 percent of the American economy, predicted to grow to 30 even 40 percent by mid-century. Elder care, child care, already much bigger employers than cars. Education, six, seven, eight percent of the economy and growing. Environmental services, energy services, the myriad of green jobs, they're all pointing to a very different kind of economy which isn't just about products, but is using distributed networks and it's founded above all on care, on relationships, on what people do to other people, often one to one, rather than simply selling them a product.
And I think that what connects the challenge for civil society, the challenge for governments and the challenge for business now is in a way a very simple one, but quite a difficult one. We know our societies have to radically change. We know we can't go back to where we were before the crisis. But we also know it's only through experiment that we'll discover exactly how to run a low carbon city, how to care for a much older population, how to deal with drug addiction and so on.
And here's the problem. In science, we do experiments systematically. Our societies now spend two, three, four percent of GDP to invest systematically in new discovery, in science, in technology, to fuel the pipeline of brilliant inventions which illuminate gatherings like this. It's not that our scientists are necessarily much smarter than they were a hundred years ago, maybe they are, but they have a hell of a lot more backing than they ever did. And what's striking though, is that in society there's almost nothing comparable, no comparable investment, no systematic experiment in the things capitalism isn't very good at, like compassion, or empathy, or relationships, or care.
Now, I didn't really understand that until I met this guy who was then an 80-year-old, slightly shambolic man who lived on tomato soup and thought ironing was very overrated. He had helped shape Britain's post-war institutions, its welfare state, its economy, but sort of reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur, became an inventor of many, many different organizations. Some famous ones like the Open University which has 110,000 students, the University of the Third Age which has nearly half a million older people teaching other older people, as well as strange things like DIY garages and language lines and schools for social entrepreneurs. And he ended his life selling companies to venture capitalists.
He believed if you see a problem, you shouldn't tell someone to act, you should act on it yourself, and he lived long enough and saw enough of his ideas first scorned and then succeed, that he said you should always take no as a question and not as an answer. And his life was a systematic experiment to find better social answers, not from a theory, but from experiment, and experiment involving the people with the best intelligence on social needs, which were usually the people living with those needs. And he believed we live with others, we share the world with others and therefore our innovation must be done with others too, not doing things at people, for them, and so on.
Now, what he did didn't used to have a name, but I think it's rapidly becoming quite mainstream. It's what we do in the organization named after him where we try and invent, create, launch new ventures, whether it's schools, web companies, health organizations and so on. And we find ourselves part of a very rapidly growing global movement of institutions working on social innovation, using ideas from design or technology or community organizing to develop the germs of a future world, but through practice and through demonstration and not through theory. And they're spreading from Korea to Brazil to India to the U.S.A. and across Europe. And they've been given new momentum by the crisis, by the need for better answers to joblessness, community breakdown and so on.
Some of the ideas are strange. These are complaints choirs. People come together to sing about the things that really bug them. (Laughter) Others are much more pragmatic, health coaches, learning mentals, job clubs. And some are quite structural like social impact bonds where you raise money to invest in diverting teenagers from crime or helping old people keep out of hospital, and you get paid back according to how successful your projects are.
Now, the idea that all of this represents, I think, is rapidly becoming a common sense and part of how we respond to the crisis, recognizing the need to invest in innovation for social progress as well as technological progress. There were big health innovation funds launched earlier this year in this country as well as a public service innovation lab. Across northern Europe many governments now have innovation laboratories within them. And just a few months ago, president Obama launched the Office of Social Innovation in the White House.
And what people are beginning to ask is: Surely, just as we invest in in R and D, two, three, four percent, of our GDP, of our economy, what if we put, let's say, one percent of public spending into social innovation, into elder care, no kinds of education, new ways of helping the disabled? Perhaps, we'd achieve similar productivity gains in society to those we've had in the economy and in technology.
And if a generation or two ago, the big challenges were ones like getting a man on the moon, perhaps the challenges we need to set ourselves now are ones like eliminating child malnutrition, stopping trafficking, or one, I think closer to home for America or Europe, why don't we set ourselves the goal of achieving a billion extra years of life for today's citizens. Now those are all goals which could be achieved within a decade, but only with radical and systematic experiment, not just with technologies, but also with lifestyles and culture and policies and institutions too.
Now, I want to end by saying a little bit about what I think this means for capitalism. I think what this is all about, this whole movement which is growing from the margins, remains quite small. Nothing like the resources of a CERN or a DARPA or an IBM or a Dupont. What it's telling us is that capitalism is going to become more social. It's already immersed in social networks. It will become become more involved in social investment and social care and in industries where the value comes from what you do with others, not just from what you sell to them, and from relationships, as well as from consumption. But interestingly too, it implies a future where society learns a few tricks from capitalism about how you embed the DNA of restless continual innovation into society, trying things out and then growing and scaling the ones that work.
Now, I think this future will be quite surprising to many people. In recent years, a lot of intelligent people thought that capitalism had basically won. History was over and society would inevitably have to take second place to economy. But I've been struck with a parallel in how people often talk about capitalism today and how they talked about the monarchy 200 years ago, just after the French Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in France.
