Economics - Oct 17
Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
The Money Fix - documentary now online
Alan Rosenblith, The Money Fix website
Money is at the intersection of nearly every aspect of modern life. Most of us take the monetary system for granted, but it has a profound and largely misunderstood influence on our lives. THE MONEY FIX is a feature-length documentary exploring our society’s relationship with the almighty dollar.
THE MONEY FIX examines economic patterning in both the human and the natural worlds, and through this lens we learn how we can empower ourselves by redesigning the lifeblood of the economy at the community level. The film documents three types of alternative money systems, all of which help solve economic problems for the communities in which they operate.
This website is dedicated to providing you with resources to educate yourself about currency. We hope you will find space in your busy life to ponder deeply what kinds of economic relationships you wish to be in. Conventional money is just one way to measure wealth. How will you measure the wealth you create?
Trailer:
THE MONEY FIX (trailer) from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.
The full documentary is available at Ethical Markets:
http://www.ethicalmarkets.tv/?s=0333&submit-2=go
The Money Fix — provided by Ethical Markets; on PBS stations and affiliates around the US for free download from www.epstv.com. Directed and produced by Alan Rosenblith (see full version at www.themoneyfix.org) and edited for TV by Hazel Henderson, this feature-length documentary explores our society’s relationship with the almighty dollar and examines economic patterning in both the human and the natural worlds. Most of us take the monetary system for granted, but it has a profound and largely misunderstood influence on our lives. The film documents alternative money systems which help solve economic problems for the communities in which they operate.
(October 2010)
The second half of the documentary covers alternative currencies, etc. Recommended by Shaun Chamberlin. -BA
Tim Jackson's Economic Reality Check
TED Talks
The Author of 'Prosperity without Growth' Offers Ideas About Where We Are, and Where We Might Go
As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.
(October 2010)
Currency wars are necessary if all else fails
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph (UK)
The overwhelming fact of the global currency system is that America needs a much weaker dollar to bring its economy back into kilter and avoid slow ruin, yet the rest of the world cannot easily handle the consequences of such a wrenching adjustment. There is not enough demand to go around.
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Asian investment in plant has run ahead of Western ability to consume. The debt-strapped households of Middle America, or Britain and Spain, can no longer hold up the dysfunctional edifice. Asians must take over, or it will come down on their own heads.
The countries actively intervening in exchange markets to suppress their currencies – China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, even Switzerland, to name a few – are all too often the same ones that have the biggest trade surpluses with the US.
They are taking active steps to prevent America extricating itself from the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, now 17.1pc on the latest U6 index and rising again.
Each country is doing so for understandable reasons: Japan to avoid a deflationary crisis, China to hold together a political order that is more fragile than it looks. In both these cases they are trapped because they clung too long to a mercantilist export strategy, failing to wean themselves off American demand when the going was good.
(10 October 2010)
