Andy Xie says those attending the G20, Davos and other wasteful meetings are wrong to try to pin the blame for the turmoil on people’s psychology; all signs point to a prolonged period of global stagnation and instability
It wasn’t long before I too learned to connect the dots. I learned to see that the austerity-induced Structural Adjustment Program of General Ibrahim Babangida in 1986, then lauded as an ingenious economic solution to Nigeria’s problems, was a creature of the IMF, the World Bank, and the Trojan sentiments of free trade.
Deutsche Bank announced plans to eliminate 35,000 jobs from its payroll over the next two years as part of a sweeping overhaul under new co-Chief Executive John Cryan.
When even Deutsche Bank is cutting 35% of its staff, something big is happening. : It implies the system itself has reached its limits, and no further growth is possible within the current paradigm. Interest rates are already approximately zero and "Quantitative Easing" has pumped vast amounts of new money into the economy. But it plainly isn't working because even Deutsche Bank is making massive losses... : When this happens it is no longer good enough to say "65,000 of you will continue to have well paid jobs, 35,000 of you will have zero." Because tomorrow the statement will be "50,000 of you will continue to have well paid jobs and 50,000 will have zero." And then 40,000, 30,000, 20, 10. The system itself is broken, and we can't make everybody redundant. We have to build a new system. : We need to build a new system where "Nobody gets everything until everybody gets something." Or "Nobody gets a Porsche until everybody has a bicycle." : When the system itself has reached its limits, a new system has to emerge: one that rebuilds from the ground up and becomes more stable over time, not less; one that starts from a wide and firm foundation.
The world's gaze has been fixated on the eurozone crisis, which helped push bitcoin back to $300 for the first time since March. But bitcoin has its own crisis brewing, and both offer valuable lessons on what makes a currency valuable--real, digital, or otherwise.
Seven years since the bursting of a US housing bubble led to financial meltdown, investors and policymakers are already well on their way to the next.If there’s one lesson from the history of financial manias, panics and crashes, it’s that bankers...
Immanuel Wallerstein (@iwallerstein) is Senior Research Scientist in Sociology at Yale University. He is the former President of the International Sociological Association (1994-1998), and chair of the International Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1993-1995). He writes in three domains of world-systems analysis: the historical development of the modern world-system; the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world-economy; the structures of knowledge. Books in each of these domains include respectively The Modern World-System (4 vols.); Utopistics, or Historical Choices for the Twenty-first Century; and Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms.
Crisis. Originally, the word derives from the ancient Greek verb “krinein”, meaning to judge in order to take a decision and its noun, “krisis”, meaning judgment, decision. According to Steven James Venette 1 “crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained.”
We live in an age of profound disruption. Global crises – financial, food, fuel, natural resources, poverty – challenge almost all societies. Yet over the coming decades these disruptions will also create, and are already creating, opportunities for profound personal, societal, and global renewal.
When you’re looking down the barrel of a civilization-erasing event, you have to plan for a world where humanity has lost everything. Canned goods might be nice, but you’d better have brought along a can opener—or know how to make one. What information should we leave survivors? And how do we store it so they can actually make use of it? In recent years, these questions have jumped onto the research agendas of a range of thinkers, from physicists to philosophers to agricultural engineers to librarians, who are considering how to curate and preserve caches of the most useful and important information, tools, and biological samples from today’s world.
In an exclusive new essay, political scientist Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed presents a dramatic picture of the world we're about to leave behind, and the new possibilities ahead. He argues that the age of Carbon is coming to a close, and only a concerted effort can prevent an impending crisis on a global scale.
Back last summer, there was growing concern that the world economy, already making the weakest recovery from the deepest slump in production and investment since 1945, was slowing down. Indeed, it ...
The intergenerational theft that is the legacy for our youth is not public debt, it is the mountain of private debt at the heart of our new banana republic
Exposing the truth about our corrupt world and what humanity has become. This is a short documentary film I made and wrote questioning our freedom, the educa...
A horrible graphic illustration of our history, but sadly all too true. Music: In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. Sacred Economics The Story of Stuff Post-crash economics On Writing ...
The big idea began with the unlikely combination of Monty Python's Terry Jones, and Theo Kocken, Professor of Risk Management at the VU University in Amsterdam. Frustrated by the lack of information available to the public, they decided to write a documentary to explain the global economic system, and look at how things could change.
A large portion of European citizens hold the belief that our present consumerist society can (and must) “progress” into the future. Meanwhile, a majority of the inhabitants of the planet can only dream of attaining the same level of material comfort that we have. However, our level of production and consumption has been achieved at the cost of exhausting natural (including energy) resources and by disrupting the equilibrium of Earth’s ecosystems.
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