World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
For a non-ideological honest economic history of the original "gold standard" and how short lived each thing by that name was, read
"Money: Whence it came, where it went" - John Kenneth Galbraith, 1975.
Notice that this was published within living memory of the original Bretton Woods and Galbraith knew personally the motives of the players described even when they were falsely reported by a not-economically-compe... media (which we still have today).
There is a particularly good explanation of the talks themselves in 1944 and Keynes "Bancor" instrument which seems to be now back in fashion (systemic trade surplus/deficit discouraged by a direct currency revaluation according to a formal rigid formula).
Galbraith has hilariously dry accounts of the late 19th and early 20th century bank crises. In each of these, like today, bankers did the minimum required to avoid being shot by the angered public - who was pleased to see them jumping out of windows and ready to praise bank robbers (like Bonnie and Clyde) as new folk heroes.
After most of these crises, seems the majority of the bankers tried to do nothing at all, denied their own malinvestments, and damn near blew up capitalism with their ideological insistence on doing what no one could sanely defend, on the grounds that "business confidence" depended on protecting speculators from their victims.
Those victims would of course strike back politically. Galbraith seems to ascribe great weight to Keynes' view that Versailles caused WWII (at least in Europe) and explains it rather thoroughly. The tragic monetary events between the two wars are outlined in great depth. One can read a lot into Galbraith's assertion that in France the rumours were that Americans were exploiting hyperinflation to buy up assets while in Germany it was said to be "Jews". Think about that a bit. What prevented better Allied cooperation in 1940 and why did a public generally angry at its aristocrats and leaning to Communism take that sudden shift towards racism and fascism?
I leave the Tea Party discussion to others but look at the turnout: If Obama had truly dealt with the bankers his base would be more likely to turn out to support his Congress. But he let them remain in place: No prosecutions, few firings. Read James Galbraith on that: www.huffingtonpost.com...
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
"The era of the societal illusion that printing money produces free economic gains is coming to a close - but the realization of how bad a mess that illusion has allowed us to create is only just beginning."
This seems wrong to me. The problem is that central bankers are monetarists not ecologists or otherwise concerned with value on a fundamental level, not that fiat currency gets produced to pursue a seemingly good opportunity and isn't restricted by gold standard(s).
Lynn Margulis says: Economists study how humans make a living. Ecologists study how other species make a living. When your biggest fundamentals problems are disappearing bees and hurricanes, do you want speculators or miners setting core prices on which the rest of the economy formally depends? No? Then assume that Zoellick doesn't want to either, and look deeper.
Floating fiat in a generally free trading environment has worked fine to control inflation in the 1990s and 2000s. Its problems are a market run rampant in speculators with arbitrarily abstract instruments that are impossible to regulate (as literally no one has the entire cashflow picture for hedging/insuring) and an extraordinarily dangerous "race to the bottom" in ecological standards that already cost trillions per year and will (according to credible studies) eat 18% of the economy by 2050. That's a worse problem than inflation and therefore we must risk inflation (at least in the most egregiously destructive economies) to stop it.
I certainly agree that currencies will remain the medium of exchange and standard of deferred payment (within the national economies). International payments and units of account could be denominated in gold. When there is doubt about whether a given transaction was speculative or hedging, converting all cashflows of concern to gold would certainly make it clearer what was going on: it's actually hard to imagine how else one could make such a distinction.
Notice also that gold only enters the market via mining and it is one of the most destructive mining activities known. So a biodiversity and climate protection regime would almost certainly put significant restrictions on the mining of new gold and its resale, perhaps similar to those now applying to diamonds. That makes it rather simple for an ecologically-based store of value model to be synchronized with a gold store of value:
If the economy is doing too much biological harm, just regulate the mining of gold into the ground so no new gold appears so its price must go up. That creates inflation relative to the gold standard as payments denominated in gold become more expensive to meet - creating pressure to alleviate the biological harm from the majority whose savings and incomes will remain denominated in currency.
Notice this only works if politicians have no role and an ecological body assumes the role now played by central bankers. Which, according to Greenspan himself, they have totally failed at and have no right or qualifications to play.
Some of you might not realize what happened in 2008: The myth that protecting shareholder interests, or even just executive's risk aversion to protect their own institutions, could regulate the whole market, has proven absolutely false. And if these institutions have no way to protect even themselves, they certainly cannot protect the fundamental values of the businesses, let alone the societies or the ecosystems, on which the overall value chain depends. So we are now simply waiting for a radically new regime for monetary controls in which ecologists are certain to play a dominating role.
What's going on here is a shift of power from central bankers to a scientific elite, and from monetarism to an ecological economics.
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
Agreed, Derryl, but I think what is contemplated is not gold as store of value (biodiversity, ecosystem and climate stability provides that in the contemplated regime) but as unit of account for sovereign states' obligations to each other - a regime the BIS kept for many years until the Euro using the gold franc as its standard. Its use as medium of exchange isn't an issue as one can move virtual units of gold as easily as anything else over wires - ultimately amounting to instructions to people in vaults to move gold from one big pile to another big pile. The debatable point is what is the standard of deferred payment - that is, will rich states be agreeing to contract with each other only in terms of gold, or (as at present) will they make contracts to repay in the currencies (treasury bond auctions etc.) that they ultimately control. The sad reality is that unless rich states agree to make contracts in gold it would only be the poorer ones that would be forced to do that, one of the main reasons why a "gold standard" was abandoned by any equity-minded economist many years ago. It favours the stablest states that actually do not need the investment for stability and it also robs poor places of credit at just the moment they're in trouble.
Europe, for instance, saw a flight of gold to the safe haven of the US just before and at the start of World War One, from 1905 to 1915, which J. K. Galbraith documents well in "Money" (1975). While that was nice for the US, it gave US bankers no incentives to work to head off conflict in Europe, and it gave Europeans less headroom to solve commercial or trade conflicts that aggravated the political grievances, and put a lot of people out of work. The same people who of course were employed in war industries or just turned into trench compost by machine guns at the front. If there was one valid prediction one should take from Marx, that's it:
A gold-constrained money supply will inevitably cause false scarcity and malinvestment that will result in disenfranchised labour and revolution - unless they are redirected to some more "patriotic" cause like war and the workers convinced to kill each other. That "solution" worked well for the elites of at least the UK and US in 1914-1918 but it did not work out that well for elites elsewhere. Which is why Bretton Woods' pseudo-gold-standard never was real and was disavowed (long overdue) by Nixon 25 years later when it became obvious that "Eurodollars" would not ever be redeemed in gold at one ounce per 35 American dollars. The lie that they would enabled Western Europe to be rebuilt by the exact same people that had wrecked in the first place: bankers.
Now we watch North America wrecked by bankers... might be wise to recall that Europe 1900-1914 was the richest and most "civilized" place on Earth and no one could have predicted what happened over the next 30 years. North America could fail, too. No one *ever* believes it can happen to them - or *is* happening.
The Threat of Internet Radio Competition to Sirius XM Just Vanished [View article]
Please stop complaining about the blatant spam and obvious conflict of interest in the thread. Just hit the "Report abuse" link on each of the blatant commercial offers and eventually it will simply go away.
Warmweather is correct that "There is room for both the Pandora type of music and the Sirius type of entertainment. Pandora will grow, and Sirius will grow." Sirius is however "dumb media" and Netflix and NBC.com are far more in the firing line than Pandora in a pay-per-byte regime. While Pandora and its ilk merely have to implement a good cacheing scheme. Possibly one based on the existing P2P protocols.
"f the strange conventions requiring American policymakers to pretend that inflation is always evil, a strong dollar is always desirable, and using monetary policy to reduce the impact of our national debt is always unthinkable. Yet these conventions, presumably designed to reassure markets, end up making the Fed even more incomprehensible to nonexperts and even more exploitable by demagogues" like Palin for instance.