Then, people said monarchy dominated everywhere because it was rooted in human nature. We were naturally deferential. We needed hierarchy. Just as today, the enthusiasts of unrestrained capitalism say it's rooted in human nature, only now it's individualism, inquisitiveness, and so on. Then monarchy had seen off its big challenger, mass democracy, which was seen as well-intentioned, but doomed experiment. Just as capitalism has seen off socialism. Even Fidel Castro now says that the only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is not being exploited by multinational capitalism. And whereas then monarchies, palaces and forts dominated every city skyline and looked permanent and confident, today it's the gleaming towers of the banks which dominate every big city.
I'm not suggesting the crowds are about to storm the barracades and string up every investment banker from the nearest lamppost, though that might be quite tempting. But I do think we're on the verge of a period when, just as happened to the monarchy, and interestingly the military too, the central position of finance capital is going to come to an end, and it's going to steadily move to the sides, the margins of our society, transformed from being a master into a servant, a servant to the productive economy and of human needs.
And as that happens, we will remember something very simple and obvious about capitalism, which is that, unlike what you read in economics textbooks, it's not a self-sufficient system. It depends on other systems, on ecology, on family, on community, and if these aren't replenished, capitalism suffers too. And our human nature isn't just selfish, it's also compassionate. It's not just competitive, it's also caring. Because of the depth of the crisis, I think we are at a moment of choice.
The crisis is almost certainly deepening around us. It will be worse at the end of this year, quite possibly worse in a year's time than it is today. But this is one of those very rare moments when we have to choose whether we're just pedaling furiously to get back to where we were a year or two ago, and a very narrow idea of what the economy is for, or whether this is a moment to jump ahead, to reboot and to do some of the things we probably should have been doing anyway. Thank you.
It's hard to believe that it's less than a year since the extraordinary moment when the finance, the credit, which drives our economies froze. A massive cardiac arrest. The effect, the payback, perhaps, for years of vampire predators like Bernie Madoff, whom we saw earlier. Abusive steroids, binging and so on. And it's only a few months since governments injected enormous sums of money to try and keep the whole system afloat. And we're now in a very strange, sort of twilight zone where no one quite knows what's worked, or what doesn't. We don't have any very clear maps, any compass to guide us. We don't know which experts to believe anymore.
What I'm going to try and do is to give some pointers to what I think is the landscape on the other side of the crisis, what things we should be looking out for and how we can actually use the crisis. There's a definition of leadership which says, "is the ability to use the smallest possible crisis for the biggest possible effect." And I want to talk about how we ensure that this crisis, which is by no means small, really is used to the full.
I want to start just by saying a bit about where I'm coming from. I've got a very confused background which perhaps makes me appropriate for confused times. I've got a Ph.D. in telecoms, as you can see. I trained briefly as a Buddhist monk under this guy. I've been a civil servant, and I've been in charge of policy for this guy as well.
But what I want to talk about begins when I was at this city, this university, as a student. And then as now, it was a beautiful place of balls and punts, beautiful people, many of whom took to heart Ronald Reagan's comment that, "even if they say hard work doesn't do you any harm, why risk it?"
But when I was here, a lot of my fellow teenagers were in a very different situation, leaving school at a time then of rapidly growing youth unemployment, and essentially hitting a brick wall in terms of their opportunities. And I spent quite a lot of time with them rather than in punts. And they were people who were not short of wit, or grace or energy, but they had no hope, no jobs, no prospects. And when people aren't allowed to be useful, they soon think that they're useless. And although that was great for the music business at the time, it wasn't much good for anything else. And ever since then, I've wondered why it is that capitalism is so amazingly efficient at some things, but so inefficient at others, why it's so innovative in some ways and so uninnovative in others.
Now, since that time, we've actually been through an extraordinary boom, the longest boom ever in the history of this country. Unprecedented wealth and prosperity, but that growth hasn't always delivered what we needed. H.L. Mencken once said that, "to every complex problem, there is a simple solution and it's wrong." But I'm not saying growth is wrong, but it's very striking throughout the years of growth, many things didn't get better. Rates of depression carried on up, right across the Western world. If you look at America, the proportion of Americans with no one to talk to about important things went up from a tenth to a quarter. We commuted longer to work, but as you can see from this graph, the longer you commute the less happy you're likely to be. And it became ever clearer that economic growth doesn't automatically translate into social growth, or human growth.
We're now at another moment when another wave of teenagers are entering a cruel job market. There will be a million unemployed young people here by the end of the year. Thousands losing their jobs everyday in America. We've got to do whatever we can to help them, but we've also got to ask, I think, a more profound question of whether we use this crisis to jump forward to a different kind of economy that's more suited to human needs, to a better balance of economy and society.
And I think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity. They bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream. They often lead to the acceleration of much needed reforms. And you saw that in the Thirties, when the Great Depression paved the way for Bretton Woods, welfare states and so on. And I think you can see around us now, some of the green shoots of a very different kind of economy and capitalism which could grow. You can see it in daily life. When times are hard, people have to do things for themselves, and right across the world, Oxford, Omaha, Omsk, you can see an extraordinary explosion of urban farming, people taking over land, taking over roofs, turning barges into temporary farms.
And I'm a very small part of this. I have 60,000 of these things in my garden. A few of these. This is Atilla the hen. And I'm a very small part of a very large movement, which for some people is about survival, but is also about values, about a different kind of economy, which isn't so much about consumption and credit, but about things which matter to us. And everywhere too you can see a proliferation of time banks and parallel currencies, people using smart technologies to link up all the resources freed up by the market, people, buildings, land and linking them to whoever has got the most compelling needs.
