Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10:00 am today in association with NZ Mint.
Bernard will be back with his version tomorrow.
As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
1. QE-NZ
Many commentators have pointed out that quantitative easing would be much more effective if it was done in such a way as to avoid the banks, and went straight to the people who need it.
Apparently, the good folks at the software supplier that upgrades the TSB Bank ATMs got the memo. Kirsty Wynn at the NZ Herald has the details:
Cash machines are not often a bottomless pit of money - unless you bank with TSB. A software glitch has given Taranaki Savings Bank customers an unlimited overdraft facility. One New Plymouth customer was able to withdraw $31,500 he did not have.
Other customers took extra money too, but Martin, also known as Jormah Ewington, was the only one charged. Martin's lawyer, Julian Hannam, said this was because his client was the only one to go back time and again.
"There were other people who could get money but he took far more than anyone else," Hannam said. "The others were treated as a mistake, rather than an effort to appropriate funds which is the scheme that Jormah adopted. He just kept going back."
2. The bureaucrats have acted; can those elected?
The US Fed has done its part; now it's the US Congress's turn. Draghi has done his thing, can the elected officials do what's needed too? All the monetary policy bullets have been fired; now we need some fiscal bullets, hopefully firing in the same direction. But how likely is that? Deborah Solomon takes a look:
You've got to give Ben Bernanke an A for effort.
After months of signaling, the Federal Reserve pulled two guns out of its arsenal: committing to a new, open-ended round of bond buying that will continue until the economy shows signs of improving, and promising to keep interest rates low through at least mid-2015.
In other words, the Fed will step on the gas for as long as it takes to jump-start the economic recovery.
3. The US's Wile E. Coyote moment
Comparing the US Fed to a rehab clinic offering addicted investors a synthetic high has been a favorite of Wall Street wags ever since the first round of Fed stimulus nearly four years ago. The punch line is that you always need more and more to get the same high and each bout of euphoria is followed by a crashing comedown.
After the frenetic reaction brought about by the announcement of the Fed's latest stimulus program - US$40 billion pumped into the U.S. economy each month - the coming week is likely to bring a more sober period for markets as investors digest what it means in the longer run and turn their attention to the remainder of the year. That will include rancorous US elections in November, wrangling over taxes and spending cuts and a slowdown in corporate earnings. More from Reuters.
4. Good company?
The Aussies are turning away from mining shares as a good place to build their wealth portfolio; they are turning to term deposits and commercial property trusts. Crikey, they are looking more kiwi by the day. Or so says Dave Potts.
5. of Statistics
Which two countries are the kidnapping capitals of the world? Australia and Canada. Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per 100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada. That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.
So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye? The BBC explains.
6. "Jobs from startups aren't saving us"
One of the benefits of a vibrant capitalism is 'creative destruction' - where disrupters introduce innovations and power employment along with their success. The cycles of capitalism should show that new companies and new ideas get established when the cycle is at its lowest and the incumbents are at their weakest. This renewal process has a great track record. But who is doing the innovation these days? Apple (the worlds largest company) and GE (the previous holder of the title)? Neither are startups, neither generating many jobs. And recent research in the US suggests something went wrong in the US in 2005/06 which is undermining the ability of startups to create new jobs. Any ideas? Here is the research from Tim Kane (.pdf)
7. Low dimensional thinking?
New techniques for everything from farming to computation interact and combine to drive the creation of more innovations in an ever-accelerating spiral. Paradoxically, technological innovation has also created our biggest problems, including climate change, environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, and the author of "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You" has a persuasive view:
What comes next? Exponential growth on a finite planet simply cannot continue. If innovation is both the key to our success and the primary threat to our existence, what can we do? Can we innovate differently? More intelligently?
Some valuable thinking on the subject comes from Sander van der Leeuw, dean of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, who takes an optimistic view. We may indeed be able to use technology to find a path to a sustainable future, he suggests, if we use our technology in a fundamentally different way.
The gist of his argument: Humans suffer from a mismatch between our thinking about what we do and the truth of what we do. Our brains make sense of a multifaceted world by ignoring much of its complexity -- a trait Van der Leeuw calls “low dimensional” thinking. In engineering a dam, assessing how agricultural runoff influences an estuary or figuring out how automobile emissions might alter the atmosphere, our conceptual models (or those of our scientists and engineers) at best consider only a few of the true pathways of cause and effect. As Van der Leeuw puts it, “every human action upon the environment modifies the latter in many more ways that its human actors perceive, simply because the dimensionality of the environment is much higher than can be captured by the human mind.”
