Joseph Stiglitz's preface to the new book "Exiting from the Crisis"
Rising inequality. Planet Money reports on a new OECD study that finds that income inequality is rising worldwide within most countries: Planet Money cites three possible explanations given in the OECD study for the trend: 1. Robots, etc.Trade barriers have come down. Technology has advanced. The combination of these two factors has disproportionately benefited highly-skilled workers. You want to be the guy building the robot, not the guy whose job got replaced by a robot.2. That last explanation is the Paul Krugman explanation. There is a fourth explanation. UPDATE: Oops. Be Sociable, Share! Comments comments. Public opinion on capitalism: Market troubles. Libya Exposes Fault Lines In The Mediterranean – Part III. Bulging youth populations, limited opportunities and repression create an explosive mix in the Middle East NEW YORK: Many factors are behind the revolutions sweeping across the Arab region, including decades of brutal repression, widespread corruption, stagnant development, absence of genuine democracy and meddling of outside powers.
But all these are exacerbated by the region’s demography. Recent high fertility levels coupled with low mortality have produced not only rapid population growth, but also large numbers and proportions of youths aged 15 to 24 years, commonly referred to as “youth bulges.” Frustration builds as growing numbers of young, educated, urban Arab men and women are forced to confront common trends, including increased competition and diminished opportunities, high levels of unemployment with few productive jobs, delayed marriages, gender inequality and human rights abuses. Another trend is delayed ages at marriage and family formation.
Vulture Fund May Cause ‘Constitutional Crisis’ in Hong Kong. China must approve a U.S. investment fund’s lawsuit in Hong Kong against the Democratic Republic of the Congo before it can proceed, the central African country’s lawyers said in a challenge to the Chinese region’s independent judiciary. “This is a matter that self-evidently affects the position of the central people’s government,” Barrie Barlow, a lawyer representing Congo, told Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal today. FG Hemisphere Associates LLC, a New York-based so-called vulture fund which buys distressed debt, has sued Congo in jurisdictions around the world seeking to seize assets to enforce two arbitration awards. In Hong Kong, its attempt to collect payments owed to Congo by state-owned China Railway Group Ltd., places the financial center’s judicial independence at stake. China’s foreign ministry has filed three letters to Hong Kong’s judiciary in this case stating no foreign government can be sued in the city’s courts. $100 Million Basic Law Mining Rights South Africa, Australia.
The Future of Money Is… Plato once offered an answer to what drives innovation: “Necessity, who is the mother of invention”. This can’t be more true today in the banking and financial services industry. So how have customer needs changed in the last few years, and what does it tell us about the future of money? I try to answer these question after listening and interacting with visionaries in the financial and start up worlds who were present at the top financial innovation event in the country: The Future of Money and Technology Summit. Overall, I found myself immersed in a sea of positivism and excitement about the future of financial services. Yes, there was dose of realists at the conference, and to certain extend retrograde thinking. It Will Be Very, Very Different The last 3 years have provided the perfect opportunity for start ups and big banks alike to innovate.
Customer needs have changed significantly. 1. Other consumer trends that will impact how we bank? Money Will Be Mobile, Virtual @RobGarciaSJ. Darwin as Economist? - NYTimes.com. Only the biggest and oldest companies are happy... Only the biggest and oldest companies are happy being listed on public markets today. As a result, the stock market as a whole increasingly fails to reflect the vibrancy and heterogeneity of the broader economy. To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite. At risk, then, is the shareholder democracy that America forged, slowly, over the past 50 years. Civilians, rather than plutocrats, controlled corporate America, and that relationship improved standards of living and usually kept the worst of corporate abuses in check.
With America Inc. owned by its citizens, the success of American business translated into large gains in the stock portfolios of anybody who put his savings in the market over most of the postwar period. Today, however, stock markets, once the bedrock of American capitalism, are slowly becoming a noisy sideshow that churns out increasingly meager returns. May The Best Currency Win. If I was a very wealthy person and I wanted to put my money in a hedge fund that protects me from all possible future outcomes or perils in the financial industry – I would be looking for a fund denominated in social currency. Should things go wrong, the only place you can go for support will be your immediate community. After all, you can’t eat Gold. The Cradle of Civilization, again? Egypt has demonstrated with astonishing clarity in a remarkable twist in human social evolution how this game plays out.
What would happen in the U.S. if… …government austerity measures stop funding education, health care, police protection, and the legal system? Social media applications will move in to fill the void. ….if inefficient industries like the travel industry, publishing, advertising, politics, academia, and financial services hold their customers hostage by acting as the gatekeeper? Social media applications will pull the gate down. The Great Conversion Factor May the best currency win. The Great Panic of 2015: The next worldwide financial crisis could be a scary replay of the Great Recession. - By Annie Lowrey. The Great Recession officially started in December 2007, according to the bean-counters at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Most people on Wall Street or in Washington, however, would probably name Sept. 15, 2008, as the real start date: That was when unprecedented losses in housing-backed securities led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros., setting off the banking panic, the credit crunch, and the rest of the horrible aftermath.
But the better question is not when the last financial crisis began, but when the next one will. Annie Lowrey, formerly Slate’s Moneybox columnist, is economic policy reporter for the New York Times. According to some creative analysts at the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, that date is April 26, 2015. In a paper presented last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos to much chattering from the fur-and-cashmere class, Wyman analysts imagine an all-too-familiar scenario coming back all too soon. That leads us back to April 26, 2015. Specifications for Social Capitalism: Game over? Perché la Cina cresce così in fretta? La domanda è stata formulata già qualche tempo fa.
