Journalist Paul Mason, economics editor for Channel 4 News, argues that the neoliberal capitalist model “is broken” — has had its day, is systemically unsustainable — and can be replaced with a new model. His solution? Use technology to reduce the hours of work we all do, and “consign the coercive bullshit that takes place at the precarious end of …
Continue reading “Paul Mason argues that capitalism is failing”
The five ’emerging’ BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for a quarter of the world economy (24.5%). Their voting power at the IMF is only 10.3 percent. They have decided to stop waiting for the US Congress to ratify reforms to that voting structure. At their sixth summit recently they announced …
The President of Iceland says we are at an historic crossroads, where “we have to choose (whether we like it or not) what is more important: the interests of the financial markets, or the democratic will of the people.” (from 34-55 seconds)
A recent article in the New York Times puts the cost of environmental degradation in China at about $230 billion in 2010. This is 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, three times the level in 2004. “This cuts to the heart of China’s economic challenge: how to transform from the explosive growth of the …
Continue reading “The two sides of change for a sustainable future”
In February this year, KPMG published a report identifying ten “sustainability megaforces that will affect every business over the next two decades.” They have identified ten good drivers of change. They just seem to have missed a trick when it comes to showing how these issues will have serious consequences for business leaders. Even inclusion of the …
We cannot continue to grow our economy forever. A physics professor at the University of California has used the laws of physics to write two blogs that explain why. Permabusiness takes this information and looks at what would come next — both for the financial system and the wider economy. Unexpectedly, we find stories in …
Lots of people talk about “thinking global, acting local”. This guy does a good job of putting it into practice. He paints a clear picture that runs from the strategic rise of China to the practical need for better education, less regulation, more environmental responsibility, and more socially-inclusive wealth creation.
Oil remains volatile, with prices falling despite low US stocks. UK-based banks are swapping their liquid assets for the illiquid assets of European lenders — but does the resulting mix have a lower or higher risk of contagion? Use of the renminbi to settle cross-border trades fell.
The Earth is full and over the past ten years increasing demand from emerging markets has erased all the resource-price declines of the last century. A new report from McKinsey says three key trends look set to make this situation more difficult and more volatile: people in developing nations are looking to increase their standards of living, …
The solution to the financial crisis is straightforward. As Richard Douthwaite and others have pointed out, the problem we face is not a lack of money. Rather it is the fact that our money has been lent into existence. As we are now discovering, this creates an inherently unstable system of debt, in which default …