Money
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Correlation of US stocks highest since 1987 crash - FT.com
It's quick, easy and you'll be able to read up to 8 articles per 30 days. Plus you can use these tools: News by Email Get the latest headlines and industry sector-specific briefings direct to your inbox. Over 40 daily updates to choose from, plus set keyword alerts for news as soon as it is published. Portfolio The FT.com Portfolio tool is designed to let you track, manage, and make decisions on your equity holdings.Every new epoch needs its adapted spirituality. A good candidate for a positive affirmation of a p2p spirituality is this book from marvelous author and speaker Charles Eistenstein, whose earlier The Ascent of Humanity offered a most profound critique of the current system. Here, he describes the positive alternative.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Book of the Week: Charles Eistenstein’s Sacred Economics is out!
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Bernard Lietaer and Christian Arnsperger on reinventing the financial system
” Dawna Jones talks to Bernard Lietaer, author of “The Future of Money” and the forthcoming “New Currencies for a New World”, about the root causes of financial uncertainty and what practical steps businesses can take to insure against it. So just how can small and medium size business reclaim control over financial instability? At their heart, economic downturns and financial instability are symptoms of a financial and monetary system that is unsustainable. Yet nature shows us how to create a structurally stable monetary system and the same principles can help business survive the current turmoil. In this special half hour interview, we’ll also how local innovations in currency serve to stabilize cash flow, local and regional economies.” “So here’s the inconvenient truth: The monetary logic of capitalist debt which rules the day makes any collective transition project towards a pluri-economy based on a broadened equality-of-opportunity principle virtually impracticable.P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The Bitcoin Epoch: It is Akin to the Printing Press Revolution
News has been filtering in about the problems that are besetting a virtual currently called Bitcoin . The day to day rumblings of its story are fascinating enough but it is the evolution of the underlying idea that I think is important. This is one of those events that we often miss at the time and look back on as ushering in a new epoch in its long-term implications for the world, as for example the printing press did it its day. So what is Bitcoin ? It’s a virtual currency that can be used to buy and sell with much as you can with a normal currency.
A month ago I heard folks talking online about a virtual currency called bitcoin that is untraceable and un-hackable. Folks were using it to buy and sell drugs online, support content they liked and worst of all -- gasp! -- play poker. Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband. I sent the 30 or so producers of my show This Week in Startups out to research the top players, and we did a show on Bitcoin on May 10.
L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen - Launch -
In "Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis", Bernard Lietaer continues his interest in sustainable monetary systems. This time around he make a tie to complex systems and makes an important contrast between "efficiency" and "resilience". Lietaer and I have been on the same page at least as far back as Douglas Rushkoff and I started discussing "open source currency" (Rushkoff http://rushkoff.com/articles/the-feature/open-source-currency/ , Energy Bulletin http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4207 ). In this case, though, his language is a little weak, and so I'd like to recast it in complex systems terms here. First, "efficiency" is a useless term because it is always a ratio with an all-too-often unmentioned denominator, i.e. efficiency of what with respect to what?
Sustainable Monetary Systems | Forward Foundation Blog
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Kevin Carson on Bitcoin and the Phyles: dystopia or utopia?
Kevin Carson ‘s take on Bitcoin , as reproduced from The Bitcoin Sun : “Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age ” was set some years after encrypted currencies and e-commerce removed most economic transactions into darknets beyond the government’s capability of monitoring and regulating, and thus caused tax bases around the world to implode. This was followed, in short order, by the collapse of most nation-states. In the ensuing Interregnum, the defunct nation-states were replaced by city-states and by networked global civil societies called “phyles.” The major phyles leased enclaves in most major city-states around the world, much as the Venetian merchant guilds leased “Venetian quarters” in the major port cities of the Mediterranean. Membership in the phyles was voluntary, and the provision of the kinds of public services and social safety nets formerly associated with states was generally tied to voluntary membership subscriptions of some sort.
What I am about to summarize or, more or less faithfully record, here is a discussion on facebook which should be available for future reference … temporary as they are those traces that remain of our social networking interactions and exchanges of ideas and views. Michel Bauwens started the ball rolling by pointing to an article that argued that “Even in Hard Times, Boosting Minimum Wage Makes Sense” . The article’s discussion was about some US State legislatures proposing to increase the minimum wage over and above the federal minimum, and doing so in times of economic hardship. Several voices affirmed that increasing the minimum wage would not be costing jobs , as has traditionally been said it would. Edward Miller intervened somewhat forcefully, saying that “it doesn’t [make sense]. It is a good way to create unemployment… yet even if it could boost aggregate wages, that would merely cause rents to rise.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The minimum wage, demurrage and the economics of labor
“After the Pirate Party’s political entry in the 2006 Swedish elections, we set out on a five-step plan to make sure that the offline civil liberties would carry over into the online world, against the wishes of the old guard. Each of these five steps would traditionally be impossible, and we’re done with the first two and are approaching the fourth: 3. Getting entry in the Swedish Parliament, which would start turning things around immediately. But in order to really change European policy, we need to…
P2P Foundation
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Book of the Week (2): The History of Stamp Scrip
* Book: New Currency: How Money Changes the World As We Know It . By Jordan Bruce MacLeod. Integral Publishers, 2009 This very well written introduction to why we need differently designed currency has an interesting review of historical experiences, in particular how evolutions after the meltdown of 1929 could help find solutions for the meltdown of 2008.
Is Ripple the Future of Money? « webisteme
Ripple is an open source project to create a new type of decentralised currency based on trust between friends. While Ripple’s technical development is ongoing, many of the core ideas are in place, as well as some prototype implementations. As I’ve studied Ripple over the last couple of weeks, the project has excited me more and more. It has similar disruptive potential to Bitcoin, whilst retaining the advantages of abundant, credit-based money. In this post, I want to explore what Ripple is, and why it might be the next great leap in monetary innovation. Detour: Mutual creditP2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The Ripple mutual credit and payment system: Will It Work?
Should it work, its consequences would be great. A mutual credit system which could scale around the world would put people in control of the money supply. It would create a decentralised source of credit money freely available whenever individuals and institutions were prepared to trust each other, and immune from the monetary abuse and fiscal policy decisions of governments. Money which was backed by trust between people, rather than the threat of force or the fear of bankruptcy, would be a profoundly disruptive monetary leap.Recent weeks have been exciting for a relatively new kind of currency speculator. In just three weeks, the total value of a unique new digital currency called Bitcoin has jumped four times, to over $40 million. Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme. For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.
What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters - Technology Review
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Can Ripple credit routing develop into an actual currency?
The world of alternative currencies is abuzz right now with discussions of the pros and cons of Bitcoin, a peer-based currency that is being “mined” using the capability of computers to solve a complex mathematical problem. A good summation of the discussions is on Quora, in the different answers to the question: HandsCoins-495x278 There is also speculation on how bitcoin, or rather the development of crypto-currencies, will influence and profoundly change our economic thinking, especially our way of taxing.Square's new apps allow consumers to pay their bills without swiping a credit card. But the company has competition. On Monday, Jack Dorsey, Square’s co-founder and chief executive, announced a way for shoppers to pay by simply giving their name to the merchant.