There's a similar story, I think, for governments. Ronald Reagan, again, said the two funniest sentences in the English language are, "I'm from the government. And I'm here to help." But I think last year when governments did step in, people were quite glad that they were there, that they did act. But now, a few months on, however good politicians are at swallowing frogs without pulling a face, as someone once put it, they can't hide their uncertainty. Because it's already clear how much of the enormous amount of money they put into the economy, really went to fixing the past, bailing out the banks, the car companies, not preparing us for the future. How much of the money is going into concrete and boosting consumption, not into solving the really profound problems we have to solve.
And everywhere, as people think about unprecedented sums which are being spent of our money and our children's money, now, in the depth of this crisis, they're asking: Surely, we should be using with a longer term vision to accelerate the shift to a green economy, to prepare for aging, to deal with some of the inequalities which scar countries like this and the United States rather than just giving the money to the incumbents? Surely, we should be giving the money to entrepreneurs, to civil society, for people able to create the new, not to the big, well-connected companies, big, clunky government programs. And, after all this, the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, "Governing a great country is like cooking a small fish. Don't overdo it."
And I think more and more people are also asking: Why boost consumption, rather than change what we consume? Like the mayor of São Paulo who's banned advertising billboards, or the many cities like San Francisco putting in infrastructures for electric cars. You can see a bit of the same thing happening in the business world. Some, I think some of the bankers who have appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But ask yourselves: What will be the biggest sectors of the economy in 10, 20, 30 years time? It won't be the ones lining up for handouts like cars and aerospace and so on.
The biggest sector, by far, will be health -- already 18 percent of the American economy, predicted to grow to 30 even 40 percent by mid-century. Elder care, child care, already much bigger employers than cars. Education, six, seven, eight percent of the economy and growing. Environmental services, energy services, the myriad of green jobs, they're all pointing to a very different kind of economy which isn't just about products, but is using distributed networks and it's founded above all on care, on relationships, on what people do to other people, often one to one, rather than simply selling them a product.
And I think that what connects the challenge for civil society, the challenge for governments and the challenge for business now is in a way a very simple one, but quite a difficult one. We know our societies have to radically change. We know we can't go back to where we were before the crisis. But we also know it's only through experiment that we'll discover exactly how to run a low carbon city, how to care for a much older population, how to deal with drug addiction and so on.
And here's the problem. In science, we do experiments systematically. Our societies now spend two, three, four percent of GDP to invest systematically in new discovery, in science, in technology, to fuel the pipeline of brilliant inventions which illuminate gatherings like this. It's not that our scientists are necessarily much smarter than they were a hundred years ago, maybe they are, but they have a hell of a lot more backing than they ever did. And what's striking though, is that in society there's almost nothing comparable, no comparable investment, no systematic experiment in the things capitalism isn't very good at, like compassion, or empathy, or relationships, or care.
Now, I didn't really understand that until I met this guy who was then an 80-year-old, slightly shambolic man who lived on tomato soup and thought ironing was very overrated. He had helped shape Britain's post-war institutions, its welfare state, its economy, but sort of reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur, became an inventor of many, many different organizations. Some famous ones like the Open University which has 110,000 students, the University of the Third Age which has nearly half a million older people teaching other older people, as well as strange things like DIY garages and language lines and schools for social entrepreneurs. And he ended his life selling companies to venture capitalists.
He believed if you see a problem, you shouldn't tell someone to act, you should act on it yourself, and he lived long enough and saw enough of his ideas first scorned and then succeed, that he said you should always take no as a question and not as an answer. And his life was a systematic experiment to find better social answers, not from a theory, but from experiment, and experiment involving the people with the best intelligence on social needs, which were usually the people living with those needs. And he believed we live with others, we share the world with others and therefore our innovation must be done with others too, not doing things at people, for them, and so on.
Now, what he did didn't used to have a name, but I think it's rapidly becoming quite mainstream. It's what we do in the organization named after him where we try and invent, create, launch new ventures, whether it's schools, web companies, health organizations and so on. And we find ourselves part of a very rapidly growing global movement of institutions working on social innovation, using ideas from design or technology or community organizing to develop the germs of a future world, but through practice and through demonstration and not through theory. And they're spreading from Korea to Brazil to India to the U.S.A. and across Europe. And they've been given new momentum by the crisis, by the need for better answers to joblessness, community breakdown and so on.
Some of the ideas are strange. These are complaints choirs. People come together to sing about the things that really bug them. (Laughter) Others are much more pragmatic, health coaches, learning mentals, job clubs. And some are quite structural like social impact bonds where you raise money to invest in diverting teenagers from crime or helping old people keep out of hospital, and you get paid back according to how successful your projects are.
Now, the idea that all of this represents, I think, is rapidly becoming a common sense and part of how we respond to the crisis, recognizing the need to invest in innovation for social progress as well as technological progress. There were big health innovation funds launched earlier this year in this country as well as a public service innovation lab. Across northern Europe many governments now have innovation laboratories within them. And just a few months ago, president Obama launched the Office of Social Innovation in the White House.
