What Some People are Saying About the Credit Crisi...
History repeats itself. The story of economics is that new generations don't seem to have the capacity to learn from previous generations. Everyone seems to get wrapped up in a frenzy of greed and fear. Few people around the world will remain unaffected by what is happening in America. It is unfortunate because of the numbers of older vulnerable people on fixed incomes that will be impacted severely. They worked to reap their rewards of retirement only to find the government had not drawn up the rules of play for the banking systems carefully enough and much of their futures were under threat from inaction and complacency.
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A Review of Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nichola...
If you are a stock market investor, this is the book you should be reading if you have not done so already. It would have been easier for you had you absorbed what Taleb has to say many years ago, but now you have had a taste of the negative, you can turn your efforts into the positive. I remember attending the lectures of John Kenneth Galbraith who spoke often of stock market crashes. His ideas were based on a thorough reading and analysis of the 1929 crash. Investing in the stock market is gambling, but it may be the only way that the 'small' investor has to get a portion of the capitalist economic pie. The rewards of investing in stocks and shares can be considerable, but the small investor has always to be aware of the sharks and black holes.
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Weathering the Financial Storms Yet to Come
There are storms of many kinds: snow storms such as covered the Eastern portions of North America and financial storms that cover the globe. You might ask why the US economy when it is producing so much in the way of armaments has such a slow growth relative to other countries. The means that armaments could be taking a largish share of the productive capacity. Is military spending government spending, and who pays for it? When? And, obviously, who dies for it?
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The Roller Coaster of Speculation
The world has a lot of liquidity despite the credit crunch in America which started the process of adjustment towards a sustainable balance of opinions. What governs the economy these days is not so much anything that is solid, but which portfolio mix will satisfy your risk preferences. For better or worse, we live in a world of speculation and the roads that we normally follow are weakening and blowing away like the sands of a desert in a storm.
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Energy, Inflation, Growth, Interest Rates, Exchange ....
After a very long period when inflation seemed to be very much under control in the United States and the UK, we had better than average bursts of trading-up in the stock and property markets. The US dollar lost ground to the Euro, the Canadian dollar and the Pound. United States, the UK and Canada were economies to watch despite their seeming success at restraining inflation. All three were involved in fighting foreign wars which still are costly, and which seem to have no end.
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Is the Profit Motive for New Therapeutic Chemical ...
Who said that the profit motive works? If the profit motive worked, we would have saved billions of lives of people in developing countries who have died of disease. As it is, the children have died and we are responsible for not pushing our governments in Western economise to act more decisively and more effectively. I can think of no better solution to many economic problems that an over expansion of the therapeutic research at government expense ... forget the private sector. It has failed to deliver the goods to the third world. Why should we help the third world fight disease?
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Maximizing Value or Efficiency But Not Both
Economists can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they know that competition is imperfect, but, on the other hand, they talk about maximizing value and the need for competition. My point is that the two are incompatible most of the time because people generally do not know what is best for their environment.
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Economists Search For Equilibrium
A constant theme in economic thought has been that of equilibrium. But, the search for equilibrium was always elusive. Even Karl Marx in his Das Kapital was under the illusion that an economic system would at some time reach an equilibrium. Others knew better, and it was Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard professor and economic historian, who was studying business cycles, concluded that the capitalist economic system, and for that matter any economic system did not linger in an equilibrium. He even felt that there was no dynamic equilibrium, and pointed to new commodities as the reason. Economies are constantly subject to innovation he wrote.
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How much will the US Fed Lower Interest Rates?
I can remember a time when the SDR value of the US dollar was above 1.00! What we have is desperate measures for desperate times. But, don't despair. What the Fed may do is responding to an opportunity provided by the Bank of Canada which lowered interest rates so as to slow down the rise in the Canadian dollar. Its one thing to have your currency appreciate by almost 30 percent, but think what that does to your competitiveness.
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Read About it - Your country is a member of the IM...
Reading about economics and economy is both interesting and may be critical to your comfort and survival. Get the Economist magazine (for an expert view), the Christian Science Monitor (for a balanced view), or the Wall Street Journal and read about what is going on in the messy economic environment that our world leaders have under the Bush administration managed to drag up.
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Investing Wisely as Exchange Rates Move Using the ...
