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Understanding and Navigating the Economic Crisis update (slides)
Ernesto Spruyt, Slideshare
Understanding and navigating the economic crisis
Goal: provide insight in the workings of the system that we call “the economy” to be able to better navigate the current economic crisis as a manager and/or entrepenur:
- The economy in a nutshell
- What happened?
- How could it happen?
- What will be next?
- How to heal the economic system?
- A methodology for managers, entrepeneurs and ‘community wizards’
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Key principles for entrepeneurs and managers
- SHift all your attention, energy, spirituality, money, leadership away from the centralizing “tapeworm” economic system toards building wealth for you and your community, in other words: make money removing the economic drains in the community
- Create value taking into account the longevity and quality of vital human support systems, such as the environment and the society: build sustainable decentralized businesses
- Build abundant wealth locally and globally with one proviso: do no harm
(13 February 2009)
Climate of Change
Paul Krugman, New York Times
Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.
The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.
… Many will ask whether Mr. Obama can actually pull off the deficit reduction he promises. Can he actually reduce the red ink from $1.75 trillion this year to less than a third as much in 2013? Yes, he can.
Right now the deficit is huge thanks to temporary factors (at least we hope they’re temporary): a severe economic slump is depressing revenues and large sums have to be allocated both to fiscal stimulus and to financial rescues.
But if and when the crisis passes, the budget picture should improve dramatically.
… So we have good priorities and plausible projections. What’s not to like about this budget? Basically, the long run outlook remains worrying.
(27 February 2009)
We’re all doomed – again
Leon Gettler, Sydney Morning Herald
The Return of Depression Economics
By Paul Krugman
Penguin Press, $26.95
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown
By Charles R. Morris
Black Inc, $27.95
Bad Money
By Kevin Phillips
Scribe, $32.95
The Great Depression Ahead
By Harry S. Dent Jr
Schwartz Media, $29.95
In his darkest and most scathing novel, The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope looked at 19th-century London captured by financial speculators and a swindle based on a crooked railroad stock.
It’s easy to compare the amount of money invested in Trollope’s fictitious railway to subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations and the way loans in recent years were bundled up and sold to the market so that the money received came from other investors rather than profits, much like a Ponzi scheme.
Or compare Trollope’s aristocrats clamouring to join the railroad’s board, not knowing anything about the business but keen to profit from the soaring stock, to the way consumers in the recent boom were using their homes as ATMs, borrowing against their house and taking advice to buy shares with other people’s money. Or the way banks and hedge funds seeking bigger returns ended up adding trillions of dollars to the public debt by investing in risky securities. Trollope’s work is indeed a picture of the way we live now.
(February 28, 2009)