And what people are beginning to ask is: Surely, just as we invest in in R and D, two, three, four percent, of our GDP, of our economy, what if we put, let's say, one percent of public spending into social innovation, into elder care, no kinds of education, new ways of helping the disabled? Perhaps, we'd achieve similar productivity gains in society to those we've had in the economy and in technology.
And if a generation or two ago, the big challenges were ones like getting a man on the moon, perhaps the challenges we need to set ourselves now are ones like eliminating child malnutrition, stopping trafficking, or one, I think closer to home for America or Europe, why don't we set ourselves the goal of achieving a billion extra years of life for today's citizens. Now those are all goals which could be achieved within a decade, but only with radical and systematic experiment, not just with technologies, but also with lifestyles and culture and policies and institutions too.
Now, I want to end by saying a little bit about what I think this means for capitalism. I think what this is all about, this whole movement which is growing from the margins, remains quite small. Nothing like the resources of a CERN or a DARPA or an IBM or a Dupont. What it's telling us is that capitalism is going to become more social. It's already immersed in social networks. It will become become more involved in social investment and social care and in industries where the value comes from what you do with others, not just from what you sell to them, and from relationships, as well as from consumption. But interestingly too, it implies a future where society learns a few tricks from capitalism about how you embed the DNA of restless continual innovation into society, trying things out and then growing and scaling the ones that work.
Now, I think this future will be quite surprising to many people. In recent years, a lot of intelligent people thought that capitalism had basically won. History was over and society would inevitably have to take second place to economy. But I've been struck with a parallel in how people often talk about capitalism today and how they talked about the monarchy 200 years ago, just after the French Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in France.
Then, people said monarchy dominated everywhere because it was rooted in human nature. We were naturally deferential. We needed hierarchy. Just as today, the enthusiasts of unrestrained capitalism say it's rooted in human nature, only now it's individualism, inquisitiveness, and so on. Then monarchy had seen off its big challenger, mass democracy, which was seen as well-intentioned, but doomed experiment. Just as capitalism has seen off socialism. Even Fidel Castro now says that the only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is not being exploited by multinational capitalism. And whereas then monarchies, palaces and forts dominated every city skyline and looked permanent and confident, today it's the gleaming towers of the banks which dominate every big city.
I'm not suggesting the crowds are about to storm the barracades and string up every investment banker from the nearest lamppost, though that might be quite tempting. But I do think we're on the verge of a period when, just as happened to the monarchy, and interestingly the military too, the central position of finance capital is going to come to an end, and it's going to steadily move to the sides, the margins of our society, transformed from being a master into a servant, a servant to the productive economy and of human needs.
And as that happens, we will remember something very simple and obvious about capitalism, which is that, unlike what you read in economics textbooks, it's not a self-sufficient system. It depends on other systems, on ecology, on family, on community, and if these aren't replenished, capitalism suffers too. And our human nature isn't just selfish, it's also compassionate. It's not just competitive, it's also caring. Because of the depth of the crisis, I think we are at a moment of choice.
The crisis is almost certainly deepening around us. It will be worse at the end of this year, quite possibly worse in a year's time than it is today. But this is one of those very rare moments when we have to choose whether we're just pedaling furiously to get back to where we were a year or two ago, and a very narrow idea of what the economy is for, or whether this is a moment to jump ahead, to reboot and to do some of the things we probably should have been doing anyway. Thank you.
Richard Wolff: Debt Showdown is "Political Theater" Burdening Society’s Most Vulnerable
Republicans have agreed to a vote today on a budget plan they say will cut the deficit $917 billion over 10 years. The move sets the stage for a showdown against unified Democratic opposition in the Senate and threats of a White House veto. To discuss the debt talks and economic austerity worldwide, we’re joined by Richard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of several books, including "Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It." "This is political theater in which two parties are posturing for the election coming next year," says Wolff. "To put it in perspective, the number of times the government has raised the debt ceiling since 1940? Ninety, almost twice a year. This is a normal, automatic procedure. Every president, Republican and Democrat, has asked for it."
Wealth Gap Between Minorities and White Americans Doubles After Housing Crisis, Recession
A new study of U.S. census data reveals that wealth gaps between whites and minorities in the United States have grown to their widest levels since the U.S. government began tracking them a quarter-century ago. White Americans now have on average 20 times the net worth of African Americans and 18 times that of Latinos. According to the Pew Research Center, the gaps were compounded during the housing bust and the subsequent recession, and essentially wiped out much of the economic progress made by people of color over the past 20 years. We discuss the center’s study with Roderick Harrison, sociologist and demographer, and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. “Any hopes or aspirations, particularly based solely on Obama’s election, that we had reached some kind of post-racial state were close to delusional,” says Harrison. “This report is pointing to just how much the socioeconomic inequalities have been exacerbated by the recession and poor economy.”
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Debt Crisis
No Deal: Debt Ceiling Talks Between Obama, Boehner Break Down
Debt Crisis Being Used as Shock Doctrine to Steal More Money from the People
Talks between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama to raise the debt ceiling in conjunction with sweeping spending cuts and tax and entitlement reform have broken down. There will be no “grand bargain” to deal with the debt crisis and raise the debt ceiling.
Boehner’s decision to abandon negotiations with President Obama puts an end to a deal that would have cut spending by up to $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years and increased tax revenues by close to a trillion dollars. But the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling must be raised by Aug. 2nd to avoid a government default.
