Links you may have missed (Dec 23, 2011)
Fun stuff and good news
Il giro in bici più pericoloso del mondo (la Repubblica) – video — I wouldn’t even be brave enough to walk this.
Solar-powered boat sails around the world (Aljazeera) – video
How to draw… dragons (Guardian) – absolutely brilliant! (click on thumbnail below to see photo series)
Europe
Germany in Europe: Christmas Presents from Merkozy (Social Europe Journal)
Can Italy survive the Financial Storm? (Social Europe Journal)
Egypt
Alaa al-Aswany: ‘Overthrowing Mubarak was too good to be true’ (Independent)
Underneath (Rantings of a Sandmonkey) – very discouraged local blogger. (Saw this link on Antony Loewenstein’s blog)
Planet earth
Major victory as Russia bans trade in harp seal skins (International Fund for Animal Welfare)
Odds and Ends
The Meme that Refuses to Die: Government Debt Must Be Paid Back (Angry Bear) (Saw link on Naked Capitalism)
Some Facts About Carrier IQ (Electronic Frontier Foundation) – lots of info here
And just because she’s so beautiful – my dog Amica (photo by Tarcisio Arzuffi)
Explaining our addiction to risk: Naomi Klein
Brilliant, brave, funny and fiercely committed. In a recent talk, Naomi Klein analyzes why we as a society are addicted to risk, and why this is creating so much destruction all around us.
Click on screenshot above to see video. Link here also.
Beware of Greeks cradling democracy
This morning while reading a couple of analyses about the great Greek referendum brouhaha, the shade of John Lennon floated past murmuring “Democracy is what happens while politicians are busy making other plans.”
Might that be the case if the Greeks are allowed to vote on the EU’s latest proposal to rescue/doom them into penury for years to come? Wouldn’t that be nice (shades of the Beach Boys just now floated by). Messy? Maybe yes, but maybe not.
The two informative commentaries mentioned above are “Time to resign Mr Papandreou” by Greek economics professor Yanis Varoufakis (here), and “Papandreou shows no regret as he faces a grilling from Sarkozy and Merkel” by the Guardian‘s Helena Smith (here). They offer differing perspectives on the Greek PM. Varoufakis scorns his government leader’s latest referendum maneuver as political ploy only. Smith, in contrast, casts Papandreou more admirably, as in this quote from an unidentified “adviser”:
He is not afraid to upset others if he firmly believes it is in the interests of his country. And as a committed socialist George really does believe in the value of participatory democracy.
Well, notwithstanding that Varoufakis makes powerful argument to the contrary, we can hope that Smith’s featured adviser may prove to be auspicious. That whether mere political operator or democracy’s champion, Papandreou will by hook or crook give the people a voice. That would be true democratic process, wouldn’t it?
Imagine.
Links you may have missed (Oct 30, 2011)
No details, flimsy numbers: Varoufakis (ABC TV – Australia) — Greek economics professor Yanis Varoufakis interviewed about EU’s latest rescue plan for his country and the eurozone — not exactly a rave review. Video — click on screenshot above.
How Germany Became Europe’s Green Leader: A Look at Four Decades of Sustainable Policymaking (The Solutions Journal)
CONVEGNO: “UN’EUROPA. MOLTE LINGUE. NUOVE OPPORTUNITÀ” (Mediapolitika) — saw this thanks to Ivan Turatti — interesting Umberto Eco quote, “The language of Europe is translation.”
Looks like Congress has declared war on the internet (GigaOM)
Celebrate with us on December 10… TerraMadre Day (Slow Food)
In Honor of Bella – Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee Slideshow (The Elephant Sanctuary) – Bella died this week. Click on screenshot below to see slide show of Bella and her boon companion Tarra.
Links you may have missed (Oct 16, 2011)
Elizabeth Warren on Debt Crisis, Fair Taxation (YouTube) – precisely put! No wonder her fan base is growing.
Panic of the Plutocrats (New York Times) – Paul Krugman
The Story Of Occupy Wall Street Told Through Online Videos (Social Times)
Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story (TEDTalks) – video – from 2009 but golden.
Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic (TEDTalks) – video – this may be some of the very best news for planet earth.
Did Van Gogh die in an unfortunate brush with fate? (The Independent)
Neo and Toxedo – Two Dogs in Paris (Dogwork.com) – fantastico!
Canzoni di 18mila giorni, il ritorno di Gianmaria Testa (la Repubblica) – music video – click on screenshot below
How do you run a Chinese Bank?
It’s not at all hard to find China in the news headlines, given that increasing numbers of people — experts and ordinary citizens — reportedly see it fast arriving as the world’s new superpower.
Highly detailed views from particularly informed experts, however, are not so plentiful. A lengthy video discussion recently between Carl Walter of JP Morgan and Victor Shih of Northwestern University, hosted by G+, is “spectacular” (per MacroBusiness.com) and informative.
For me, one of the most thought provoking observations comes in the first video (starts at 13:44). Walter describes the reaction of the Chinese government to the 2008 financial crisis and the fall of Lehman Brothers. At that point, the highly alarmed Chinese, according to Walter, lost all faith in the Western financial model.