Era il titolo di un documento del Fondo Monetario Internazionale pubblicato nel 1997, ed è una domanda tanto intrigante per dirigenti d’azienda e i responsabili politici di oggi quanto lo era per i loro predecessori. In effetti, la questione della crescita è un tema centrale delle conversazioni d'affari attuali a proposito di ognuna delle principali economie emergenti. Posta a più ampio spettro, la questione della crescita ha più importanza oggi di quanta ne avesse una decina d'anni fa. Dirigenti aziendali e funzionari governativi sono sempre più impegnati a chiedersi come le loro organizzazioni potranno beneficiare dell'interazione con i paesi emergenti.
Nel frattempo, la loro definizione di “paese emergente” si è estesa a comprendere molte più nazioni di allora. Capire la crescita La distinzione è cruciale. Da cosa saranno dunque determinate le differenze più evidenti fra le traiettorie di crescita? L’amaro bilancio dell’eccezionalismo, alcune domande scomode su Mirafiori. Walking Into The Trap Of Influence Currencies | Conversational Currency. How To Play The Value Game. The Value Game is a new class of business methods that converts financial currency into social currency and vice versa.
The benefits of the Value Game are innumerable since social currency is the only true alternate means of storage and exchange for value that can hedge a weakening dollar. The rules of the game are really quite simple The Value Game Starts and ends with Dollars (financial currency)All new value is created within the game is denominated as “Social Currency”Value is created from 3 or more communities interacting with a shared asset How to build a Value Game In order to build a Value Game, the social entrepreneur finds an asset that people are willing to share, and then identify three or more communities whose interaction with the asset creates social value. The following are 3 Case studies currently under development at The Ingenesist Project: Example 1: Social Flights is a new startup that aggregates private jets and deploys them to the social graph. Gaming The Game. Why Is Chris Hedges A Lone Voice In Criticizing Huffington Post’s Business Model? « AlterPolitics - Progressive Blog For Politics, World Issues, Arts & Entertainment.
Chris Hedges’ new TruthDig column, Huffington’s Plunder, raises a topic that seems to provoke a lot of uneasiness in the liberal blogosphere. It points a spotlight on the business model pioneered by one of the country’s most prominent progressive voices, Arianna Huffington. Huffington recently released a book entitled “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream”. In it she argues that our trade and economic policies have focused on corporate profits at the expense of the American worker. She posted at the Huffington Post her reasons for writing the book.
It’s become a bad carnival game where the rich always get the grand prize and the average American walks away empty-handed. Hedges criticizes Huffington for engaging in the exact same business practices that she publicly denounces: But Hedges responds that this line of argument is used by every company that exploits its workers: Think this won’t happen? It’s Time for a Knowledge Economy Balance Sheet | Conversational Currency. The Walrus | June 2004 | "Games Theories" by Clive Thompson. Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen an unpopular field—welfare research—and published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, “had never influenced anybody.” He’d scraped together a professorship at the Fullerton campus of California State University, a school that did not even grant Ph.D.s.
He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he’d always done: he played video games. Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the “player auctions.” As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at.
He began calculating frantically. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. Castronova is a natural role-player. Visa Adds Person-to-Person Payments in U.S. Visa just announced the ability for U.S. Visa card holders to send and receive funds from other cardholders anywhere in the world. The system, which will hit later in 2011, will greatly increase the scope of person-to-person digital payments globally. Visa says it's mplementing the personal-payments protocol throughout its systems in the U.S., which means that at some point soon anyone in the U.S. holding a Visa debit or credit card will be able to send money to anyone else who owns a Visa card anywhere (though if you owe money to someone with a Mastercard, or just want it sent to their bank account, you're out of luck).
It's a breakthrough, Visa notes, that extends the services Visa offers from the point of sale into the ephemeral digital space and lets consumers "pay one another. " Direct personal payments are, of course, already commonplace around the world; there are more than 70 different programs in place to enable account holders to send funds to Visa accounts. Social Capitalism: The Value Game. The Value Game (TVG) introduces a new class of business plans that will help communities to articulate social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital toward the production of goods and services.
The earliest versions were developed in a international education project in Mexico under NAFTA (1996-1997), and at The Boeing Company (1998-2008). More recently, Social Flights deployed TVG in 2009-2011, and CRManage in 2011-2013. TVG is a multi-agent algorithmic game comprised of a shared asset and a collection of diverse players (agents) in whose individual best interest it is to preserve the asset (sustain play) rather than consume it (game over). The proper selection of the asset and the proper grouping of the players defines the game incentives and payouts (sources and sinks). General Form: The following video describes an early version of The Value Game beginning with the Airplane Game and then generalizing the idea to include all shared asset communities.
Case Studies: Barry Sussman: Is Middle East Unrest Causing Oil Price Spikes? Maybe Not. Reporters and editors, based on past experience, should examine the extent to which stock market speculators and the oil companies are pushing gas prices to the $4 mark. For guidance, here are some questions and leads from experts who wrote about the subject for Nieman Watchdog in the period 2005 to 2009, when oil and gas prices shot last shot through the roof. According to some skeptical experts, sharp spikes in oil and gas prices in recent years were brought about more by speculators and price-gouging by energy companies, and less by problems of supply and demand.
Nieman Watchdog ran story after story to that effect. Gas prices again are headed to the $4 mark. For a while the upward move was blamed on the revolution in Egypt. The press needs to take a deeper look here. Other factors point to the same culprits creating a crisis where there isn't one. It's possible of course that fear of the unknown is driving up oil prices to an extent.
Peter K.