"...The Fed has a dual mandate to fight inflation and maximize employment, and right now, it's winning the fight against inflation while getting creamed by unemployment. This is why dovish critics - led by New York Times columnist and Nobel-laureate economist Paul Krugman, who is considerably better informed than Palin, although equally shrill - are taking the opposite stance, blasting Bernanke's QE2 as unconscionably late and overly timid.
Inflation has become a dirty word, and the term inflation fighter has taken on superhero connotations, so it's easy to forget that inflation has its pros and cons. When prices are rising, money is worth less today than it was yesterday; that's bad for lenders, who get repaid with less valuable currency; for savers, whose money loses buying power; and often for ordinary workers, when their wages rise more slowly than the prices do for the stuff they need to buy. But it's good for borrowers, including mortgage holders, credit-card holders and, yes, the Treasury - a multitrillion-dollar debt is less damaging when a trillion dollars is worth less than it used to be. Inflation can also juice the economy by encouraging spending, hiring and investing since families and businesses have less incentive to hoard cash. And while it's true that inflation by definition weakens the dollar, which sounds awful (and actually is awful for importers who want to buy foreign goods), a weak dollar is good news for U.S. exporters whose products become more attractive to foreign buyers. If you want awful, try an extended period of deflation; our last one was called the Great Depression, and Bernanke has dedicated his career to preventing a recurrence. (Read TIME's Person of the Year cover story on Bernanke.)
Right now, unemployment is a staggering 9.6%, while inflation and inflation expectations remain unusually low. Ordinarily, the obvious Fed policy response would be to step on the monetary gas by lowering interest rates, but the Fed already lowered interest rates as low as they could go in December 2008."
Ultimately the Chinese complaint about US money printing and the US complaint about Chinese currency deflation amount to nothing. The solution will be a global carbon/biodiversity trade tariff which will punish China in the short term and the US in the medium term for the poor structural behaviour of both, but ultimately benefit all as it will hold off all other forms of more arbitrary trade protectionism. Expect inflation in economies that are basically dependent on fossil fuel export or use too much of it, but big growth in employment everywhere from green industries and the long term freedom from fossil fuel prices. It's probably the only end game here, and the gold proposal facilitates that path so obviously it's surprising that there isn't more comment about it. Clearly however the Fed and WB don't want to attract any more criticism from monetarist and ideological anti-inflation clowns like Palin.
Court Says FCC Doesn't Have Authority to Enforce Net Neutrality [View article]
"..there is historical precedent by the FCC (and the Canadian regulator CRTC) to take proactive steps to protect an important telecommunications/inf... service such as the Open Internet from the predatory practices of incumbent operators. Although it has largely been forgotten about by most cable company CEOs, the entire existence of cablecos in North America is largely due to regulatory actions by the FCC and CRTC in the 1970s and early 80s to protect them from being taken over by the telephone companies, and prohibiting the telephone companies from offer competing video services. In the US the FCC imposed such restrictions on the telcos in order to prevent market concentration , and in Canada it was done for cultural protection reasons. Countries that allowed the telcos to compete with cable companies such as Australia largely killed off this important industry sector in those early years. But in North America as a result of these regulatory prohibitions, a relatively small industry at that time, was allowed to grow and thrive to the point where it can now hire as many lobbyists as the telcos ( a true measure of any mature industry). And like the telcos they now argue vociferously against “government” interference in the private sector market supposedly created single handedly by themselves."
- Bill St. Arnaud,
The Court is making it impossible to do what has worked before.
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
Why 2011 May Be the Year of the Oil Comeback [View article]
A high oil price does not make oil companies, especially the dirty oil companies, a good investment. They are subject to big sudden loss like BP faced and Syncrude/Petro-Canada faces, and more critically a serious restriction on their practices. Trillions of dollars in liability, specifically, about to be attached to their bottom line, according to World Bank etc. www.bbc.co.uk/news/sci...
China’s Dagong Credit Agency Downgrades U.S. to A+ [View article]
One might surmise that those within the Communist Party of China who believe that they could actually win an honest election would be less afraid of dissent and disgruntlement than those who know they'd get the boot. Perhaps that translates into favouring a more aggressive stance towards the US and a more aggressive developing of internal markets, with all the risks that seems to entail?