Summing this up, Walter says:
The Chinese want to have a clear model that they can try out and see if it works and then expand on, and now that [Western model] financial system is gone…
Watch the full discussion here, posted on MacroBusiness. Note — the comments section is also interesting.
Economist Roubini says reality check is looming for Eurozone
At least, and that’s rather exceptional, Nouriel Roubini spreads the gloom around evenhandedly. Writing an op-ed piece this week for Project Syndicate about problems of the Eurozone, he grounds the assessment in a disapproving scowl at most of the world’s biggest economies (“The Eurozone’s Autumn Hangover” Sept 15, 2010):
.. all the factors that will lead to a slowdown of growth in most advanced economies in the second half of 2010 and 2011 are at work in Germany and the rest of the eurozone. Fiscal stimulus is turning into fiscal austerity and a drag on growth. The inventory adjustment that drove most of the GDP growth for a few quarters is complete, and tax policies that stole demand from the future (“cash for clunkers” all over Europe, etc.) have expired…
Roubini’s primary concern seems to be that European leaders have largely postponed having to account for Europe’s economic problems, rather than finding a real resolution for them:
In the periphery, the trillion-dollar bailout package and the non-stressful “stress tests” kicked the can down the road, but the fundamental problems remain: large budget deficits and stocks of public debt that will be hard to reduce sufficiently, given weak governments and public backlash against fiscal austerity and structural reforms; large current-account deficits and private-sector foreign liabilities that will be hard to rollover and service; loss of competitiveness (driven by a decade-long loss of market share in labor-intensive exports to emerging markets, rising unit labor costs, and the strength of the euro until 2008); low potential and actual growth; and massive risks to banks and financial institutions (with the exception of Italy).
You can read the whole essay here.
US and EU citizenry share common priority about economic woes
The sentiment, “It’s the economy, stupid,” apparently also holds prime position in the hearts of Europeans when money troubles hit, according to the results of a European Union survey just released this week (“Spring 2010 Eurobarometer: EU citizens favour stronger European economic governance” Aug 26, 2010).
Survey results show that 75 percent of Europeans favor more coordination of economic and financial policies among countries belonging to the EU, the 2010 Spring Eurobarometer reports. The survey, conducted earlier this year at the height of the European debt crisis included more than 26,000 people in 27 EU member states.
“The clear majority for enhanced European economic governance shows that people see the EU as a decisive part of the solution to the crisis,” said Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, who is also in charge of Communication. “Our spring survey – conducted at the height of the crisis – reflects the difficult times and challenges that Europeans faced during the past months…
See full report here.
A British novelist argues that you and I can speak Wall Street if we try
John Lanchester’s newly-released book “Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay” is getting raves from critics. One reviewer described it as “Acidic, frightening, and sharply funny.”
The subject of the nonfiction book is the craziness of the world of contemporary finance, and how the lunacy came to be.
Earlier this month, Lanchester offered a peek into the material of his book when he spoke at an event sponsored by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London. I’m especially taken by Lanchester’s ideas because his thesis — my own favorite one — is that we as citizens can and must become informed.
The video is below and I hope you will watch it. As an inducement, I’ve excerpted a few comments.
In his opening remarks, Lanchester alludes to the longstanding idea of the two cultures of arts and science and the gap between them. He suggests that this gap no longer exists, but another one does:
It seems that there’s a much bigger gap between the world of finance and the general public, and that there’s a need to narrow that gap if the financial industry aren’t to become a kind of priesthood administering to its own mysteries and feared and resented by the rest of us. Lots of bright, literate, functioning well-educated people… have no idea about all sorts of economic basics of a type that financial insiders take as elementary knowledge about how the world works…
To people who don’t, as it were, speak finance the language can seem impenetrable and the interlocking ideas too complex to grasp or unpack. I’ve become very preoccupied by this gap which seems to me a real problem not least because the idea of a democracy implies an informed electorate. If you don’t have an informed electorate, which I would argue that we don’t really in this area, then the democracy is thinner, and I tried to do my bit in addressing that gap by writing about it.
Lanchester goes on to describe the faulty mathematical models used by those in today’s finance world. He details their persistent refusal to acknowledge the undeniable proof during recent decades that these models were broken. And, after describing the magnitude of the errors that occurred in 2008, he adds:
That is so wrong you just can’t put it into words. It shouldn’t be humanly possible to be that wrong. We’re talking about a drop in house prices causing people with bad credit to have trouble paying back their mortgages. And they managed to turn that into literally the most unlikely thing in the history of the universe.
And the really outrageous thing is that the banks are still talking about it as if they were unlucky. As if it were some sort of freak, perfect storm or 100 year event, which is what the bank chairman in the U.S., has just been telling Congress. That’s absolute rubbish — it’s like closing your eyes and trying to run down the strand without opening them and then complaining that you’re unlucky when you get hit by a bus.
Good advice and why it’s being ignored: Stiglitz and Lessig
In a seven-minute interview on Thursday for The Washington Note, Nobel Economics winner Joseph Stiglitz prescribes good sense remedies for the USA economy:
And in a two-minute talk to the public this week, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig explains why Congress isn’t listening:
Learn more about the work of Change Congress here.
