Charles Murray: Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem. Spain's Crisis Pushes Educated Into 'Economic Exile' Hide captionGovernment employees demonstrate against the Spanish government's austerity measures in Madrid, on Friday. The economic situation has forced some Spaniards to leave the country for work. Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images Government employees demonstrate against the Spanish government's austerity measures in Madrid, on Friday. The economic situation has forced some Spaniards to leave the country for work.
In Spain, the growing crisis — debt, austerity and joblessness — has prompted more people to vote with their feet. The Spanish government denies it, but the "brain drain" has become something of a flood with more and more educated, skilled Spaniards moving abroad. Neurobiologist Elisa Cuevas Garcia from Madrid sips an iced espresso on a hot afternoon at an outdoor cafe in Berlin. The Spanish government subsidized her training, but she left Spain a few years ago for a research post in Berlin where she's finishing up her Ph.D. Why some countries are richer than others. Capitalist countries’ prosperity is rooted in the ancient Cistercian monastic order. (Photo: Colourbox) Why is the Western part of the world enjoying wealth and growth, while other countries are left behind in poverty? A new PhD thesis seeks to find an answer to this question by digging deep into the underlying mechanisms of growth. One of the clues the thesis follows begins in France in 1098, when a breakaway group of monks formed a new monastic order.
We’ll get back to that, but first we need to delve a little deeper into the underlying factors of wealth and growth. Here, the economic literature points to three factors: institutions, culture and geography. The idea is that some countries have established institutions that form a good breeding ground for education, savings and technological progress – or they have simply been blessed with a culture or a geography that has formed a productive environment. Economic success may be due to diligence and moderation Big differences in the world. The Meaning of Libor-gate. The price of Treasury bonds is supported by the Federal Reserve’s large purchases.
The Federal Reserve’s purchases are often misread as demand arising from a “flight to quality” due to concern about the EU sovereign debt problem and possible failure of the euro. Another rationale used to explain the demand for Treasuries despite their negative yield is the “flight to safety.” A 2% yield on a Treasury bond is less of a negative interest rate than the yield of a few basis points on a bank CD, and the US government, unlike banks, can use its central bank to print the money to pay off its debts.
It is possible that some investors purchase Treasuries for these reasons. However, the “safety” and “flight to quality” explanations could not exist if interest rates were rising or were expected to rise. It is the prospect of ever lower interest rates that causes investors to purchase bonds that do not pay a real rate of interest. What follows is not an apology for fraud. Think about it this way. Charts: What Your Trash Reveals About the World Economy. "The fastest way to reduce solid waste volumes is to have a recession," writes World Bank urban specialist Dan Hoornweg in a report on the state of trash in cities.
Hoornweg elegantly sums up why garbage is and will remain a vexing problem. Here in the United States, we hear "zero waste" and think sanctimonious yuppies. Yet much of the world's population is too poor to buy—and throw away—much stuff in the first place. But as developing countries become wealthier and adopt higher standards of living, they're also following our wasteful lead. Here are three key takeaways from the report: 1. The World Bank report reveals stark but expected contrasts between rich, industrialized countries and those less well off. Americans throw away "enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months. " When it comes to the amount of trash per person, Americans and Europeans are the dubious winners. Current World Trash Generation (lbs. Projected World Trash Generation, 2025 (lbs. 2.
Volkswagen: VW conquers the world. Yes, There Is an Alternative to Capitalism: Mondragon Shows the Way. There is no alternative ("Tina") to capitalism? Dani Martinez, innovation director at Orbea bicycles, part of Mondragon Co-operative Corporation, in Mallabia, 2011. (Photograph: Vincent West/Westphoto for the Guardian) Really? We are to believe, with Margaret Thatcher, that an economic system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do? Capitalism's recurring tendencies toward extreme and deepening inequalities of income, wealth, and political and cultural power require resignation and acceptance – because there is no alternative?