Not that it's necessarily less risky to remain reliant on export markets in 2010 where import substitution (especially in energy where developed countries are scrambling to develop robust energy conservation and efficiency and transport innovation to reduce imported fuel) seems to be the dominant ideological trend.
The Threat of Internet Radio Competition to Sirius XM Just Vanished [View article]
"Net neutrality" rhetoric will simply evolve into what the solution was going to be all along: Standards for what aspects of traffic can legally be used to "shape" it. Type of service bits have been part of the Internet Protocol since it's beginnings, it just remains how to use those in a way that is not biased politically or against small business.
As for those who think that particular applications or protocols should be treated "equally" and get the same access to bandwidth on some first-come-first-served basis, they're very confused and serving the agenda of a small group of users moving lots of bits. No sane person wants voice traffic or email from disaster zones to be equal in priority to porn bits moving over bittorrent, so there will inevitably be *some* traffic shaping, it just remains to define what and how and on what grounds. (Read Karl Auerbach on all this).
I guess it is easier to let biologists argue over which economy has done the most damage this year and move some gold around based on that agreement, than to ask a bunch of central bankers to engage in "open market operations" to operationalize scientific metrics into prices. So it's fairly easy to see the underlying agenda.
I'm all in favour of it myself.
"Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), added that a recent analysis showed that companies viewed biodiversity loss as a bigger threat than international terrorism.
The finding came originally from a World Economic Forum report, , which indicated businesses saw about an 8% likelihood that biodiversity loss would affect them - largely by damaging their reputation - while about 4% saw international terrorism as a threat."
Various reforms to the global banking system were motivated (successfully) by the desire to fight international terrorism. Accordingly changes motivated by a desire to more accurately reflect biodiversity loss should be twice as easy to achieve. ;-) Enemies of this are not going to advertise themselves too openly but one can expect various fulltime staff (Forex traders, dirty oil companies, central bankers) to fight it because they fear science replacing marketing.
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
and other stuff from IMF, World Bank, etc. on biological values and how the financial system has failed to reflect them to date. There is a new currency standard coming, and it's going to be biodiversity based.
If you destroy biodiversity by any means including climate damage you will pay / lose credit / value / inflate. If you enhance it you will gain. That forces investment into things that have huge payoffs for the entire human civilization, and drastically reduce substitution expenditures - already 2.5-6.6T/year as of today, getting worse every year.
There are few investments better than a stable climate and forest and marsh and river infrastructure. ;-)
All other points of view will be exterminated. You will be assimilated. Monetarism is dead. Pragmatism is green.
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
"Money: Whence it came, where it went" - John Kenneth Galbraith, 1975.
Notice that this was published within living memory of the original Bretton Woods and Galbraith knew personally the motives of the players described even when they were falsely reported by a not-economically-compe... media (which we still have today).
There is a particularly good explanation of the talks themselves in 1944 and Keynes "Bancor" instrument which seems to be now back in fashion (systemic trade surplus/deficit discouraged by a direct currency revaluation according to a formal rigid formula).
Galbraith has hilariously dry accounts of the late 19th and early 20th century bank crises. In each of these, like today, bankers did the minimum required to avoid being shot by the angered public - who was pleased to see them jumping out of windows and ready to praise bank robbers (like Bonnie and Clyde) as new folk heroes.
After most of these crises, seems the majority of the bankers tried to do nothing at all, denied their own malinvestments, and damn near blew up capitalism with their ideological insistence on doing what no one could sanely defend, on the grounds that "business confidence" depended on protecting speculators from their victims.
Those victims would of course strike back politically. Galbraith seems to ascribe great weight to Keynes' view that Versailles caused WWII (at least in Europe) and explains it rather thoroughly. The tragic monetary events between the two wars are outlined in great depth. One can read a lot into Galbraith's assertion that in France the rumours were that Americans were exploiting hyperinflation to buy up assets while in Germany it was said to be "Jews". Think about that a bit. What prevented better Allied cooperation in 1940 and why did a public generally angry at its aristocrats and leaning to Communism take that sudden shift towards racism and fascism?