8. 'A fracking good story'
Who would have thunk? CO2 emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions for the US have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007. That reduction is more than Germany produces in one year, more than NZ produces in 24 years. Apparently, its the result of some smart, large public investment. Apologies for the spilt coffee, but I have always been a secret admirer of one explainer (who has always acknowledged the global warming trends) and who is pointing out this huge shift.
The amazing truth is that fracking has succeeded where Kyoto and carbon taxes have failed. As shown in a study by the Breakthrough Institute, fracking was built on substantial government investment in technological innovation for three decades.
Climate economists repeatedly have pointed out that such energy innovation is the most effective climate solution, because it is the surest way to drive the price of future green energy sources below that of fossil fuels. By contrast, subsidizing current, ineffective solar power or ethanol mostly wastes money while benefiting special interests.
Fracking is not a panacea, but it really is by far this decade’s best green-energy option.
9. Apocolypse not: Monitoring a dodgy track record
Matt Ridley can't see much difference between the religious or environmental doomsters. But he has been keeping the score on the environmental ones:
Over the past half century, none of our threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. Some came partly true; some were averted by action; some were wholly chimerical. This raises a question that many find discomforting: With a track record like this, why should people accept the cataclysmic claims now being made about climate change? After all, 2012 marks the apocalyptic deadline of not just the Mayans but also a prominent figure in our own time: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said in 2007 that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.”
10. Nigel Farage, again
Not sure I could vote for him (I see too much of WP in him), but it is fun watching an articulate sceptic plying his trade of doom - even when his masters have the upper hand on the day.
and ...
39 Comments
Seems some ppl were 20 years ahead of the curve,
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/15/wynne-godley-on-the-euro-…
regards
# 7 - " ... our conceptual models (or those of our scientists and engineers) at best consider only a few of the true pathways of cause and effect."
Think that's bad? Look at the way orthodox economist's deal with complexity.
"Our brains make sense of a multifaceted world by ignoring much of its complexity."
Indeed, look at the way orthodox economist's deal with it.
...... don't make us come down there with tar , feathers , and photos of Helen Clark , Bernard ......
Kindy respond to the questions put to you by Hugh / Christov & Gummy ; re. NBR & your attempt to have them barred from budget briefings & Reverse Bank lock-ups !
:-)
Why not read the propaganda version, you dont want the truth anyway,
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/gerry-brownlees-futile-news-censoring-fias…
NBR broke the "gentleman's" agreement not to publish until the dead line is passed, which is fair enough IMHO.
regards
Steven - Firstly........ask the question.......Should Government or its agencies who are meant to be accountable to the people or voters be in a position to release what is essentially public information under and embargo or press release..whatever you choose to call it? Who's damn country is it - the people's or the Politicians?
When the Govt uses embargoes to release information it is nothing more than creating a maximum advantage to sell it's latest product/concept to the people. This is not how an open and democratic society should work. If the people keep condoning this behaviour we keep getting more of it as it is a tried and true recipe for the Govt and it's agencies to sell their products/concept upon the people.
The Govt is not Private enterprise and therefore shouldn't be able to use the current style of press-releases as their means of selling their products/concepts to the people. Investigation by journalists on Government activities is hampered by this hideous process of embargoes and press releases and seriously impedes appropriate discussion and information to be assessed.
NZ'ers need to take a good hard look at themselves and the way they have been pigeon holed and categorised into groups of interest rather than being treated as individuals by Government. Propaganda is simply easier to distribute to groups.
The day a Politician stands up and says...I'm considering the problems of such and such and asks for the people's open input then we have a more open form of democracy and an opportunity for discussion and information to be assessed. People go behind closed doors simply because the have something to hide and the need to control that situation.
Andrew R - Yes I do know what a press embargo is.
If a journalist uses his/her own sources for an investigation they have undertaken then they have the right to publish that information. Its called investigative journalism and NZ is severely lacking in these types of journalists.
Quite frankly there needs to be far more transparency within the public sector at all stages of the game. The Only reason Govt and its agencies use embargo's is to release information in a controlled way that they can sell their policies etc to the public usually using ethos, pathos and logos to create the mood and spin the yarn.