I understand why such a system's leaders would like us to believe in Tina. Of course, alternatives exist; they always do. Modern societies have mostly chosen a capitalist organization of production. Capitalism thus entails and reproduces a highly undemocratic organization of production inside enterprises. . © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited. What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Mother Russia.
China Embraces Ponzi-Bonds. China is preparing to launch a program that will create the same complex debt-instruments that triggered the global financial crisis in 2008. The pilot program will allow banks to convert pools of loans into securities via off-balance sheet securities firms called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) or Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV). The process, which is called securitization, helps banks to circumvent capital requirements by hiding debt on off their books, thus, allowing them to increase leverage by many orders of magnitude.
Securitization turbo-charges credit expansion while concealing the risks from shareholders, investors and depositors. Chinese authorities claim that securitization will help to kick-start the economy by “freeing up funds for lending at a time when Beijing is seeking ways to bolster growth”. But according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, increasing “lending” does not appear to be the real goal at all. See? Garbage, garbage, and more garbage. Why? The 32 Sexiest, Tastiest, Creepiest And Craziest Economic Indicators In The World. Suzuki: 'Absurd' to Let Corporations Profit in Name of 'Saving Planet' GUELPH, Ontario — Allowing economic forces to be a role player in saving the environment is “absurd,” says Canada’s most prominent environmentalist. Suzuki in this undated file photo. “It’s absolutely absurd to make money about saving lives. Crazy,” Suzuki said, in response to comments from fellow panelists at University of Guelph.
David Suzuki made the comment Thursday while participating in a University of Guelph President’s Dialogues panel discussion. The title of the session was: Climate Change: debate, dilemma, death? “It’s absolutely absurd to make money about saving lives. Green energy entrepreneur and inventor Sherolyn Vettese and former Yale professor and Zerofootprint founder and chief executive officer Ron Dembo both just expressed that there was a role for the economy and business to play in saving the planet. That had Suzuki shaking his head. “We’ve got to leave the corporate sector out of it. He called the economy a “tiny circle. . ” © 2012 Guelf Mercury News. Cenk Uygur Asks If the US Should be Following Iceland's Model in Dealing With the Financial Crisis. For all the fearmongering we hear out of our politicians on the right about how heaven forbid we're going to turn into Greece, the one country you never hear them talk about any more is Iceland.
The reason they don't is, as Cenk Uygur explained on his show this Tuesday, they took a different path than the United States after their financial crisis and nationalized the banks, threw some the people responsible for the crash in jail and bailed out the homeowners instead of worrying about only bailing out the banks. And now they're coming back and their economy is growing again. FDL's Dave Dayden has been writing about the financial crisis in depth for some time and he visited the set of The Young Turks to discuss whether the United States should be looking to Iceland as a model to emulate as he wrote about here: Iceland Provides Blueprint for How to Deal With the Financial Crisis: I love this story.
So does the story end there? More there so go read the rest. Wall Street And High Frequency Trading: The 86% Vs. The 99% Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows that the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight is fixed;the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes…And everybody knows Last week Bill Maher took the Occupy Wall Street movement to task for not getting more directly involved in the political process. Basically, he dismissed the plans that OWS has prepared for this summer, suggesting that they’re ineffective, and a little ‘too last year’ to be of any consequence. In a way, he was echoing the old trope about the movement, that they lack ‘focus,’ and don’t have any demands of substance. While it’s my experience that Maher is pretty well-informed, I felt that he was a little unnecessarily glib in this instance.
Only 16% of all stock market transactions are being made by sentient beings. Goldman Sachs?! Unthinkable. Here, The Times breaks down how high frequency trading works: Ha-ha ! Me? The World's Richest Countries And Biggest Economies, In 2 Graphics : Planet Money. Gross Domestic Product — GDP — may have its limits. But it's a useful, broad measure for looking at national economies. It's basically the total dollar value of all of the goods and services a country produces in a year.