Boehner’s decision to abandon negotiations with President Obama puts an end to a deal that would have cut spending by up to $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years and increased tax revenues by close to a trillion dollars. But the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling must be raised by Aug. 2nd to avoid a government default.
Debt Crisis Being Used as Shock Doctrine to Steal More Money from the People
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Alberta Oil Sands featured on "60 Minutes"
One of the world's largest oil deposits can be found right here in North America, but it is buried in the sand, as Bob Simon reports.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=1225047n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBoxBob Simon of "60 Minutes" discusses the challenge of getting to oil in the sands of Alberta, Canada.
North America's future as the New Middle East?
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3506177n&tag=mncol;lst;4
Monday, July 18, 2011
Game Theory: Game of Chicken
This classic scene from the film Footloose can be used to illustrate the game of Chicken - a popular example of game theory.
Scene from the 1984 movie "Footloose". Music is "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler.
"We are both heading for the cliff, who jumps first, is the Chicken".
Chicken game
James Dean and Corey Allen at cliff edge in "Rebel Without A Cause."
In a battle of nerve, two cars are accelerating toward each other form opposite ends of the same road. If one of them doesn't swerve, they will crash. How do the actors rationally respond to such a scenario?
In this Harvard Law Today interview, Robert H. Mnookin, author of Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, answers the question -- should you bargain with people you consider to be unethical, amoral, or otherwise harmful?
The art of doing difficult negotiations during tough economic times is the topic of discussion with Professor Robert H. Mnookin and Paul Solman on PBS News Hour.
http://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/video-of-professor-mnookins-interview-on-pbs/
Scene from the 1984 movie "Footloose". Music is "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler.
"We are both heading for the cliff, who jumps first, is the Chicken".
Chicken game
James Dean and Corey Allen at cliff edge in "Rebel Without A Cause."
In the "chickie run" scene from the film Rebel Without a Cause, this happens when Corey Allen's character cannot escape from the car and dies in the crash. The opposite scenario occurs in Footloose where Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) is stuck in his tractor and hence wins the game as he can't play "chicken". The basic game-theoretic formulation of Chicken has no element of variable, potentially catastrophic, risk, and is also the contraction of a dynamic situation into a one-shot interaction.
In a battle of nerve, two cars are accelerating toward each other form opposite ends of the same road. If one of them doesn't swerve, they will crash. How do the actors rationally respond to such a scenario?
In this Harvard Law Today interview, Robert H. Mnookin, author of Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, answers the question -- should you bargain with people you consider to be unethical, amoral, or otherwise harmful?
The art of doing difficult negotiations during tough economic times is the topic of discussion with Professor Robert H. Mnookin and Paul Solman on PBS News Hour.
http://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/video-of-professor-mnookins-interview-on-pbs/
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Foreign Aid and Foreign Assistance Myths
Veronique de Rugy debunks some of the myths surrounding foreign aid, using empirical studies showing that foreign aid has failed to produce steps that reduce poverty in countries like Egypt. De Rugy finds that the data shows that most of US foreign aid isn't going to the poorest countries.
Ten great myths about foreign aid: After Cameron described critics as 'hard-hearted', how your money is squandered
MYTH 1: We can afford to spend a few billion pounds to help the world’s poor
MYTH 2: We must hit the UN target to give away 0.7 per cent of our GNP in aid
MYTH 3: Aid works
MYTH 4: OK, it hasn’t worked in the past, but it will in the future
Ten great myths about foreign aid: After Cameron described critics as 'hard-hearted', how your money is squandered
MYTH 1: We can afford to spend a few billion pounds to help the world’s poor
MYTH 2: We must hit the UN target to give away 0.7 per cent of our GNP in aid
MYTH 3: Aid works
MYTH 4: OK, it hasn’t worked in the past, but it will in the future
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Chance Didnt Create The Current Economic Crisis
June 22 2011: International Bankers the creators of despair, the instruments of corporatist fascism and monopoly, markets not free under the eye of international banks, Greece the catalyist fo the Euro downfall, Fed inflation soaks up majority of treasuries, elitist banks helped with the profits in world markets last year.
What the world is experiencing today did not happen by chance, it was planned that way.
What the world is experiencing today did not happen by chance, it was planned that way.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Worldometers
FOOD
Money spent due to obesity related diseases in the USA today (US$):
Friday, June 17, 2011
Bitcoin in the News
How does the bitcoin network operate? It is explained in this video
Hit me with a bitcoin!
The Bottom Line: Bitcoins digital currency unstable, still a high-risk venture
LargeCoin Early Adopter Inquiry Form
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Inspirational Money and Business Quote
Today's organizations thrive when they maximize what they know. Results depend on the collective talents and creativity of people.
- Evangeline Caridas
Warren Buffet once said: "It's only when the tide goes out, you find out who's been swimming naked." Once your business gets public attention, everything you've done wrong will be scrutinized for all to see.
