Here's my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. 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.
My must read is #3 on an epic journey
1. The story of Kweku Adoboli - Remember him? He was the UBS trader in London who lost $2.3 bln for his bank through trading synthetic equities.
Now he's out of prison and spoke extensively to Lindsay Fortado at the FT about why he did what he did and what's next.
Through the surprisingly close relationship I forged with him during his prison years, I came to know him as a far more complex figure than his portrayal. He still seems slow to believe that what he did was truly wrong or unknown to others at UBS, but remains convinced that he had been working to a higher imperative: to make his bosses as much money as possible and lessen the wider pressure on the bank’s traders.
2. The soft stuff - In the coming age of robots, apps and algorithms, it turns out social skills will become increasingly important. The New York Times reports on research showing skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, and the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.
3. An epic journey - This piece in the New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle details one refugee's escape from Syria across ten borders is already an epic and instant classic.
4. Is there alien life out there? - Ross Anderson reports via The Atlantic that astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star that they can't explain so they're taking a closer look.
5. Robots vs wages - Larry Summers is always worth reading. Here at The Washington Post he argues that education won't solve the problem of robots taking the jobs of middle class workers, if it is a problem. Workers just need more power and the economy needs to grow more jobs, he says.
6. It wouldn't make a difference - This Brookings paper by William G. Gale, Melissa S. Kearney, and Peter R. Orszag caused quite a stir in America this week by pointing out that lifting the top tax rate there to 50% and redistributing the income to the bottom 20% would improve inequality in an "exceedingly modest" way.
7. The climate is changing - 2015 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, Justin Gillis repports in the New York Times. Last year set the previous record high.
8. Someone is wrong - This chart shows how the market (the blue line) thinks the US Federal Reserve won't be raising interest rates any time soon.
That's quite different to the Fed's own 'dot plot'. Someone is going to be wrong, and lately it's been the world's central banks.
9. Totally John Oliver on the Canadian election. I laughed.
10. Totally Clarke and Dawe - Malcolm Turnbull doesn't really care about the polls...
8 Comments
#5, we should all train and work as baristas, then as long as everybody buys 1 coffee on the way to work we will all be rich and fulfilled.
#7, Climate science 101: "..... just look through the pinhole. NO!, you are not to look at the bigger picture, just the pinhole.....", repeat after me, if it was not recorded, it did not happen.
There isn't much point to automation if everybody is expected to do new pointless non-jobs to fill in the time while the gains are siphened off elsewhere. We really should be working less. But that's incompatible with the silly economic treadmill we are trapped on. And I say this as a guy who does the automating.
Money is an illusion.
Money could just as easily have been invented by a magician
Debt exposes this money illusion.
So what does all this debt teach us?
Debt is an illusion of wealth.
Debt allows us to have what we cannot afford – the illusion of having what we have not.
Debt is an illusion that we are actually paying for things when we are not.
If debt were not an illusion we would pay it back, but you cannot pay back an illusion.
Because of this illusion debt has to be repaid with more debt.
Total debt will always grow because it cannot be paid back
It is this money illusion that enables banks to print more and more of it (QE)
Why then do we have and tolerate this illusion – because it enslaves us
Global debt stands at 75 trillion dollars (75,000,000,000,000)
A 75 trillion dollar illusion
Oh, and if the debt gets too high we can allways inflate it away - whoops, we cant get back inflation
Money is an illusion...
you are joking...... I use money as a medium of exchange... I use it to buy food petrol etc... It works for me...it's real for me..???
Maybe the illusion is that we believe money is a store of value...???
Maybe the illusion is that we believe it is a unit of account...??
we use it to measure everything.... and yet it is not a constant.... ($1 is not like 1cm)... but we use it in that way to measure economic activity....
That creates an illusion.......!!!
Money is something, anything, that is accepted as a medium of exchange.
In our case paper and electronic digits in a computer.
It is not the paper or the electronic digit that has value it is the acceptance that is has value.
It is an illusion in our heads that this paper or this electronic digit has value.
Because money is not real but an illusion you can do things with an illusion that you cannot do with something that is real.
We can create lots of it.
We can fund wars with it
We can bail out banks with it
There is no limit to what you can achieve with an illusion just so long as the people go on believing the illusion
Try being this creative with something that is real and see how far you get.
#6 - That says a lot more about the inadequacy of the Gini coefficient as a diagnostic tool than it does about the usefulness of such a policy (The authors' conclusion spends a lot of effort to downplay their numerical findings!). Focusing on 'reducing inequality' rather than actual outcomes like improvement in employment, housing, health and wellbeing is such a poisonous fetishisation.
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