Here are all the countries with GDP of over $100 billion: Notes GDP at current exchange rate for 2010. Having a very large GDP means a country is an important economic player in the world. A better measure for looking at the wealth or poverty of a nation's citizens is GDP per capita (adjusted for the fact that $1 buys more in some countries than in others). Here are all the countries in the world with GDP per capita over $15,000 a year: GDP per capita (purchasing power parity), 2010.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the two graphs is China, which has the second biggest economy in the world but is still very poor. It's also worth noting that GDP per capita is just an average. Update: The World Bank does not list Taiwan as a separate country. You Didn't Really Think Anything Would Happen To JPMorgan Chase, Did You? Facebook and the 100 Billion. Investors that shoot for IPO allocations needn’t worry that a high stock price overvalues the company if they are confident they can find a ‘greater fool’ willing to pay more.Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2012.
With cult-like projections, Mark Zuckerberg’s face was beamed across a screen at Hacker Square. Facebook was, after all, having its heralded float as a public company, though the occasion could not cease but be a social event of some magnitude. That, and the fact of its founder’s marriage, which received the usual empty adulation that such a network facilitates. The shares in the company’s shares finished at $38.37, though at one point stocks were trading at $42 a share. The question then is whether such a value is not just a touch exaggerated, something which might be said of the entire social media experiment.
With Facebook, we are in a curious situation of producing what we consume in one act. Its value, like its functionality, is fictitious or better still, virtual. Colonized by Corporations. May 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” Illustration by Mr. Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks.
The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist. [slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='resource contains economist'] views this month; [slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='strtotime equals 2011-07-01|interval equals -1'] overall Some while back, I found myself sitting next to an accomplished economics professor at a dinner event.
Shortly after pleasantries, I said to him, “economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,” just to see where things would go. It was a lively and informative conversation. I was somewhat alarmed by the disconnect between economic theory and physical constraints—not for the first time, but here it was up-close and personal. Cast of characters: Physicist, played by me; Economist, played by an established economics professor from a prestigious institution.
Note: because I have a better retention of my own thoughts than those of my conversational companion, this recreation is lopsided to represent my own points/words. Act One: Bread and Butter Physicist: Hi, I’m Tom. Economist: Hi Tom, I’m [ahem..cough]. Total U.S. Taibbi Calls MF Global Scam 'Straight Up Embezzlement' Using U.S. Dollars, Zimbabwe Finds a Problem - No Change. But these days, Robson Madzumbara spends a lot of time quite literally waiting around for change. Pocket change, that is. He waits for it at supermarkets, on the bus, at the vegetable stall he runs and just about anywhere he buys or sells anything. “We never have enough change,” he said, manning the vegetable stall he has run for the past two decades. “Change is a big problem in Zimbabwe.” For years, Zimbabwe was infamous for the opposite problem: mind-boggling inflation. Trips to the supermarket required ridiculous boxloads of cash. By January 2009, the country was churning out bills worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which were soon so worthless they would not buy a loaf of bread (the notes now circulate on eBay, as gag gifts).
But since Zimbabwe started using the United States dollar as its currency in 2009, it has run into a surprising quandary. “For your average Zimbabwean, a dollar is a lot of money,” said Tony Hawkins, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe. A Short History of Neoliberalism (And How We Can Fix It) As a university lecturer I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. But today this assumption comes ready-made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. It has not always been this way, however. Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new, that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests.
So how did things change? Where did neoliberalism come from? Figure 1. Source: R. Figure 2. Russians Court Luxury Real Estate With Record-Breaking Sales. The Crisis of Credit Visualized. Living without cash: Does it lead you to spend more or less? Greece on the breadline: cashless currency takes off | World news. MarketRiders, Betterment, and Personal Capital: Three sites that help you stop investing like an idiot. Noreena Hertz On Co-op Capitalism. Preparing for a post-oil era. China's Second-Richest Man Says ‘Monopoly' State Needs More Entrepreneurs. The Pyramid of Capitalism, 1911. Nouriel Roubini — Jeffrey Sachs.
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