by Chris Becker The HBO series Chernobyl wasn’t about the dangers of nuclear power but rather the ability of societies at large to lie, obfuscate, conceal and pass off individual responsibility to create huge “mistakes”. The collapse of the Soviet Union was due to this cascade of lies, that its economic and social system was
Cross posted from The Conversation: by Davina Jackson Honorary Academic, School of Architecture, University of Kent Today’s smart cities rely on networks: squillions of semiconductor devices that constantly pulse electromagnetic waves (light and radio frequencies) through telecommunications satellites. Data Cities, by the author. Lund Humphries (2018), Author provided Another genre of satellites, equipped especially for Earth
by Chris Becker This is big. Big big news that paradoxically one day will be as humdrum as a 747 crossing the Atlantic. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched its orbital rocket, the Falcon 9, and landed the first stage. The 2nd stage went on to deploy 11 satellites for Orbcom, but the game changer is
By David James. A common observation is that the financial system got into trouble because of the invention of securities that were too complex for ordinary investors to understand. This is true, but it should be more closely examined. Warren Buffett is no doubt right in noting the sociological implications for the finance and business
An intriguing proposal about how to rethink the global financial system is the notion of debt free money. This idea is typically raised in relation to the fact that the US Federal Reserve is not a central bank, it is a privately owned institution. The documentary “Secrets of Oz” details a long history of battles
The global financial crisis and its subsequent repercussions were the inevitable consequence of governments’ abrogating their responsibility to govern. In thrall to nonsense arguments about “financial de-regulation”, they weakly handed over the job of setting the rules of money to the markets. As previously discussed, this did not result in fewer rules. It resulted
The angst of the day is the prospect that low growth will become a permanent feature of the world economy. Flashman has asked what it would mean if the GFC was permanent? As he notes, the Asian Development Bank is cutting its growth forecasts. Europe and America are struggling to grow at all and
An intriguing discussion was had on the Radio National breakfast program this week about the conclusions to be drawn from the demise of Gunns, Tasmania’s biggest paper and pulp mill. It is, sadly, the kind of debate that only occurs in Australia after the fact. People fear creating ripples in a small pond. Plus
Surely the greatest misnomer in modern times is the term “financial de-regulation”. For at least 25 years, various business funded think tanks and mono-culture, conformist university economics departments have hailed its advantages, for the most part completely capturing the world’s business press. I know. I am actually a business journalist who was, until recently, in
For the last couple of years, in the wake of the financial crisis, the banking and finance community has darkly warned about the dangers of over regulating the sector. “We mustn’t impede the free flow of capital”, it is claimed, “otherwise efficiency and productivity will be lost and the real economy will not recover.” The
Doubts are growing about the efficacy of quantitative easing. Maccanomics is asking whether monetary easing is a Ponzi scheme, a trap that central banks won’t be able to get out of. The Economist explores the possibility that there is a problem of diminishing returns: For economies that have already used QE, the problem is one of diminishing
Paul Krugman appeared on CNBC overnight and the results were fascinating as his Keynsian views went head-to-head with an ideological distaste for government. Great viewing.
The argument advanced by the historian Philip Bobbitt that a transition is occurring in world politics from the nation state to the market state has long appealed as a snapshot of what is occurring in world politics. It is, as with any thesis about a large subject, far too simple to reflect accurately all that is
Find below Joe Hockey’s recent speech on “the End of the Age of Entitlement”. It’s a good speech with which I agree in principle. It is the first time I’ve seen an Australian political leader acknowledge that the world has changed after the GFC and that henceforth nations will be judged upon the relative performance
In the movie Margin Call, which is broadly about the financial crisis and the insidiousness of the financial sector, one of the characters laments about how he used to be an engineer who did useful things like build bridges (he calculates that one he built saved people thousands of years of travel time). But of
A talk by the futurist Ray Kurzweil was recently played on the ABC in which he talked about the accelerating rate of innovation when it becomes part of what is broadly termed the information technology industry. He argues that in the future medicine, biology, economy and social relationships will be subject to information technology and the
A fascinating article has been written by Eliot Spitzer for The Slate which details the massive lying that went on during the GFC. It raises an intriguing question. What functions do lying and truthfulness play in financial systems? The assumption commonly made is that lying and deception are “bad” and truth telling is “good”. This is
There has been much debate about the need to revive Keynesianism, government stimulation of the economy versus austerity. In many respects the debate is irrelevant. It is not dealing with the world as it currently is. A lesson is emerging from the current crisis, and for that matter the financial crises of the last two
Binary thinking is always easy. It is also a trap, perhaps the most common. A moment’s reflection should tell us that human affairs cannot be analysed as simple antonyms: government versus markets, socialism versus laissez faire, monetarism versus Keynesianism. But the habit is hard to shake, perhaps because we inevitably tend to see things in
If nothing else, the European crisis is bringing us back to a timeless reality: power is what matters in human affairs. My esteemed colleague Houses & Holes has long argued for the importance of looking at political economy; the intersection of finance, business and politics; the true matrix of power. It was always a compelling
We’ve heard quite a bit about the new ‘two-strikes’ rule on executive pay in the media since an amendment to the Corporations Act, to toughen executive remuneration conditions, was passed in July. This amendment was the outcome of a Productivity Commission inquiry into executive remuneration released in January this year. While more accountability to shareholders
We live in hyper-metarialist times, both financial materialism and scientific materialism. It has become so intense, it is scarcely noticed. Yet its consequences are profound, not least for how we understand economics. The concluding remarks of Adam Curtis’ documentary “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” detail some of them. He argues, using the example
Having just watched the second episode of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by my favourite documentary maker Adam Curtis, in which he tells the “story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, as a self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy”, I am once again struck by what an absurd body
It is a measure of how un-self critical modern economics has been, that the Marxists are starting to appear to be making the most sense of the current crises. The supine acceptance that “the market is always right” — a truism only to traders and vested interests — means that there has been precious little
I must admit, beyond writing a story about why we might want to carry the Occupy Wall Street banner downunder a few weeks ago, I haven’t shown a lot of interest in the various “Occupy” movements in Australian cities. Not for any particular reason beyond that I assumed, rightly it seems, that any Australian movement
Last week, Paul Krugman wrote the following on the growing protest, Occupy Wall Street: There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people. When the Occupy Wall Street protests
The global economy is not simply suffering from a European debt crisis. Debt itself is in trouble. This morning on Radio National there was an interview with David Graeber, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmith University London and author of “Debt — the first 5,000 years.” Graeber, who is involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He made
How moral is money? OK, I’ll pause while you laugh bitterly. But in this era of computerised meta-money, it is an important question. First it should be said that I am using the word “moral” in the sense of an extension of “mores”, social habits, not as a reflection of larger questions of right and
In The Great Crash of 2008, Ross Garnaut and I identified four major causes of the GFC: housing bubbles, global imbalances, clever money and greed. Pretty much none of these causes has been seriously addressed. But today I’m going to focus on the last. Greed is a part of all bubbles of course, but in
The time value of money is the corner stone of capitalism; it dates back to capitalism’s origins in the Renaissance (as historian Carlo Cippola “Clocks and Culture” describes). It is in deep trouble. The twenty first century capital markets are becoming so strange, this simple notion is being turned into a bizarre mixture of hyper-instantaneity