I leave the Tea Party discussion to others but look at the turnout: If Obama had truly dealt with the bankers his base would be more likely to turn out to support his Congress. But he let them remain in place: No prosecutions, few firings. Read James Galbraith on that: www.huffingtonpost.com...
www.democraticundergro...
fdlaction.firedoglake..../
seekingalpha.com/artic...
He's somewhat more ideological than old JK, and thank God for that, because sober analysis is not going to kick out the criminals.
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
This seems wrong to me. The problem is that central bankers are monetarists not ecologists or otherwise concerned with value on a fundamental level, not that fiat currency gets produced to pursue a seemingly good opportunity and isn't restricted by gold standard(s).
Lynn Margulis says: Economists study how humans make a living. Ecologists study how other species make a living. When your biggest fundamentals problems are disappearing bees and hurricanes, do you want speculators or miners setting core prices on which the rest of the economy formally depends? No? Then assume that Zoellick doesn't want to either, and look deeper.
Floating fiat in a generally free trading environment has worked fine to control inflation in the 1990s and 2000s. Its problems are a market run rampant in speculators with arbitrarily abstract instruments that are impossible to regulate (as literally no one has the entire cashflow picture for hedging/insuring) and an extraordinarily dangerous "race to the bottom" in ecological standards that already cost trillions per year and will (according to credible studies) eat 18% of the economy by 2050. That's a worse problem than inflation and therefore we must risk inflation (at least in the most egregiously destructive economies) to stop it.
I certainly agree that currencies will remain the medium of exchange and standard of deferred payment (within the national economies). International payments and units of account could be denominated in gold. When there is doubt about whether a given transaction was speculative or hedging, converting all cashflows of concern to gold would certainly make it clearer what was going on: it's actually hard to imagine how else one could make such a distinction.
Notice also that gold only enters the market via mining and it is one of the most destructive mining activities known. So a biodiversity and climate protection regime would almost certainly put significant restrictions on the mining of new gold and its resale, perhaps similar to those now applying to diamonds. That makes it rather simple for an ecologically-based store of value model to be synchronized with a gold store of value:
If the economy is doing too much biological harm, just regulate the mining of gold into the ground so no new gold appears so its price must go up. That creates inflation relative to the gold standard as payments denominated in gold become more expensive to meet - creating pressure to alleviate the biological harm from the majority whose savings and incomes will remain denominated in currency.
Notice this only works if politicians have no role and an ecological body assumes the role now played by central bankers. Which, according to Greenspan himself, they have totally failed at and have no right or qualifications to play.
Some of you might not realize what happened in 2008: The myth that protecting shareholder interests, or even just executive's risk aversion to protect their own institutions, could regulate the whole market, has proven absolutely false. And if these institutions have no way to protect even themselves, they certainly cannot protect the fundamental values of the businesses, let alone the societies or the ecosystems, on which the overall value chain depends. So we are now simply waiting for a radically new regime for monetary controls in which ecologists are certain to play a dominating role.
What's going on here is a shift of power from central bankers to a scientific elite, and from monetarism to an ecological economics.
The Threat of Internet Radio Competition to Sirius XM Just Vanished [View article]
"Maintained"? Pretty narrow word. I suppose you can make that statement correct if you define "maintained" extremely narrowly.
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
Europe, for instance, saw a flight of gold to the safe haven of the US just before and at the start of World War One, from 1905 to 1915, which J. K. Galbraith documents well in "Money" (1975). While that was nice for the US, it gave US bankers no incentives to work to head off conflict in Europe, and it gave Europeans less headroom to solve commercial or trade conflicts that aggravated the political grievances, and put a lot of people out of work. The same people who of course were employed in war industries or just turned into trench compost by machine guns at the front. If there was one valid prediction one should take from Marx, that's it:
A gold-constrained money supply will inevitably cause false scarcity and malinvestment that will result in disenfranchised labour and revolution - unless they are redirected to some more "patriotic" cause like war and the workers convinced to kill each other. That "solution" worked well for the elites of at least the UK and US in 1914-1918 but it did not work out that well for elites elsewhere. Which is why Bretton Woods' pseudo-gold-standard never was real and was disavowed (long overdue) by Nixon 25 years later when it became obvious that "Eurodollars" would not ever be redeemed in gold at one ounce per 35 American dollars. The lie that they would enabled Western Europe to be rebuilt by the exact same people that had wrecked in the first place: bankers.
