Finance and the Economy

Explaining The Commons Economy

January 21, 2024 Dave Darby, Resilience. Create! Commoning, Commons, Finance and the Economy, Local Economy

What Is The Commons Economy? It’s an economy in which the essentials of life – housing, energy, land, food, water, transport, social care, the means of exchange etc. are owned in common, in communities, rather than by absentee landlords, corporations or the state. Commons have 3 parts: a) resources / assets, b) ‘commoners’ – local people who control and use them, and c) a set of rules, written by the commoners, so that they’re not lost, by being sold or used up. We’re not talking about ‘open access’ public goods like the oceans, atmosphere, sunlight or rainfall or ‘anything to do with building community’, but commons based on the principles laid out by Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons.

Casino Capitalism And Derivatives Market: Time For A ‘Lehman Moment’?

January 16, 2024 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Educate! Capitalism, Derivatives, Finance and the Economy, Financial Crisis

Reading the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we have achieved a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in 2023. But critics are questioning the official figures, and prices are still high. Surveys show that consumers remain apprehensive. There are other concerns. On Dec. 24, 2023, Catherine Herridge, a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence, said on “Face the Nation,” “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.”

Reimagining Economics Education

January 1, 2024 David Bollier. Strategize! Economics, Education, Finance and the Economy, The Commons

Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator and curriculum developer, had long been appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people. Students at middle and high schools learn about a "degenerative economic system," as she puts it, in which "the economy" is framed as something separate from society and nature. With little sense of contemporary realities, economics courses assume that endless economic growth is desirable and possible. It focuses on businesses and markets, ignoring the vital role that household care and the commons play.

Is American Banking Safe? You Might Not Like The Answer

December 6, 2023 Lynn Parramore, Scheer Post. Educate! Banking, Capitalism, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, History, Regulation

As anybody who lived through the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 knows, banking can be hazardous. Failures can hit millions hard, wiping out life savings, tossing the economy into chaos, and messing with investments, spending, and overall growth. Capital requirements are supposed to be crucial buffers shielding banks from catastrophes, rooted in centuries of financial evolution from Alexander Hamilton up through the New Deal regulatory regime and modern international agreements like the Basel Accords. But current regulators’ efforts to raise the capital ratios of big banks to safe levels are strongly opposed by most financiers, sparking debates on finding a balance between stability and financial risk, all amid intense political pressures.

The Pentagon Just Can’t Pass An Audit

November 30, 2023 Lindsay Koshgarian, Scheer Post. Educate! Audit, Congress, Finance and the Economy, Pentagon, Social Programs

The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money. For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one. Since then, the Pentagon has done an audit every year and given itself a participation prize each time. Yet despite this year’s triumphant press release — titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit” — it has failed every time. In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc).

Amid Discouraging New Inequality Stats, Some Rays Of Hope

October 24, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! California, Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, wealth inequality

Back in the early 20th century, earnest middle-class reformers out to overturn America’s plutocratic order gravitated to the pages of The Public, a weekly magazine whose editor, Louis Post, would become the U.S. assistant secretary of labor in 1913. One year later, the associate editor of The Public would offer a cutting critique of the legal system that so protected our nation’s plutocratic powers-that-be. That system, Stoughton Cooley of The Public avowed, rendered judgments “so far from justice and common sense” that average citizens believe “absolutely that the poor have no redress against the rich.”

Share The Wealth Vs. Waste The Wealth

October 14, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, IRS, Taxes, wealth inequality

In 2020, the Trump team’s last full year, U.S. households annually making over $1 million faced fewer tax audits than households with incomes low enough to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. That had never happened before. But the blame for this plutocratic about-face, a new Americans for Tax Fairness report makes clear, doesn’t belong to the Trump crew alone. Rich people-friendly members of Congress gave Donald Trump his tax-cutting playbook. Ever since 2010, they had been squeezing the IRS budget big-time, forcing the agency “to drastically pull back on auditing the ultra-wealthy.” How drastically?

How Could A BRICS+ Bank And Settlement Currency Work?

