‘American Dream’ Film: Communicating Economic Ideas Dramatically

I’m interested as much in the way ideas get communicated as the ideas themselves. What brings this to mind is the animated film I saw today called The American Dream. This is the most creative expression I’ve seen of the more non-mainstream view of economics — the idea that the Federal Reserve is an evil [...]

Do Companies Really Act in Their Own Interests?

Economics 101 would make one think that all actors always act in their own self-interest and that that is what makes a free-market economy work so well. But deeper economic study helps you to appreciate that the reality is much more nuanced. This is emphasized in posts today by James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario [...]

The Produce Box: Local Foods in the NC Triangle Region

The trend toward local foods is one of the movements that makes tremendous sense to me in the current emerging economic environment. Here in the Triangle region (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA), a local startup, The Produce Box, has been been making weekly deliveries of local foods for the past couple of years. Each week [...]

The Astonishing $600 Trillion Interest-Rate Derivatives Market

A post from April 21, 2010 on Washington’s Blog calls derivatives “the world’s largest market, dwarfing the size of the bond market and world’s real economy” and says that the derivatives market “is currently at around $600 trillion or so (in gross nominal value).” — See “Are Interest Rate Derivatives a Ticking Time Bomb?“ In [...]

Defining Asset Bubbles

Here is an interesting interview with Jeremy Grantham of investment firm GMO, discussing asset bubbles, what they are, and how they should affect investment decisions. Economist Edward Harrison at Naked Capitalism adds some analysis and explanation in his post “Jeremy Grantham on Bubbles.” Harrison’s “informal working definition of a bubble is “a price rise that [...]

The annoying thing about The Big Oligarchy

The annoying thing about The Big Oligarchy … the banks the insurance companies the government the giant firms and their privileged controllers … is that you pay into It all your life through premiums, taxes, and the money It makes from the float on your cash … but then when you ask for the promised [...]

How Can Local Economies Transition to a Petroleum-Scarce World?

Today I read an interview in New Scientist with Rob Hopkins, a key figure in the Transition Towns movement — see “Rob Hopkins: Getting over oil, one town at a time.” He writes about how communities can transition to a more sustainable economy at Transition Culture. Hopkins describes the Transition Towns concept as follows: A [...]

How the Wall Street Boom Went Kablooey

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided recently, I became aware of Michael Lewis’s November 2008 article for Portfolio, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” which offers a fascinating inside look at how bubbles develop, sustain themselves, and then collapse. Lewis makes an interesting connection with the delusional “positive thinking” mode that seems to be an [...]

Simon Johnson: ‘What kind of catastrophe would you like?’

On CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on 7 January, MIT economist Simon Johnson delivered a perky, upbeat prediction of economic catastrophe in the next year due to the megalomania of banks that have drunk the too-big-to-fail Koolaid — see “Crisis Just Beginning: Economist“. You’ll get a kick out of Johnson’s collegial banter with CNBC’s Erin Burnett [...]

Pumping up the Big Bubble

From the Bubbleconomics point of view, the U.S. government’s efforts over the past year can be seen as an attempt to keep the Big Bubble pumped up. The current economic design requires a strong and powerful system of banking and investment, which is why the government has focused so much on propping up the banking [...]