Deborah Friedell reviews ‘The Everything Store’ by Brad Stone · LRB 5 December 2013. Jeff Bezos thinks of himself as a great man, and why shouldn’t he?
‘Our vision is to have every book ever printed, in any language, available in under 60 seconds.’ He wrote that ten years ago; now it’s almost true. Jamie Martin reviews ‘The Battle of Bretton Woods’ by Benn Steil · LRB 21 November 2013. When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found.
Who rates the rating agencies? France last week had its credit rating knocked down a tick from AA+ to AA by one of the ‘big three’ rating agencies.
Standard & Poor’s blamed the French economy’s sluggish recovery, high unemployment and a high debt-GDP ratio. Credit ratings, whose rationale is to make risk assessments for investors, matter for governments and other bond issuers, since lower ratings mean higher borrowing costs, and downgraded bonds can tailspin as increased repayments up the likelihood of issuers’ defaulting. For governments, that means higher budget deficits, and calls for austerity to balance the books. So credit ratings are big bananas. But what are credit rating agencies? As usual with government-sanctioned market activity, the questions are who regulates, in whose name, and who holds the regulator itself to account.
Participants in the securitization industry realized that they needed to secure favorable credit ratings in order to sell structured products to investors. How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled by Paul Krugman. The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin Penguin, 430 pp., $29.95 Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $24.95.
Best Management Talent. The Royal Mail's Retiring Chief Executive The Royal Mail’s Annual Report was published on 3 June, containing details of its executive pay for the previous year.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Marx, Public Choice Theory, And The Utility-Maximizing Consumer. Image: Class Struggle board game, ©1980 Avalon Hill.
Richard M. Locke: Can Global Brands Create Just Supply Chains? Rob Reich: What Are Foundations For? Judge Richard Posner, one of the foremost American jurists outside the Supreme Court, once observed, “A perpetual charitable foundation . . . is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody.
It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets . . . and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.” Why, he wondered, don’t we think of these foundations as “total scandals”? If foundations are total scandals, then we have a massive problem on our hands. We are now living through the second golden age of American philanthropy. After The Feminine Mystique. Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in?
Www.katiecouric.com Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In isn’t the first social movement spearheaded by a Facebook executive. “Together we are starting a movement,” announced Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s 2007 F8 conference. Zuckerberg’s movement turned out to be the “Facebook platform,” a technology that allows developers to build third-party applications to operate within Facebook, a “revolutionary” innovation to bring hackers into the Facebook fold.
But like users, anyone developing for Facebook must scramble to adjust whenever Facebook makes changes. Turtles from the Shells. Mexico drug war result of NAFTA? Text smaller Text bigger With federal police and military units forced to secure the border town of Nuevo Laredo, U.S.
-trained anti-drug commandos now protecting the drug cartels and Mexican narcotics pouring into the America, some experts are suggesting Mexico’s instability is a direct result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the economic pact meant to be create a border boom. In Defense of Soviet Waiters. There’s been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around.
The Real—and Simple—Equation That Killed Wall Street. Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace. [This post was co-written by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch ] “In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 79 Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. Red Plenty Seminar. Saudi Arabia Stakes a Claim on the Nile - Water Grabbers - National Geographic. This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater, a special National Geographic Freshwater News series on how grabbing land—and water—from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures.
Michael J. Sandel: When Markets Crowd Out Morals. We live in a time when almost anything can be bought and sold. The Red and the Black.