Concentration, Manipulation and Margin Calls. Over the past 25 years the financial markets of the world have become highly concentrated in the intermediation of a handful of firms, and regulation has been harmonised in the interests of these few firms. As Adam Smith - that great proponent of free markets - cogently observed: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Sadly, these few global firms have been for some time in "a conspiracy against the public", and have subverted the organs of public governance and the infrastructure of the financial markets to their purposes. Regulators and legislatures have done what they were asked to do in rubber stamping the policies that promoted further concentration, assured the whole time that it would result in "efficient markets", when the reality has been entirely otherwise. In October 2008 the global financial markets crashed. How to do this? Is property going social?
I’ve got a feeling something interesting is happening to the way real estate operates online in the UK. Anecdotal evidence is emerging that social networks like Facebook and less conventional startups are perhaps starting to find the chink in the armour of the traditional property listing market here. In particular, Facebook Marketplace is starting to be used by niche poperty agencies like Pimlico Flats, more successfully than the usual online suspects like Craigslist and Gumtree.
That latter site has had problems with other aspects of its site like, having to dump dating because of spam and scams. The same problems are plaguing Craigslist in the UK, and this is something that Pimlico Flats picks up on in a blog post on the subject. At the same time, although Findaproperty and Rightmove remain strong, less conventional sites like Globrix, Nestoria, Zoopla (see below) and even niche social networks like Asmallworld are being used.
Debunking free marketarianism. By Linda Bealecrossposted with Ataxingmatter Richard Abrams: debunking free marketarianism I’ve often written here about the problems of the naive, black-or-white view of economics that has been fostered by the Chicago School and Milton Friedman acolytes who talk of “free markets” as though markets exist in vaccum tubes unaffected by the social, cultural and legal context around them. Debunking that “free market myth” is important, because without understanding the mythology of it most ordinary Americans will continue to be misled and fooled by those who devise and enact policies that affect our everyday lives. So it is nice to see another academic talking sense on “free markets. The populist and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century rose in response to the changed structure of power in the country. End Of The Free Market.
When you write a book called The End of the Free Market, you can be pretty sure what the first question is going to be: "Do you really believe we're seeing the end of the free market? Really? " Yes, I do. But there are two important caveats. Not everywhere and (hopefully!) Not forever. We're used to living in a world where we see corporations as the future of political and economic power. Remember the movie "Network"? "There are no nations; there are no peoples. How about Rollerball and Robocop, variations both on the idea that big corporations are drinking the rest of the world's milkshake--and don't mind killing people who get in their way? Here's why you can put those fears aside and worry about something that's actually happening: One- The free market's largest, most successful experiment in history, the single European market, has hit some serious turbulence.
At the moment, none of these leaders is any position to praise the enduring virtues of free markets. The world economy: The odd decouple. Second Law of Thermodynamics May Explain Economic Evolution. (PhysOrg.com) -- Terms such as the "invisible hand," laissez-faire policy, and free-market principles suggest that economic growth and decline in capitalist societies seem to be somehow self-regulated. Now, scientists Arto Annila of the University of Helsinki and Stanley Salthe of Binghampton University in New York show that economic activity can be regarded as an evolutionary process governed by the second law of thermodynamics.
Their perspective may provide insight into some fundamental economic questions, such as the causes of economic growth and diversification, as well as why it’s so difficult to predict economic growth and decline. As Annila and Salthe explain in their study published in Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics was originally formulated to describe the flow of heat from hot to cold areas. From this thermodynamic perspective, decision making is ultimately about choosing the action that causes energy to flow along the most steeply descending energy gradient. Seven States of Energy Debt. Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state, Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.
In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives; The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. –from Pyrography, by John Ashbery 1987 The inevitable coming of the sovereign debt panic finally engulfed Europe this week as the derisively (or perhaps affectionately) named PIGS spilled their slop on the continent. Notable among three of the PIGS are their relatively small populations, and small contributions to either world or European GDP. I’ve identified seven large US states by four criteria that are sure to cause trouble for Washington’s political class at least for the next 3 years, through the 2012 elections. -Gregor. Payback Time - Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government - Series. Twenty-Five Years to Work Off the Debt Overhang? T. S. Eliot was right. Human beings cannot stand very much reality. As much as I have an appetite for bearish views (I figure the optimist case gets disproportionate air time), the headline of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s latest piece, “Our quarter-century penance is just starting,” is grim even by the standards of the bearish faithful.
Evans-Pritchard, as usual, marshals some persuasive information: “The current financial crisis is unlike any others,” says the Bank for International Settlements. Evans-Pritchard takes issue with Paul Krugman’s call for more fiscal stimulus. I’m not keen about either approach, at least in isolation, The idea of pushing more money through the same unreconstituted systems is likely either not to work or if it is done on a sufficient scale, to produce a reversion to the behaviors that led to the crisis, with the similar, or even worse results (since the underlying debt will be even larger).
We’ll see in a few months how viable the “green shoots” prove to be. Markets without Capitalism as part of P2P economics (2): Kevin Carson’s transition proposals. This is a follow up on yesterday’s post, arguing that the idea and practice of markets, should be divorced from their present embeddedness in an unsustainable infinite growth system such as capitalism. Today, we look at the ideas of mutualist Kevin Carson.
I will follow this up in a next installment by some of my own ideas on a commons-centered economy. Kevin sends us the following contextual info to link the two articles together: “The only thing I would add, to flesh it out: the two pieces you quote from involved dismantling the infrastructure of state capitalism from the top down. The other side of the strategy is the kind of stuff I talked about in the “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old” post–building counter-institutions from the bottom up to fill the void. It’s a sort of dialectical strategy, with the agenda you quoted providing political cover and room for the alternative economy to grow.
A proposed market strategy against corporate capitalism 1. Portfolio Theory. Place of heteregeneous and egalitarian markets in a hybrid and plurarist P2P Polity. It is important to understand that while the P2P approach is opposed to the infinite growth mechanism that is capitalism, and to its exclusion of the majority of the people of the ownership of their means of production, it is in no way against markets as such. This is both because people need the freedom to engage in the kind of exchanges and transactions of their choice, and because markets can be heteregenous markets that are very egalitarian in nature.
Especially, if we move to new forms of peer property, i.e. distributed stakeholder ownership models, which transcend the present separation between value creators (workers and peers and enterpreneurs) and ownership. Below, we start with the key argument. Capitalism is, and has always been, an anti-market. 1. Manuel De Landa: “Capitalism was, from its beginnings in the Italy of the thirteenth century, always monopolistic and oligopolistic. Many of the technological inventions that allowed her economy to take-off came from China. Product Variety, Consumer Preferences, and Web Technology: Can the Web of Data Reduce Price Competition and Increase Customer Satisfaction? Taking Distribution Seriously by Robert C. Hockett.
Tom Ferguson: The Invisible Hand Is Waving Goodbye. Replacing Cap and Trade and Carbon Taxation with Cap and Reward systems. Cap and Trade and Carbon Taxation won’t work, because there is an immediate cost but no immediate benefit. What is needed are Cap and Reward programs that directly reward virtuous behaviour, argues green computing expert Bill St. Arnaud. Bill St. Arnaud: “Roger Pielke has argued, as I have, that we need climate policies that provide IMMEDIATE and tangible benefits to the public, but have the added feature of also reducing CO2 emissions.
Such policies must also be conducive to our current lifestyle and not demand a sack cloth and ashes solutions. Hence my argument for policies like “cap and reward” where consumers and businesses would receive credits directly to purchase low carbon products or services in exchange for paying a carbon tax or levy on their carbon consumption.