- Evangeline Caridas
Warren Buffet once said: "It's only when the tide goes out, you find out who's been swimming naked." Once your business gets public attention, everything you've done wrong will be scrutinized for all to see.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Global Aging
The world's population is getting older. Countries need to think about how fewer young people can continue to support the elderly.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Principles of economics, translated
A microeconomist is someone who's wrong about specific things; a macroeconomist is someone who's wrong about things in general
There’s safety in small numbers
Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0280c2-8bee-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OlQiorgW
Running late for a flight, on a twisting Sicilian road, I overtook a large lorry while my view was obscured by another large lorry. All was well, but several weeks later I am still having flashbacks. I’d taken a bet against what my colleague John Kay calls the “Taleb distribution”, named after Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. When you bet against a Taleb distribution, you enjoy lots of small gains (I made my flight) but you also risk disaster.
On the roads, the risks are obvious enough, but in many contexts they will be hidden. When banks and insurance companies sold credit default swaps on subprime loan packages, they were receiving a stream of small payments in exchange for a risk of catastrophic loss. But the risk seemed very small: as Joseph J. Cassano of AIG commented as the credit crunch was beginning: “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.” He was wrong by 11 or 12 orders of magnitude, which may be about as wrong as it’s possible to be in human affairs.
Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0280c2-8bee-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OlQsIcGK
It will often make sense to bet with the distribution instead of against it, taking repeated small losses on the chin in exchange for the occasional big success. In derivatives markets, this is the trading strategy that Taleb himself advocated. It is the strategy of the successful venture capital fund, too.
It’s also the approach advocated by Peter Sims – a former venture capitalist – in an enjoyable new book, Little Bets. In one of many examples, Sims describes the American comedian Chris Rock’s agonising practice sessions in low-key comedy venues, scratching around for new material, and argues that it’s worth tolerating a lot of disappointments in order to make it big.
I agree with Sims, but here is the difficulty: these small failures hurt. That is the evidence from psychological research; it’s also what common sense tells us. And they are embarrassing, because while the “little bets” that Sims describes are good bets, until they pay off they may seem to other people to be as fantastical as wasting money on scratchcards.
In contrast, the world often admires those who bet against the Taleb distribution, who keep risking disaster but usually avoid it. As the small wins stack up – perhaps bloated through leverage – managers and colleagues will tend to see a safe pair of hands, not a dangerous driver.
The challenge, then, is to find institutions that support little bets – or to use Taleb’s term from the second edition of The Black Swan, “antifragile” institutions, which benefit from disruption.
Scientific institutions fit the bill. A single breakthrough, whether theoretical or in the laboratory, can make up for a hundred failed ideas, because the scientific process helps to refute bad ideas and disseminate good ones.
But the most ubiquitous antifragile institutions are markets. When markets work well, they are remarkable systems for sifting out the dross and spreading successful ideas. The printing press and the production line, for instance, only needed to be invented once. These ideas spread through imitation, mergers and the growth of successful companies. And when markets work it is not because of the power of the profit motive, but because this process of trial and error is incredibly powerful.
When faced with a complex problem, we should look for institutions that can quickly discard bad ideas and reward good ones – institutions which place themselves on the right side of the Taleb distribution, able to exploit each rare opportunity as it appears. That need not be a free-market approach, but it must be one which is able to experiment and to adapt.
Tim Harford’s new book, ‘Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure’, is published by Little, Brown
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0280c2-8bee-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OI4de4B4
Running late for a flight, on a twisting Sicilian road, I overtook a large lorry while my view was obscured by another large lorry. All was well, but several weeks later I am still having flashbacks. I’d taken a bet against what my colleague John Kay calls the “Taleb distribution”, named after Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. When you bet against a Taleb distribution, you enjoy lots of small gains (I made my flight) but you also risk disaster.
On the roads, the risks are obvious enough, but in many contexts they will be hidden. When banks and insurance companies sold credit default swaps on subprime loan packages, they were receiving a stream of small payments in exchange for a risk of catastrophic loss. But the risk seemed very small: as Joseph J. Cassano of AIG commented as the credit crunch was beginning: “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.” He was wrong by 11 or 12 orders of magnitude, which may be about as wrong as it’s possible to be in human affairs.
Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0280c2-8bee-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OlQsIcGK
It will often make sense to bet with the distribution instead of against it, taking repeated small losses on the chin in exchange for the occasional big success. In derivatives markets, this is the trading strategy that Taleb himself advocated. It is the strategy of the successful venture capital fund, too.
It’s also the approach advocated by Peter Sims – a former venture capitalist – in an enjoyable new book, Little Bets. In one of many examples, Sims describes the American comedian Chris Rock’s agonising practice sessions in low-key comedy venues, scratching around for new material, and argues that it’s worth tolerating a lot of disappointments in order to make it big.
I agree with Sims, but here is the difficulty: these small failures hurt. That is the evidence from psychological research; it’s also what common sense tells us. And they are embarrassing, because while the “little bets” that Sims describes are good bets, until they pay off they may seem to other people to be as fantastical as wasting money on scratchcards.
In contrast, the world often admires those who bet against the Taleb distribution, who keep risking disaster but usually avoid it. As the small wins stack up – perhaps bloated through leverage – managers and colleagues will tend to see a safe pair of hands, not a dangerous driver.
The challenge, then, is to find institutions that support little bets – or to use Taleb’s term from the second edition of The Black Swan, “antifragile” institutions, which benefit from disruption.
Scientific institutions fit the bill. A single breakthrough, whether theoretical or in the laboratory, can make up for a hundred failed ideas, because the scientific process helps to refute bad ideas and disseminate good ones.