You might have guessed that we have entered a period of financial and economic adjustment. Central banks have lowered interest rates and will lower them further as they seek to minimize the impact of unwise investments by the public and by banks. These unwise investments are imploding in value as people react suddenly to bad news.
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The Seeds of War
It used to be a joke in Montreal that the cement companies, who were controlled by certain Italian interests that had migrated from Chicago required a good project every five or so years. The price of cement was pushed up to $15 from a cost of $5, and a cement tower is added to cream more profit. Thus, we had the St. Lawrence Seaway project, EXPO 67, the Jacques Cartier bridge repair, Mirabelle Airport, Man and His World, the highways to Ottawa and Ontario, the great Hydro projects of northern Quebec, the Liberation of Quebec from Canada, the Unifying of Quebec with Canada.
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The Grand Assise
I was once a junior civil servant given the task of doing whatever I was told. It seems strange now to look back on it, but the issue of world debt has been an issue with me for much of my career in government and private industry.
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Debt as a Cause of Wars
Over the past year, I have been engaged in taking the first steps towards making a film of the Wuh Lax stories and "The Cosmic Lantern." This is an enormous challenge and theoretically beyond the budget of the most determined independent film producers. I suppose the mistake of a film producer would be to underestimate the vision that The Cosmic Lantern contains. This is not just a story but a series of stories with enormous potential. It hits at the heart of western civilization with its emphasis on performance above all else. It challenges the audience with the economics of debt which provide an explanation of why otherwise peaceful communities are drawn into war.
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America's Economic Prospects for the Longer Term
No one wants to hear the bad news. Everyone puts their head in the sands and waits for the stampede to pass. This time it won't be like that. The process of adjustment for America will be slow and arduous as it has been for countries in the Far East. We once called these countries the economic tigers of Asia. Suddenly, they became devalued and we saw goods appearing on our shelves some 25 to 50 percent lower in cost than before. America went crazy with imports and the goods from Asia flowed in like a dam burst of the ice age. Now, its America's turn. Few would recall that the Asian crisis was a result of firms in Asia locking on to the dollar and borrowing until the cows came home.
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America's Failed Economic and Political Policies
Economic policies of the United States over the years of the Bush administration threaten to push the world economy into severe recession and damage prospects for solution to many of the world's energy problems. Why be optimistic about the prospects for solving the world environmental crises when the United States, which should be leading the world forward, has made such a wonderous mess of things? Most disasterous of all is the way the unfair distribution of incomes has hit intelligent and willing people who are in need of resources to participate more effectively in the modern economic age.
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The Problem with Energy Prices
Once long ago, I did a study of European energy use and real economic growth that showed its real annual growth rate average of 6 percent, yes 6 percent, seems impossible now, was achieved by real average growth rate of energy consumption of 17 percent, also a seemingly impossibly high figure! Small wonder then that when these numbers or the real effect of these numbers were absorbed by those owning crude oil, there was a shock that eventually resulted in the oil cartel. Of course, Libya was the country providing the oil!
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Millionaires in a Row
The world is full of copy cats each one of them trying to become a millionaire, and if they do thinking that they have discovered something special about themselves that makes them in some way superior.In an earlier blog, I wrote of the weakness in the ideas about the law of attraction as put forward in book written by several authors and entitled The Secret. Obviously, publishing is one of the easiest ways to become rich. One of my former bosses used to remark that the Catholic Church became wealthy from its publications, and he is right.
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Demand and Supply of Property
It is interesting to watch the expectations of those riding off the recent boom in house prices in the US and the UK. In both countries, there has been an enormous amount of captial put into the creation and revamping of property. If the amount of such investment is excessive what results is a downswing of activity until demand picks up to bring overall demand for property in line with long term needs. Whether these needs may be somewhat higher than in the past is an interesting question. Needs are an essential ingredient to the equations that bring about a balance in supply and demand.
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The Irony of Business As Usual
Have you ever sensed that the world is in a disconnected state from its own reality. You will mainly get this feeling when you experience two very different activities of people that are going in opposite directions at once.
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On the One Hand, but On the Other Hand
At this moment, I feel very much like Larry David, when he holds out two hands. He is weighing what appear to be two alternatives, either the prescription from his doctor or the advice of his pharmacist which proposes an alternative prescription. The world is so made that we have alternatives, and it was my luck that I chose at a university age the science of alternatives, economics.
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