So I assume you like the status quo of controlled release of information given your "get real" comment.
Nigel is the only entertaining European politician around (well, apart from Draghi's unintentionally humourous comments, like "the LTRO was an unqestionable success").
I would vote for him if I was back in the UK. He's the only politician I can see prepared to actually say the Euro is doomed, when all the others know it but just want it to carry on until they get their golden handshake and retire, regardless of how many countries they destroy economically along the way.
Basically he says what we all wish we had a chance to say to the EU 'elite'. He is my Euro hero.
| August 22, 201 |
Most North Americans know that human-caused global warming is real, even if political leaders don't always reflect or act on that knowledge. According to a recent poll, only two per cent of Canadians reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that Earth is warming at alarming rates – a figure that may seem surprising given the volume of nonsense deniers (many of them funded by the fossil fuel industry) spread through letters to the editor, blogs, radio call-ins, and website comments.
Polling indicates more deniers live in the U.S., but they still make up just 15 per cent of that population.
It's getting harder to ignore the evidence: record high worldwide temperatures; increasing extreme weather events; devastating droughts, floods, and wildfires; animal and plant species turning up where they've never been found before; record ice loss in the Arctic and Greenland; melting glaciers… The trends are exactly as climate scientists predicted.
Meanwhile, one of the few "skeptic" climate scientists, Richard Muller, recently reversed his thinking. Muller and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, studied climate data dating back to 1753, then looked at possible causes of the unusual warming observed since the mid-1950s. (Ironically, the study was funded in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, founded by climate change skeptics with heavy interests in the fossil fuel industry.)
Their conclusion? It's not the sun. It's not volcanoes. The most likely cause is humans spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. This isn't news to most climate scientists.
As evidence builds, deniers are starting to change their tune. They once said global warming isn't happening, and some claimed the world is actually cooling. Now, heat records are being broken worldwide – this past decade was the hottest on record. Many scientists say the situation is even more severe than first thought, with temperatures and impacts increasing faster than predicted.
Faced with the evidence, many deniers have started to admit that global warming is real, but argue that humans have little or nothing to do with it. Muller's study was just one of many to demolish that theory.
Our climate has always changed, and natural variation is part of that. But scientists have long known that carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in the atmosphere. Recent warming is occurring at an unprecedented rate that corresponds to burning fossil fuels. According to NASA, global average temperatures have been rising significantly since the 1970s, "with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years." North America just experienced the hottest July on record, and the first seven months of 2012 were the warmest, on average, in more than 100 years.
This evidence has caused some deniers to change their tune again. Yes, the Earth is warming, they say, but whether it's from natural or human causes, we can't do anything about it, so we might as well continue with business as usual, maybe employing technological fixes to help us adapt.
There's also a subset of deniers who see some nefarious conspiracy in climate science and "Agenda 21" (a nonbinding, voluntary UN agreement on sustainable development) to impose a world government or something, but their irrational arguments aren't worth the time of day.
The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels. We also know solutions lie in energy conservation, shifting to renewable sources, and changing our patterns of energy and fuel use, for example, by improving public transit and moving away from personal vehicles.
Scientists have been warning about global warming for decades. It's too late to stop it now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts. The side benefits are numerous: less pollution and environmental destruction, better human health, stronger and more diversified economies, and a likely reduction in global conflicts fuelled by the rapacious drive to exploit finite resources.
We can all work to reduce our individual impacts. But we must also convince our political and business leaders that it's time to put people – especially our children, grandchildren, and generations yet to come – before profits.
Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Editorial and Communications Specialist Ian Hanington.
Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.
robby217 - I assume you have facts and figures?
Or are you just another lightweight denirer of anything inconvenient to your personal aspirations?
Suzuki is second only - and that by a small margin - to Albert Bartlett, in his grasp of the exponential function. Not that we need to be told, of course. A quick look around the planet is enough.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
Oh pdk, one scare at a time please.
As for your data 29/12000 years (lets restrict the denominator to just the holocene). Significance?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature…
Trying to claim Suzuki is second only to Albert Bartlett is a complete insult to your mate Bartlett I would have thought?
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/03/22/peter-foster-suzuki-vs-the-…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/30/the-worst-kind-of-ugly-propaganda…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/16/david-suzuki-insults-but-wont-deb…
"21st Century Capitalism for Dummies". from Hypertiger.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7H6wGy5zf4&feature=related
Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions for the US have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.
David Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year.
There are other social/environmental consequences to fracking and it's not all about CO2 emissions.
http://grist.org/natural-gas/against-the-grain-fracking-companies-mine-rural-wisconsin-for-sand/
How much of US reduction in emissions is offset/shifted to other locations?
The US imports a significant volume of tar sands oil from Canada, operations which contribute a significant increase in emissions.
The US may be consuming less coal but it doesn't make up for the destruction they've left behind.http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Mining-the-Mountain.html
http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/earth/surface-of-the-earth/when-mountains-move.html
Simply put, Lomborg is spinning.
Sure, gas displacing oil is an improvement, and for those with very small minds that might be enough information.
But a 14% reduction since 2007, is not a reduction to 1990 levels, far from it, and it's STILL an addition to total carbon yoy.
Interesting that Lomborg fudges a reduction from a nation which didn't sign up to Kyoto, yet which burns 25% of the fossil fuels globally; with the promised (but 100% undelivered) reductions from lesser users. From a Prof, that's a nonsense.
Who pays him?
That said, the EIA (while not as reliable as the IEA) report is a fascinating read.
A survey here in Australia showed that only 5.5 % of investors think that the sharemarket is the best place to have money ...... the lowest % ever recorded ...
...... but 39 % of investors think that cash in the bank is the best place to park their money ...... the highest support for cash in 38 years ......
The contrarian in me thinks that the stockmarket will probably rocket from here !
Have we had a load of fluff from Parker yet...on how much he thinks he has learned about the magic of printing to buy growth, create employment and buy himself and his socialist mates a seat in the Beehive!...
Here is one fully packaged lesson on why his newfound love of greater debt is a big fat load of you know what...
Gidday Gummy Bear Hero...I been a tad busy sorting out me new batch...Hey I read some guff in the aussie news at dawn that rubbished QE3....can't find it now....seems Bernanke is full of it...the whole game is about stealing from savers and shafting those who didn't take on stupid debts...and the unintended Cs are frightening...look for property to become the safe ground...might explain the auckland bubble....
Bernanke's just trying to keep the US housing market ticking along ....... folks feel richer if their houses are going up in value ........ and that might re-kick consumer spending ........
..... yadda yadda ....... I posted a film clip of Bennie as a boy , even then he was a generous wee soul ....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=szwclmmKwLg
Some rumour monger reckoned that your disappearance coincided with that of future Chinese leader Xi Jingpingpong because the pair of you were in cahoots to launch a takeover bid for Fonterra ........ is it true ?
Batch or Crib...I like the one here similar to a long drop..less cleaning to do...
WTF....oh the poor information engineer ....
"Spaniards are already reeling from a July round of cuts that eliminated Christmas bonus pay for public employees, lowered unemployment benefits and raised sales taxes, bringing new pain to wage earners hit by public-sector pay reductions two years ago.
"We cannot and will not accept more cuts," said Angel Arriero, a 39-year-old information engineer at a government ministry, marching in Madrid's late-summer heat Saturday with his wife and young daughter. He said his pay had dwindled by more 10% since Spain's economy was plunged into crisis four years ago.
"It's all too much for me to handle," he said, holding a sign that read "No mas!"—No more."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/17/eurozone-crisis-spain-bailout-protests
I think information engineer is Spanish for BS spinner....no xmas bonus...how sad...how soon before our very own Shearer promises a xmas pay bonus to those who vote Labour in 014!
"The island has been dubbed the "island of the blind" by the media"
Now it will become the island of miracles...where the blind see again....think of the tourism...the filthy dollars or will they soon be 'Drakmaas'!
Poor witty, truth-speaking Nigel Farage has just been fined (heftily) for saying something witty and truthful about Van Rompuy. Watch out, peeps its a brave new Orwellian world
.
BRUSSELS (AP) — How much does it cost to tell the one of the EU's top officials he has "the charisma of a damp rag?" About €3,000, or close to $4,000, as a European member of Parliament has discovered.
In 2010, Nigel Farage, an anti-European Union member of the EU Parliament, rose following a speech by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council. As Van Rompuy listened, Farage, a Briton, added that the former Belgian prime minister came from "pretty much a non-country."
The Parliament docked Farage €2,980 — 10 days' expenses.
Here's some more truth from Zerohedge
Quite well put I thought...
Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing? A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.
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