But the most ubiquitous antifragile institutions are markets. When markets work well, they are remarkable systems for sifting out the dross and spreading successful ideas. The printing press and the production line, for instance, only needed to be invented once. These ideas spread through imitation, mergers and the growth of successful companies. And when markets work it is not because of the power of the profit motive, but because this process of trial and error is incredibly powerful.
When faced with a complex problem, we should look for institutions that can quickly discard bad ideas and reward good ones – institutions which place themselves on the right side of the Taleb distribution, able to exploit each rare opportunity as it appears. That need not be a free-market approach, but it must be one which is able to experiment and to adapt.
Tim Harford’s new book, ‘Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure’, is published by Little, Brown
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0280c2-8bee-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1OI4de4B4
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
10 Best Mafia Lessons For Success In Business
Former Mafia Associate Gives Lessons For Success In Legitimate Business
If you're climbing the corporate ladder and eager to succeed, you can glean some valuable lessons from mobsters who are employees of the longest running organization in history: the Mafia.
If we shed our prejudices, we'll find that accomplished mobsters are just like top business leaders.
The Mafia shares the same power structure as any corporation. A don is exactly like a CEO, steering the business (or family) into the future. His capos are middle-managers or department heads, and his soldiers are employees.
Whether corporate or Mafia, people who acquire diplomatic skills, leadership qualities, and the enthusiasm to motivate will master their respective fields.
In my new book, "Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman," I explain the better attributes of La Cosa Nostra so that Our Thing can become Your Thing.
1. Lesson 6 - Don't End Up in the Trunk of a Car: Avoid Office Politics.
When John Gotti took over the Gambino family, mobster Louie Milito had issues with his appointment decisions. Milito felt he was being pushed aside as promotions went to less experienced mobsters. Instead of holding his tongue, Milito took part in office politics, expressing his dissatisfaction. Gotti's new regime called for his immediate dismissal and Milito's whispering was stopped by the whisper of a bullet passing through a silencer. Would Milito have taken a shot had he directed his original dismay to Gotti himself? We will never know.
Avoid office politics. If you have something to say, go through the appropriate channels and express your concerns constructively, to the right people. Your corporate survival is at stake.
2. Lesson 12 - Roll Up Your Sleeves but Keep Your Pants On
Lucchese underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso admitted to killing Anthony Fava, the architect he hired to redesign his home. Casso claimed that Fava, having accepted cash payments, might have been an informer but denied reports that Fava had made a pass at his wife. Oddly though, when Fava's body was found, his genitals had been burned with a blow torch. Everyone in the Mafia knew that Fava had broken the cardinal rule: never hit on the wife of a colleague.
Even if you haven't spotted a blow torch in boss's top drawer, stay away from the his or her goods and the goods of your coworkers. It's the surest way to make enemies and ruin your career before it starts.
Monday, June 6, 2011
The Key To a Successful Life?
If you were one of the 1000+ babies born at the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972-73, chances are you don’t have any secrets.
Those babies (now pushing 40) have grown up as the most scientifically studied group of people in the world. Starting at age 3, and every couple of years since, they’ve had every aspect of their physical and mental health examined and reported on in over 1100 publications. The latest paper to make a splash was on self-control. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Dunedin study subjects with the lowest self-control as children have the worst health as adults. But what intrigued us was the finding that self-control was also linked to financial health…which is why we went to Duke University last week to interview the study’s associate director, Terri Moffitt, for our story about money tips for tots.
Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.
Obesity good for the economy?
Why America Has to Be Fat
A Side Effect of Economic Expansion Shows Up in Front
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Angry Birds App Earns Over a Million a Month
http://zacjohnson.com/angry-birds-app-earns-over-a-million-a-month/
Feb 16th, 2011: Peter Vesterbacka is the man behind Angry Birds. Produced by gamemaker Rovio, it has been the number one app in the UK (on Android and iPhone) for the past year and leads the charts in 70 other countries. To date, the Angry Birds has been downloaded over 75 million times worldwide. At the Mobile World Congress he talks to Mary Watkins, technology correspondent, about the gravitational shift to mobile technology and the formula for making a winning app.
Feb 16th, 2011: Peter Vesterbacka is the man behind Angry Birds. Produced by gamemaker Rovio, it has been the number one app in the UK (on Android and iPhone) for the past year and leads the charts in 70 other countries. To date, the Angry Birds has been downloaded over 75 million times worldwide. At the Mobile World Congress he talks to Mary Watkins, technology correspondent, about the gravitational shift to mobile technology and the formula for making a winning app.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Four businesses making money off the apocalypse
Here are a few of the slightly unusual ways in which the business people of America have been profiting from the prophecy.
1. Pet heaven
Bart Centre, a New Hampshire atheist, author and entrepreneur, saw an opportunity for pet insurance. His business, Eternal Earthbound Pets, has been selling insurance to Fundamentalist Christian pet owners who believe they'll be raptured into heaven ahead of the apocalypse. For those who were worried about what might happen to their dogs and cats when they're gone, Mr. Centre proposed a solution. His team of committed atheists would collect and look after the pets of those who believed they would no longer be around to take care of them. To quote the company's strap-line, it was offering believers, "The next best thing to pet salvation in a post-rapture world."
Centre had more than 250 clients who have paid up to $135 to have their pets cared for post rapture. But his clients would be disappointed twice, he told the Wall Street Journal. "Once because they weren't raptured, and again because I don't do refunds."
2. Apocalypse fashion
A California company called Rapture Wear has been selling jewelry inscribed with biblical verses ahead of Judgment Day. Asking believers, "What will you leave behind?" the jewelry is designed to be left on earth with messages for those who have not been saved, and has proved particularly popular for this latest prediction. Gary Rovarino, the company's general manager, said "As we enter a period of [cultural] decline, it drives people our way."
3. Final message
Unsure as to whether or not email will feature in the after-life, believers have been signing up for earthly services offering to send their final correspondence on their behalf. For a fee, their last thoughts will be sent out to a pre-selected group. Mark Heard, a 52-year-old evangelical Christian from Harwich, says of the final remarks, "Hopefully the messages won't be, 'Ha-ha, I told you so; you're going to hell'. Ideally it will be, 'I hope this is enough evidence that what I told you was correct and you still have time to be accept Jesus Christ and be saved.'"
4. There's an app for that
One smartphone app has been designed which promises to give users a 30 minute notice in advance of the rapture, or Judgment Day. The "Rapture Detector" application offers a somewhat unconventional religious strategy, telling users that, "Sin, lust and fornication can be yours again!" because the Detector's half-hour heads-up provides just enough time to repent and join those who've been pure all along.
A question of morals?
Whilst many of these ideas are relatively comical, the question may be raised as to whether these companies are really just exploiting vulnerable people. Is there a moral issue with offering services that you firmly believe you will never have to provide? Whatever the answer, many businesses will continue turning this prophesied disaster into legitimate profit.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Don't Sweat the Debt Ceiling
The U.S. Treasury Secretary warns of dire consequences if the debt ceiling is not raised. And yet investors are buying bonds, not selling them. Why?
Here is a blast from the past for you:
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
SOMETHING MISSING FROM HBO'S TOO BIG TO FAIL
There was something missing from last night’s premiere of Too Big To Fail, a made for HBO movie which portrayed the inner workings of the U.S. Treasury during the financial crisis on Wall Street back in 2008. By the time the movie was over, I was still having trouble putting my finger on it. It occurred to me while the credits rolled that I had written quite a bit about the crisis while it was going on, so I headed back to the archives of Brown Man Thinking Hard to see what I’d said.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out what felt wrong about the HBO dramatization after I typed the words “Wall Street” into the box marked “search” on my original blog. The buzzwords were all there – “CDO’s”, “toxic assets”, “sliced up mortgage securities” – and the cast of heroes and villains was complete, with everybody from Richard Fuld to Warren Buffet getting mentioned, but the writers didn’t go for the jugular because they didn’t bring up the Gaussian copula formula David X. Li came up with, the formula that allowed everybody on the Street to justify putting so much of their client’s money into mortgage backed securities.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38560
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Bitcoin
The same people who brought you Wikileaks are back, and this time, they've created a virtual currency called Bitcoin that could destabilize the entire global financial system. Bitcoin is an open-source virtual currency generated by a computer algorithm that is completely beyond the reach of financial intermediaries, central banks and national tax collectors. Bitcoins could be used to purchase anything, at any time, from anyone in the world, in a transaction process that it is almost completely frictionless. Yes, that's right, the hacktivists now have a virtual currency that's untraceable, unhackable, and completely Anonymous.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Actually, "The Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do
You hear it again and again, variation after variation on a core message: if you tax rich people it kills jobs. You hear about "job-killing tax hikes," or that "taxing the rich hurts jobs," "taxes kill jobs," "taxes take money out of the economy, "if you tax the rich they won't be able to provide jobs." ... on and on it goes. So do we really depend on "the rich" to "create" jobs? Or do jobs get created when they fill a need?
Here is a recent typical example, Obama Touts Job-Killing Tax Plan, written by a "senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth,"
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011051913/do-we-depend-rich-create-jobs
Nine Pictures Of The Extreme Income/Wealth Gap
Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see it. People just don't understand how muchwealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people’s ability to comprehend.
If people understood just how concentrated wealth has become in our country and the effect is has on our politics, our democracy and our people, they would demand our politicians do something about it.
How Much Is A Billion?
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020612/understanding-extreme-incomewealth-gap
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Chucking it All for A Career Change? Here’s Your To-Do List.
It’s never too early to start thinking about your next act. The longer time frame you have to plan, the better. Start working at age fifty on a career you might not get around to until age sixty.
If you have lots of time, you can try out some ideas and possibilities, role-play, and do a little bit of those things to see if that is the direction you want to go. Moonlight, apprentice or volunteer to see if you even like that kind of work once you see the underbelly, and every job has one.
The Great Stagnation: Why Hasn't Recent Technology Created More Jobs?
Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Our Debt Binge Is Ending — And The Middle Class Will Get Clobbered
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/debt-binge-ending-middle-class-clobbered-20110405-094510-405.html
The world is coming to the end of a 50-year debt supercycle, John Mauldin says, and the austerity required to put us back on solid financial footing will hammer ordinary Americans.
Mauldin, a financial analyst and the author of ENDGAME: The End Of The Debt Supercycle And How It Changes Everything, thinks that the the US will soon be forced to confront the fact that it has borrowed way too much in the past few decades and must severely cut back.
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