Now we watch North America wrecked by bankers... might be wise to recall that Europe 1900-1914 was the richest and most "civilized" place on Earth and no one could have predicted what happened over the next 30 years. North America could fail, too. No one *ever* believes it can happen to them - or *is* happening.
The Threat of Internet Radio Competition to Sirius XM Just Vanished [View article]
Warmweather is correct that "There is room for both the Pandora type of music and the Sirius type of entertainment. Pandora will grow, and Sirius will grow." Sirius is however "dumb media" and Netflix and NBC.com are far more in the firing line than Pandora in a pay-per-byte regime. While Pandora and its ilk merely have to implement a good cacheing scheme. Possibly one based on the existing P2P protocols.
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
news.yahoo.com/s/time/...;_ylt=Ah53ms0MG0D_weCw...
"f the strange conventions requiring American policymakers to pretend that inflation is always evil, a strong dollar is always desirable, and using monetary policy to reduce the impact of our national debt is always unthinkable. Yet these conventions, presumably designed to reassure markets, end up making the Fed even more incomprehensible to nonexperts and even more exploitable by demagogues" like Palin for instance.
"...The Fed has a dual mandate to fight inflation and maximize employment, and right now, it's winning the fight against inflation while getting creamed by unemployment. This is why dovish critics - led by New York Times columnist and Nobel-laureate economist Paul Krugman, who is considerably better informed than Palin, although equally shrill - are taking the opposite stance, blasting Bernanke's QE2 as unconscionably late and overly timid.
Inflation has become a dirty word, and the term inflation fighter has taken on superhero connotations, so it's easy to forget that inflation has its pros and cons. When prices are rising, money is worth less today than it was yesterday; that's bad for lenders, who get repaid with less valuable currency; for savers, whose money loses buying power; and often for ordinary workers, when their wages rise more slowly than the prices do for the stuff they need to buy. But it's good for borrowers, including mortgage holders, credit-card holders and, yes, the Treasury - a multitrillion-dollar debt is less damaging when a trillion dollars is worth less than it used to be. Inflation can also juice the economy by encouraging spending, hiring and investing since families and businesses have less incentive to hoard cash. And while it's true that inflation by definition weakens the dollar, which sounds awful (and actually is awful for importers who want to buy foreign goods), a weak dollar is good news for U.S. exporters whose products become more attractive to foreign buyers. If you want awful, try an extended period of deflation; our last one was called the Great Depression, and Bernanke has dedicated his career to preventing a recurrence. (Read TIME's Person of the Year cover story on Bernanke.)
Right now, unemployment is a staggering 9.6%, while inflation and inflation expectations remain unusually low. Ordinarily, the obvious Fed policy response would be to step on the monetary gas by lowering interest rates, but the Fed already lowered interest rates as low as they could go in December 2008."
Ultimately the Chinese complaint about US money printing and the US complaint about Chinese currency deflation amount to nothing. The solution will be a global carbon/biodiversity trade tariff which will punish China in the short term and the US in the medium term for the poor structural behaviour of both, but ultimately benefit all as it will hold off all other forms of more arbitrary trade protectionism. Expect inflation in economies that are basically dependent on fossil fuel export or use too much of it, but big growth in employment everywhere from green industries and the long term freedom from fossil fuel prices. It's probably the only end game here, and the gold proposal facilitates that path so obviously it's surprising that there isn't more comment about it. Clearly however the Fed and WB don't want to attract any more criticism from monetarist and ideological anti-inflation clowns like Palin.