The Internet can play a major role in delivering these low carbon products or services through de-materialization of physical products. Some would argue that energy efficiency should be part of this equation, as well. Competing with free: anime site treats piracy as a market failure. When lawyer Evan Stone worked as an in-house counsel for anime distributor FUNimation, the company tried all sorts of techniques to stop piracy. It sent takedown notices and DMCA complaints to anyone who would listen, like ISPs (which sometimes took action) and torrent sites (which rarely did). It hired outside firms to flood torrent sites with bogus files. It put more than 90 series online for free streaming.
Stone finally came to believe that suing file-sharers was the only approach left. "I didn't know what other options we had," he told me earlier this year. But making money in anime isn't hopeless; it turns out that anime lovers will pay for content even in an age of widely available free versions. Pirates can't compete with this kind of availability, since even the most dedicated fansub groups need time to do their own translations. A leap of faith The site was founded in 2005 by four engineers from the University of California. The Structure of the Economy May Change Faster Than We Can Learn About It. Culture, Contradiction and Marketing Pragmatism | Irish Marketing Review | Find Articles at BNET.
In Search of..... - TV.com www.tv.com/shows/in-search-of Narrarated by Leonard Nimoy, In search of was a 30 minute syndicated show that covered a wide range of paranormal topics. It pioneered a lot of the methodology that ... Search Engine - Download.com download.cnet.com/s/search-engine search engine free download - GSA Search Engine Ranker, Nomao - The personalized search engine, Zoom Search Engine, and many more programs Google Search - Download.com download.cnet.com/s/google-search google search free download - Google Search, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google Search, and many more programs Star Search - Episode Guide - TV.com www.tv.com/shows/star-search-2003/episodes Star Search episode guides on TV.com.
Entrepreneurs, Economics, & Education. In a recent post about Indian entrepreneurs [Entrepreneurs in India], I focused on a number of entrepreneurial enterprises that are receiving international attention. Almost daily, Indian entrepreneurs continue to draw attention. An article in The Economist declares that "the rich world’s bloated health-care systems can learn from India’s entrepreneurs" ["Lessons from a frugal innovator," 18 April 2009 print issue]. The article begins in the operating room of an Indian hospital where a patient lies wide awake and chatting while his doctors open his chest and operate on his heart. This "beating heart -- awake surgery" is the brainchild of Dr. Vivek Jawali. "Poverty, geography and poor infrastructure mean that India faces perhaps the world’s heaviest disease burden, ranging from infectious diseases, the traditional scourge of the poor, to diseases of affluence such as diabetes and hypertension.
Even today some jobs are available but qualified candidates are not. The State of the Art of Complementary Currencies and its Open Source Software in 2010. The State of the Art of Complementary Currencies and its Open Source Software in 2010 Michel Bauwens 9th April 2011 “The International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR) has produced a special edition which details some of the recent developments in the field of complementary currencies. It contains fifteen short papers which encompass discussions of the wider field, geographic reviews and reports on new forms of currency innovation. The edition highlights the growing range of experiments and contexts within which complementary currencies are being mobilised to solve economic, social and environmental problems.” See here for the Table of Contents and access to the articles Of particular interest for our community are: * Complementary Currency Open Source Software in 2010, Matthew Slater, This report briefly covers the field of non-commercial mutual credit software.
Market design helps people attain goals effectively. Michael Giberson Harvard economic systems designer Al Roth is profiled in the Boston Globe: Academically speaking, Roth is a pioneer of so-called market design: finding situations where a market is failing — often, a place that most people wouldn’t even recognize as a market — and making it work better. Roth has influenced a cadre of young, energetic market designers, many of whom have taken up prominent positions at top universities. Inspired by Roth’s work, these rising economists are also setting their sights on real-world problems. Some market-oriented people will react negatively to the idea of “economists … as society’s mechanics,” but the negative reaction is based on a misunderstanding.
When most people think of economics, they think of money — the study of how much things cost and why. One response to the lack of markets for transplantable kidneys is to agitate for change, to advocate lifting the regulations that prevent it. Like this: Like Loading... Ben Edelman - Home. Biography - Peter A. Coles. Al Roth's game theory, experimental economics, and market design page. The Matchmaker. The New American Normal - NYT.