The defining moment was the fiasco over Wednesday’s bund auction, reinforced on Thursday by the spectacle of German sovereign bond yields rising above those of the UK.
If you are tempted to think this another vote of confidence by international investors in the UK, don’t. It’s actually got virtually nothing to do with us. Nor in truth does it have much to do with the idea that Germany will eventually get saddled with liability for periphery nation debts, thereby undermining its own creditworthiness.
No, what this is about is the markets starting to bet on what was previously a minority view – a complete collapse, or break-up, of the euro. Up until the past few days, it has remained just about possible to go along with the idea that ultimately Germany would bow to pressure and do whatever might be required to save the single currency.
A Curious Case of Optimism
I first started reading biographies of men of great accomplishments in high school; the first was that of Eddie Rickenbacker. I haven’t stopped, either; the most recent was that of Steve Jobs. Sometime after I’d started my career in the automotive industry, I took to reading books about the men who had created that industry. One thing you learn quickly about these individuals is that most had suffered serious financial setbacks before they finally succeeded. In fact the setbacks they encountered would have stopped the average individual in his tracks; but those who finally succeeded to greatness seemed to brush off defeat even faster than they accepted their ultimate success.
The other fact one notices in reading great car guys’ biographies is that many of the greatest names in business history actually started in the absolute worst of economic times. Others, such as GM’s Alfred Sloan, made their reputations in periods of horrendous economic activity.
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Best Photos of 2011
From the uprisings across the Arab world to the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, there was no lack of news in 2011. Reuters photographers covered the breaking news events as well as captured more intimate, personal stories. In this showcase, the photographers offer a behind the scenes account of the images that helped define the year.
Design by Rutan
You can always tell a Burt Rutan airplane, just as you can always tell a Dr. Seuss drawing or a Beatles song. It’s not only the configurations — though canards, winglets, or twin booms sometimes give them away. It’s not just the materials, though composites have been key to Rutan’s achievements and helped make him the hero of the homebuilder. And it’s not just the futurism, though Rutan designs always look like they flew in from a decade off in the distance. There’s some other quality rolled up with those three that makes you know it’s a Rutan. We think of it as playfulness.
Consider SpaceShipOne, Rutan’s best-known creation, which made history in 2004 as the world’s first private spaceship. It looks the way it does for sound engineering reasons: Its famous tail feathers were deployed to slow and control its atmospheric reentry, its tubby fuselage has a diameter of five feet to accommodate an oxidizer tank of similar dimension and a comfortable cabin, and its pointy little nose is sprinkled with small round windows so that the pilot could see the horizon at all times during the flight up to 60 miles and back. But SpaceShipOne is also toy-like. Can anyone doubt kids would be delighted by a small model of it?
The Best Cities For Technology Jobs
During tough economic times, technology is often seen as the one bright spot. In the U.S. this past year technology jobs outpaced the overall rate of new employment nearly four times. But if you’re looking for a tech job, you may want to consider searching outside of Silicon Valley. Though the Valley may still be the big enchilada in terms of venture capital and innovation, it hasn’t consistently generated new tech employment.
Take, for example, Seattle. Out of the 51 largest metro areas in the U.S., the Valley’s longtime tech rival has emerged as our No. 1 region for high-tech growth, based on long- and short-term job numbers. Built on a base of such tech powerhouses as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing, Seattle has enjoyed the steadiest and most sustained tech growth over the past decade. It is followed by Baltimore (No. 2), Columbus, Ohio (No. 3), Raleigh, N.C. (No. 4) and Salt Lake City, Utah (No. 5).
5 Ways to Think About Nuisance Fees
If you have any doubt about the impact of the Bank of America debit card fee episode, consider a couple of things.
First, it’s now been lampooned in the form of a video on the Funny or Die site. In that clip, a fake Bank of America ad quotes customers thanking the bank for not burning down their houses or torturing their families in a dungeon.
Second, it has induced a new wariness among companies in entirely different industries.
“We have the Bank of America fee top of mind,” said Bill Kula, a spokesman for Verizon. “Part of my role is to get in front of executives and say ‘Do you want your head chopped off if you do this?’ ”
Is There Life After Debt?
Fact: The debt crisis is global – and, yes, this includes the so-called creditor nations, such as China. After all, in our fiat currency world it takes a debit in order to create a credit.
The way we got into this mess is well known: the West foolishly (even criminally, if you ask me) gave up its industrial/manufacturing base and the high earned-income jobs it generated, replacing them with services and low value-added jobs. However, it didn’t lower its consuming and spending habits to balance the losses, instead it piled on debt from vendor nations, and constructed Rube Goldberg asset bubble contraptions that attempted to generate “wealth” out of thin air (e.g. real estate, derivative-based bonds, etc.).
Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive
The European: A computer “is a simple mind having a will but capable of only two ideas”, you have said.Does it make sense to think of a technical apparatus in biological terms?
Dyson: The quote comes from an illustration of a circuit diagram that Lewis Fry Richardson produced in 1930. It was a very prophetic idea, like most of the stuff that Richardson did. He had drawn this diagram of an indeterminate circuit, so it was impossible to predict which state the circuit would be in. Maybe those are the origins of mind: A simple and indeterminate circuit. The significance of Richardson’s idea was that he broke with the assumption that computation had to be deterministic, because so few others things in the universe are deterministic. Alan Turing was very explicit that computers will never be intelligent unless they are allowed to make mistakes. The human mind is not deterministic, it is not flawless. So why would we want computers to be flawless?
The European: The ultimate indeterminate process on Earth is evolution. Yet evolution doesn’t really require input and commands, it sustains and develops itself. That seems fundamentally different from the way we think about technological evolution…
Dyson: Biological evolution is a bottom-up process. There are differences between the two realms, but there are also similarities: In both biology and technology, things develop into structures of increasing complexity. That’s what Nils AallBarricelli saw right away. He tried to understand the origins of the genetic code and apply that to the development of computers. The question was whether you could run computer experiments that allowed increases in systemic complexity to happen. And very quickly that stopped being an experiment and codes began evolving in the wild—not by random mutation, but by crossing and symbiosis, exactly as Barricelli prescribed.
History and Evaluation of the Policy Response to the Great Recession: Summers BGP-266M Crisis Economics Syllabus
Course Overview: This course will examine the American policy response to the recent financial crisis
and associated Great Recession. The objective is to illuminate (i) the changes in macroeconomic thinking necessitated by recent events (ii) the relationship between analytical macroeconomics, finance and policymaking in a political context (iii) lessons of recent experience for public policies directed at preventing crises in the future and responding to them when they come. The lectures will draw on the professional economic literature to the minimum extent necessary to facilitate understanding of the issues involved. The primary focus will be on the process of policy choice and the factors entering into actual policy decisions. Each lecture after the first introductory lecture will cover a different aspect of the policy response to the crisis. Sections will take up relevant analytical economic aspects.