Court Says FCC Doesn't Have Authority to Enforce Net Neutrality [View article]
the Canadian regulator CRTC) to take proactive steps to protect an
important telecommunications/inf... service such as the Open
Internet from the predatory practices of incumbent operators. Although
it has largely been forgotten about by most cable company CEOs, the
entire existence of cablecos in North America is largely due to
regulatory actions by the FCC and CRTC in the 1970s and early 80s to
protect them from being taken over by the telephone companies, and
prohibiting the telephone companies from offer competing video
services. In the US the FCC imposed such restrictions on the telcos in
order to prevent market concentration , and in Canada it was done for
cultural protection reasons. Countries that allowed the telcos to
compete with cable companies such as Australia largely killed off this
important industry sector in those early years. But in North America
as a result of these regulatory prohibitions, a relatively small
industry at that time, was allowed to grow and thrive to the point
where it can now hire as many lobbyists as the telcos ( a true measure
of any mature industry). And like the telcos they now argue
vociferously against “government” interference in the private
sector market supposedly created single handedly by themselves."
- Bill St. Arnaud,
The Court is making it impossible to do what has worked before.
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
So yes, money creation and destruction is seemingly out of whack with real world value creation and destruction, and that's never good.
Gotta fix it if market prices are going to predictably reflect value added.
Why 2011 May Be the Year of the Oil Comeback [View article]
China’s Dagong Credit Agency Downgrades U.S. to A+ [View article]
Not that it's necessarily less risky to remain reliant on export markets in 2010 where import substitution (especially in energy where developed countries are scrambling to develop robust energy conservation and efficiency and transport innovation to reduce imported fuel) seems to be the dominant ideological trend.
The Threat of Internet Radio Competition to Sirius XM Just Vanished [View article]
As for those who think that particular applications or protocols should be treated "equally" and get the same access to bandwidth on some first-come-first-served basis, they're very confused and serving the agenda of a small group of users moving lots of bits. No sane person wants voice traffic or email from disaster zones to be equal in priority to porn bits moving over bittorrent, so there will inevitably be *some* traffic shaping, it just remains to define what and how and on what grounds. (Read Karl Auerbach on all this).
World Bank President Magnificently Right About Structural Reforms to World's Forex Regime [View article]
www.bbc.co.uk/news/sci...
I guess it is easier to let biologists argue over which economy has done the most damage this year and move some gold around based on that agreement, than to ask a bunch of central bankers to engage in "open market operations" to operationalize scientific metrics into prices. So it's fairly easy to see the underlying agenda.
I'm all in favour of it myself.
"Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), added that a recent analysis showed that companies viewed biodiversity loss as a bigger threat than international terrorism.
The finding came originally from a World Economic Forum report, , which indicated businesses saw about an 8% likelihood that biodiversity loss would affect them - largely by damaging their reputation - while about 4% saw international terrorism as a threat."
Various reforms to the global banking system were motivated (successfully) by the desire to fight international terrorism. Accordingly changes motivated by a desire to more accurately reflect biodiversity loss should be twice as easy to achieve. ;-) Enemies of this are not going to advertise themselves too openly but one can expect various fulltime staff (Forex traders, dirty oil companies, central bankers) to fight it because they fear science replacing marketing.
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
A gold standard would make business cycles more extreme and make it impossible for central banks to fight inflation or deflation, Nouriel Roubini says. "A fixed exchange regime... just doesn't work. Because in that world, monetary policy by definition instead of being counter-cyclical becomes pro-cyclical... It just exacerbates the business cycle." [View news story]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and this
bankofnaturalcapital.com
and other stuff from IMF, World Bank, etc. on biological values and how the financial system has failed to reflect them to date. There is a new currency standard coming, and it's going to be biodiversity based.
If you destroy biodiversity by any means including climate damage you will pay / lose credit / value / inflate. If you enhance it you will gain. That forces investment into things that have huge payoffs for the entire human civilization, and drastically reduce substitution expenditures - already 2.5-6.6T/year as of today, getting worse every year.
There are few investments better than a stable climate and forest and marsh and river infrastructure. ;-)
All other points of view will be exterminated. You will be assimilated. Monetarism is dead. Pragmatism is green.