In August this year, stock markets around the world crashed. Two big reasons for this were quoted by the Guardian’s Larry Elliott on 5 August. For Gavyn Davies writing in the FT, other factors were key.
Author archives: Permabusiness
Financial innovation: top to bottom
Companies in the US and UK, faced with a lack of willingness from the banks to lend, have been raising money by issuing ‘mini-bonds’ direct to customers. Similar to the debentures issued by the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, they can offer customers a mix of goods and services (tennis tickets, chocolates, shaving …
Bank of England may shift QE into riskier assets
As concerns mount over the state of the economy, George Osborne has said that he sees no barriers to a further round of quantitative easing, possibly moving into riskier asset classes than gilts. Adam Posen, an external member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, is expected to call for the Bank to do exactly …
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Cities vs Companies
Cities and companies are both human constructs: different ways of arranging people. But why is it that we can raze a city to the ground, and within a few decades it can recover… but all companies die? The answer seems to be built into something about the way they are organised. Both follow natural, scientifically-measurable …
The Open Enterprise
Shereef Bishay wonders why three quarters of people feel under-engaged at work, and compares this with the passion of the Open Source Software community. With several others he investigated what the principles of an ‘Open Enterprise’ would be , and suggests: No formal (fixed) organisation structure: everyone has the same job title, “Human Being” Instead …
Reinsurance can encourage adaptation to climate change
Some excerpts from this rather long article in Business Week, “The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry”: (The article we originally linked-to may have been edited slightly, and was originally at http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-god-clause-and-the-reinsurance-industry-09012011.html ) “It is wrong to say that a natural disaster destroyed something; the destruction was not nature’s fault but our own” — because we built in …
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State of the oceans
In the last fifty years we have eaten more than 90% of the big fish in the sea. We have eaten more than ninety percent of the big fish in the sea: And instead we have turned the entire Pacific Ocean (the Pacific Ocean!) into a floating Garage Patch: As Charles Moore says, “We had to …
The Earth is full
This article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times says what I have been thinking for a while: the Earth is full. As the WWF has been saying for some time now, we are using resources faster than the Earth can replenish them: not ‘slightly’ more, but a full 50% more than the Earth is able to renew …
‘Rare earths’ not so rare
Japanese scientists have discovered huge deposits of “rare earth” minerals on the mud floor of the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii and Tahiti. These minerals are crucial for making electronics products such as smartphones, tablet devices, flat-screen TVs and hybrid cars. Until now China, with the largest land-based deposits of these minerals, has had about 97% of global production. …
Oceans (and people) under massive threat
A group of leading world experts has met to discuss the state of the world’s oceans. Their findings, surprising even to them, are that the oceans of the world are under more severe stress than already understood. Conditions are now being created that are the same as all five mass-extinctions in the past 600 million …