They will answer to the King of Gondor. The blade that was broken shall return to Minas Tyrith. Put aside the Ranger. Become who you were born to be. Take the Dimholt Road. It is but a shadow and a thought that you love. I cannot give you what you seek. We cannot defeat the …
Author archives: Permabusiness
What climate change could wreak, sooner than you think
This article in New York Magazine tells us that, unless we take “aggressive action”, our planet is headed for: Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts …
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Alibaba is the beginning of a new global trade system
Interesting article here that sees Alibaba not simply as another ecommerce company like Amazon or ebay but as a trading platform for any business, and hence a strategic tool for China to take over world trade and banking. The platform not only provides a front end for customers to interact with businesses, the businesses deliver products …
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Was Marx right after all?
In this talk from May 2015, Chris Hedges shows how Marx may well have been right about the structural limits to capitalism as it currently exists. “The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, …
Opinion on the strategic situation of oil companies
Over the past year, oil companies have seen the price of their product fall by half. Yet, the visiting professor and chair of the Kings Policy Institute at Kings College London writes, there is a “poverty of strategic thinking” on what to do about this, beyond blind trust that “prices must rise again”. “There is no serious analysis of …
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Norway’s oil fund shows responsible investor pressure is getting results
Norway’s $810bn oil fund has stepped up its push for more responsible investing. In doing so it voted against the resolutions recommended by 9,000 of the companies it holds investments in, including Apple, General Electric and JPMorgan. The fund also completely sold out of a record 73 companies last year, many of which were related to the coal …
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Beijing Enterprises buy German waste-to-energy group
Beijing is surrounded by rubbish dumps so large that they have been described as the city’s “seventh ring”. On Thursday Beijing Enterprises completed the largest ever Chinese acquisition of a German business, purchasing a German waste management company for €1.44bn. The target company is regarded as an industry leader in advanced technologies for filtering emissions. The firm currently converts 4.7m …
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Daimler weakens despite strong 2015 performance
The automotive sector is often a sign of the health of the overall economy. When times are hard, consumers hold back on buying a new car. When times are good, industrial buyers invest in transportation. Daimler has just reported 2015 revenues up 15 per cent and operating earning up more than 25 per cent. There was strong …
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Have commodities and mining reached bottom?
With the slowdown in China’s economy (the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials) the recent boom in commodities and mining companies has turned into “the worst commodities rout in two decades”. Glencore, a mining and commodity trading company with 2014 revenues of $221bn has just had its debt downgraded by Standard & Poor to one …
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Spain now has 10 confirmed cases of Zika virus
After SARS and ebola, we now have the Zika virus, which is spreading remarkably quickly. New forms of disease appear to be arising more frequently and spreading faster. “Spain on Thursday became the first European country to confirm the Zika virus in a pregnant woman — a milestone in the alarmingly rapid spread of the disease across the …
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