This excellent article by Erik Nielsen points out that the UK and Italy have economies of roughly similar size. The UK is rated “Triple A” and funds itself at 1.6%. Italy is rated “A plus” and consequently funds itself 5.1%. But Italy’s economy is strongly manufacturing based, and much of that is linked to German …
Category archives: Uncategorized
FT publishes letter
The Financial Times has published an adapted version of our piece on risk:
Risk-avoiders are actually increasing the risk
As even Morgan Stanley’s share price drops 50% this year, Franco-Belgian lender Dexia enters emergency talks on possible break-up (and Greece’s failure to meet 2011 budget targets will be turned into new 2012 targets), pressure mounts for UBS to be broken up while RBS, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch also struggle, investors look around for the …
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How to set priorities?
We can’t do everything. So how do we choose what to do, and what not to do? Bjorn Lomborg applied this question to the setting of global priorities. He identified a list of the top problems the world faces, and then got a ‘Dream Team’ of leading economists to rank them. “If we had $50bn to …
Looking for new paradigms
Gavyn Davies, ex-head of global economics at Goldman Sachs, ex-chairman of the BBC, said something interesting in the FT yesterday. He wrote, “Michael Feroli at JP Morgan suggests a useful way of looking at this. Long term bond yields are equal to the sum of short rate expectations, plus a risk premium which represents the …
Ray Anderson
Ray Anderson died recently. He was founder of Interface, a company making industrial-grade carpets from oil. In around 1990 he was writing the ‘sustainability code’ for his own company and he was depressed to find that the best he could come up with was “We will comply with government regulation.” Then Paul Hawken’s “Ecology of …
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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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 …