October 12, 2023 Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. Create! BRICS, De-dollarization, Finance and the Economy, NATO, Vladimir Putin

This first week of October has seen U.S. interest rates soar to the 5% level on long-term Treasury bonds. That has made long-term Treasuries one of most attractive investment vehicles in the world, or even the most attractive. One obvious result is that countries aiming to de-dollarize their central-bank reserves would make an untimely decision to move out of the dollar at this point. To avoid holding dollars in the form of US Treasury securities would mean holding foreign reserves denominated in a currency that is declining against the dollar. No other government is willing to make its currency so attractive to international investors (including central banks) by raising interest-rates so high.

Climate-Related Damage Costs $16 Million Per Hour On Average Globally

October 10, 2023 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. Educate! climate crisis, Extreme weather, Finance and the Economy, Socio-economic costs

Over the past 20 years, extreme weather events globally, like hurricanes, floods and heat waves, have cost an estimated $2.8 trillion, according to a new study. The study authors estimate the cost of the extreme weather damages from 2000 to 2019 to average around $143 billion, which breaks down to around $16.3 million per hour. The researchers analyzed studies that used a methodology known as Extreme Event Attribution (EEA), which connects human-related greenhouse gas emissions and changes in extreme weather events. They compared these analyses to socio-economic costs from extreme weather events to determine how much of the socio-economic costs of extreme weather events are linked to climate change.

We Have, In Africa, Everything Necessary To Become A Powerful, Modern, And Industrialised Continent

October 6, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Africa, Finance and the Economy, Imperialism, Industrialization, Resources, Wealth

In his 1963 book, Africa Must Unite, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent. United Nations investigators have recently shown that Africa, far from having inadequate resources, is probably better equipped for industrialisation than almost any other region in the world’. Here, Nkrumah was referring to the Special Study on Economic Conditions and Development, Non-Self-Governing Territories (United Nations, 1958), which detailed the continent’s immense natural resources.

‘The Great Taking’: How They Can Own It All

October 3, 2023 Ellen Brown, Web Of Debt. Educate! Bankruptcy, Finance and the Economy, Global Economy, Regulations

The derivatives bubble has been estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillion). The entire GDP of the world is estimated at $105 trillion, or 10% of one quadrillion; and the collective wealth of the world is an estimated $360 trillion. Clearly, there is not enough collateral anywhere to satisfy all the derivative claims. The majority of derivatives now involve interest rate swaps, and interest rates have shot up. The bubble looks ready to pop. Who were the intrepid counterparties signing up to take the other side of these risky derivative bets? Initially, it seems, they were banks –led by four mega-banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Poverty Rose In 2022 As Inflation Surged, Pandemic Aid Terminated

September 13, 2023 Max Jones, Scheer Post. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Pandemic, Poverty

In the aftermath of pandemic relief programs such as increased unemployment and nutrition benefits, greater rental assistance and the child tax credit — policies which the Biden administration allowed to expire in 2021 — Americans faced the largest one-year increase of poverty on record. According to a report from the Census Bureau published on Sept. 12, the sharpest increase in poverty affected children, as child poverty more than doubled from a record low of 5.2 percent to now 12.4 percent. This was indicated by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which “factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living.”

More Banks To Fail? Not In North Dakota

September 1, 2023 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Big Banks, Economic crisis, Finance and the Economy, North Dakota, Public Banks

U.S. banks are again in the crosshairs. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded five new middle-tier banks and put three others on negative outlook. This follows sweeping downgrades earlier in August by Moody’s, which cut credit ratings on 10 banks and placed four of the 15 largest U.S. banks on review for possible downgrade. As with the banks going into receivership earlier this year, concerns include interest rate risk due to unrealized losses from long-term securities. Meanwhile, the U.S. government itself has been downgraded by Fitch Ratings, which questions the government’s ability to finance its nearly $33 trillion federal debt.

Just Stop Oil: The Intersection Of The Four Horsemen And The Web Of Life

August 14, 2023 Nate Hagens, Resilience. Resistance Report climate crisis, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Fossil Fuels, Oil and Gas

In Part 4 of this Frankly mini-series, Nate concludes the deep dive into the nexus between “just stopping oil” and “just pumping oil” with 10 guideposts which might help us to navigate through the intersection of the Four Horsemen of the 2020s and the shrinking Web of Life….together known as The Great Simplification. From decomplexifying at various scales to a change of consciousness arising from more humans focused on “Inner Tech”, there are many ways we as individuals and as a part of the greater society can manage the push and pull of both environment and economic issues while remaining grounded in the reality of energy, technology, behavior, and the economy.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources