

nechaus wrote:If i had 1 billion dollars, i would go buy an island and build sustainable housing that provides food water and electricity, let anyone who has been living on the streets live on it.

nechaus wrote:
Perhaps they should split the world again, people who want capitalism can live on the left, people that don't can live on the right.
I don't know i don't have the answers, i just know this is less than ideal for most of the population.
If i had 1 billion dollars, i would go buy an island and build sustainable housing that provides food water and electricity, let anyone who has been living on the streets live on it.

NUDGED TOWARDS BETTER THINKING
THIS book should be required reading this summer. Not because it is entertaining or a mere diversion but because it is a subtle and beautifully scientific guide for the perplexed. If you see yourself as a citizen in a democratic polity, read Thinking, Fast and Slow. Self-indulgent cynics and self-important ideologues probably won't read it, but they are most in need of what it has to teach. Do yourself a favour, whoever you are: buy this book and read it quietly and thoughtfully, absorbing its insights.
Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work on prospect theory. To understand what this is, how Kahneman got into thinking about it and what his key insights were (in collaboration with his long-time research partner Amos Tversky), go straight to chapter 26, Prospect Theory. It's a fascinating excursion into clear thinking all on its own. Prospect theory is about gambling, risk-taking and expected returns. It's a body of theory with considerable practical relevance to the king-sized mess welfare economics and financial markets got themselves into by the late 2000s.
Kahneman re-examined the fundamentals of utility theory, articulated by Daniel Bernoulli, almost 300 years ago. He did this long before the extravagant follies of the past decade or two came close to wrecking economies from California to Greece.
Utility theory lies at the foundation of modern economics. There is a rather urgent need right now to understand what has gone so awfully wrong in so many economies. Falling back on Marxism or some kind of self-satisfied ideological cliche does not amount to understanding. Kahneman confers considerable understanding. That's why he deserved his Nobel Prize.
Thinking, Fast and Slow has five parts: Two Systems; Heuristics and Biases; Overconfidence; Choices; and Two Selves. It also contains, as appendixes, two of the classic papers for which Kahneman won his Nobel: Judgment under Uncertainty and Choices, Values and Frames.
Part I sets cognitive science in an accessible of reference that acts as a disciplined corrective to a good deal of pop psychology and a lucid introduction to the theoretical work in the following four parts of the book.
Kahneman suggests we think of our brain -- our "machine" for making judgments -- as consisting of two basic systems, which he calls System 1 and System 2. He describes the characteristics of each and explains how their faults and standard ways of interacting result in many kinds of error, bias and illusion -- universally and predictably, not in merely unusual or idiosyncratic cases.
System 1 is the intuitive, unconscious, fast reaction part of the brain. It is emotional, holistic and instinctual. It is, as he expresses it, "a machine for jumping to conclusions".
In certain circumstances and often in everyday life, its functions are reliable, rapid and even remarkable. But when it comes to matters that require complex, abstract thinking it is in deep trouble. System 2 is better equipped -- if trained and switched on -- to handle such matters. The problem with System 2 is that it is lazy and highly inclined to rationalise rather than critically examine the intuitive judgments of System 1.
In Parts II, III and IV of the book, drawing on the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists, Kahneman offers a fascinating dissection of the brain of homo sapiens. The chapters include The Law of Small Numbers, Anchors, The Science of Availability, Availability, Emotion and Risk, Causes Trump Statistics, Intuitions vs Formulas, Risk Policies and Frames and Reality. At every point Kahneman exhibits a demeanour at once keenly curious, meticulously scientific and utterly unpretentious.
The implications of what he imparts are enormous and need to be digested by our education institutions (not least all business administration courses), our public policy systems and our methods for public debate.
An indication of the ways in which such insights can be applied was offered several years ago, in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. Originally completed in 2007, it was reissued in 2008 with a postscript titled The Financial Crisis of 2008. The authors drew attention to the alarming reality that almost no economists or financial analysts had foreseen the crisis, or issued public warnings as it approached. They praised the behavioural economist Robert Shiller for having done so.
Shiller's warning in 2005 had been that "social contagion" was creating a housing market bubble that inevitably would burst. Shiller's books, Irrational Exuberance (2000), and The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (2003), are recommended. Thaler and Sunstein argue that sound public policy, informed by the insights of cognitive science and behavioural economics, must invent ways to prevent or defuse such outbreaks of social contagion, or what Charles Mackay long ago called "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds".
As Michael Lewis's peerless writing shows, a little thoughtful analysis can reap enormous dividends. If markets and capitalism are to flourish and the costs of human stupidity are to be contained in future, then many things will need to be rethought and reformed. Lewis's latest book, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, a characteristic tour de force shows this from Iceland and Ireland to Greece, Germany and California.
Kahneman, meanwhile, is hard at work trying to engineer better thinking in the marketplace, or at least to nudge the unwilling and unwitting in that direction. He is a partner in a firm called Greatest Good, committed to applying cutting-edge data analysis and the insights of behavioural economics to real business challenges.
His associates are a highly impressive group, including Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, Gary Becker, John List, Atul Gawande and Lisa Randall. Now that, to adapt Groucho Marx, is a club of which I'd like to be a member.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
By Daniel Kahneman
Allen Lane, 500pp, $29.95
Paul Monk is founder of Austhink Consulting. His most recent book is The West in a Nutshell.

Sunder wrote:nechaus wrote:
Perhaps they should split the world again, people who want capitalism can live on the left, people that don't can live on the right.
I don't know i don't have the answers, i just know this is less than ideal for most of the population.
If i had 1 billion dollars, i would go buy an island and build sustainable housing that provides food water and electricity, let anyone who has been living on the streets live on it.
The problem with unqualified equality, is that instead of everyone striving to be at the top, everyone will strive to be at the bottom in the sense that they will take the path of maximum comfort and minimum effort, not make trade offs as they do now.
Sure, you will get the odd person who will study medicine for the love of people - or professional curiosity, but will you have enough doctors? Who will service your sustainable houses? people from the other side of the world? Although its often misquoted Gordon Gecko had a point - " Greed
clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. " Greed means people work hard, better themselves, betters humanity. For want of more food, hunters and gatherers became farmers. For want of a better life, people researched, innovated and enterpreneured. Without greed, we would still be in caves. Without greed, we'd be back there in a few generations.
Greed is not a problem - senseless, meaningless, selfish greed is a problem.
Oh, and by the way? If you're on the dole, you're in the top 5% of the world's earners. On the minimum wage? Top 2%. On the median wage? Top 0.5%. No, capitalism hasn't worked for all, but if you're saying it hasn't worked for you, then I think your perspective is skewed.

Philistine wrote:I love your work Sunder, I don't think I have seen you post a single thing on this forum that I disagree with.
I just posted this on the book thread I started, but I actually think it is relevant to this thread as well. I am halfway through this book at the moment, and it is awesome. I highly recommend everybody interested in the topics covered in this thread read it. It is called "Thinking, Fast and Slow". THis is a review that appeared in this weekends Australian.

nechaus wrote:How can you say that, people will strive to the bottom? How can you know? Because of what happens with people and the current system now.
A system that is equal for everyone has never been done in history... unless i missed something.
I think we have enough tech to really sustain ourselves. If I was to live in a cave, It would be an amazing cave.

mdd0127 wrote:Also, to chop down another point. There are no such things as "zero percent" loans. The only people they would give those to would never have the need to apply for one. It's a scam to get people in the door, tell them they don't qualify, then string them up at 21%apr.
deVries wrote:What is the solution to transfer easily some symbolic form of work-exchange beyond bartering or coins? How would we make the most efficient market of work-exchange?


nechaus wrote:I believe the problem is capitalism. As long as people have the goal of being on the top, that is the problem. and as long as this type system is in place there will be those type of people, that is the problem. So basically there will always be that huge gap with rich and poor.
nechaus wrote:If i had 1 billion dollars, i would go buy an island and build sustainable housing that provides food water and electricity, let anyone who has been living on the streets live on it.
nechaus wrote:Maybe there is no such thing as being equal as we are all so different.
nechaus wrote:I think no one should have to live in poverty, and there should be a standard. Walking through the city, i see this same homeless women sitting on this same chair everyday.

nechaus wrote:I have read all the pages of this thread, took me bloody ages.
I believe the problem is capitalism.

Gordo wrote:They were making so much money on credit default swaps and ninja loans they closed down the gold certificate business years ago. This is what got them in trouble.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN:You have been a staunch advocate for letting markets regulate themselves. And my question for you is simple... Were you wrong?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Yes, I found a flaw, but I've been very distressed by that fact.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality...
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Precisely. No, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

Tom Tom wrote:Problem is true Capitalism is eroding before our eyes. Again the SOLUTION is capitalism.
"The Constitution guarantees the rights of “life, liberty, and property” in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, and then again in the 14th Amendment, which protects those rights against interference by the states."
"The US Supreme Court did belatedly discover the “pursuit of happiness” when interpreting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In the 1923 case of Meyer v. Nebraska, there was a challenge to a state law prohibiting the teaching of foreign language to elementary and middle school children. Speaking for the court, Justice McReynolds stated that the liberty guaranteed by the 14th Amendment includes not only freedom from restraint, but also, the right to work, to raise a family and, “generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
You’ll note that the court referred not to an unfettered pursuit of happiness, but to the “orderly” pursuit of happiness; in other words, you can’t pursue happiness to the point of breaking the law or violating other people’s rights. Fair enough."

The Taxpayer Is the Lender of Last Resort to the Bankrupt CDS Casino. In this case, Paulson won betting that homeowners would default, while his counterparties lost the same amount taking the opposite side of the bet. Because these OTC transactions were not properly capitalized, the losing counterparties would have collapsed under the strain of paying these bets; in addition, because of interconnectedness among financial institutions, any single collapse of a major financial institution would have destabilized the worldwide economy. Only the intervention of taxpayers as the lender of last resort stemmed the onset of a worldwide depression.
The analysis surrounding this subject estimates that there may have been three to four times as many ―naked‖ CDS instruments extant at the time of the meltdown than CDSs guaranteeing actual risk (Kopecki and Harrington 2009; U.S. Congress, Senate 2008). This means that to the extent that the guarantors of CDSs (e.g., AIG) had to be rescued by the U.S.
15
taxpayer, the chances were very high that the ―bail out‖ was of failed naked CDS bets that mortgages would be paid (prominent Members of Congress have maintained that the holders of bets that mortgages would fail have formed a strong political constituency against the ―rescue‖ of subprime borrowers through the adjustment of mortgages to keep homeowners from defaulting; Grim 2009).
The fact that ―naked‖ CDS and ―synthetic‖ CDOs were nothing more than ―bets‖ on the viability of the subprime market also demonstrates the importance of the CFMA expressly preempting state gaming and anti-bucket shop laws (Johnson and Hazen 2004, 975). Had those laws not been preempted, it is almost certain that at least some states would have banned these investments as unlicensed gambling or illegal bucket shops. An action of this sort by even a single state would have disrupted the ―naked‖ CDS market throughout the country.
Interconnectedness: The Systemic Risk Derived from All Types of Swaps
Swaps Other Than CDS Have Caused Serious Financial Dislocations. While CDSs and synthetic CDOs almost certainly lit the fuse that led to the recent explosive financial destabilization, the remainder of the OTC market has historically led to other destabilizing events in the economy. These include the recent energy and food commodity bubble, the near failure of LTCM in 1998, the Orange Country bankruptcy of 1994, and now, through cross currency swaps masking the full extent of sovereign debt, a causative factor of the European sovereign debt crisis (Greenberger 2008, 2-3; Greenberger 2009, 4-5; Story, Thomas, and Schwartz 2010).
Unregulated OTC Derivatives of All Kinds Cause “Too Big To Fail.” However, even if looking only at the financial crisis of 2007 and beyond, the remainder of the unregulated OTC derivatives market was central to the crisis‘s causation. That is because the remainder of the OTC derivative market relates directly to the interconnectedness that made large financial
16
institutions ―too big to fail,‖ and the prevention of a cascading collapse of the financial system therefore required calling upon the American taxpayer to bail out many of those huge financial entities (Greenberger 2008).
The Lehman Bankruptcy. As now can be seen from the Lehman bankruptcy proceedings, Lehman was a counterparty or guarantor of over 930,000 OTC derivatives. (Charles 2009, 16). To the extent that these contracts did not involve CDS, they certainly involved unregulated interest rate, currency, foreign exchange, and energy swaps. The Lehman liquidators are now embarked in a huge battle with Lehman‘s OTC derivative counterparties, claiming that those counterparties have greatly exaggerated the value of amounts owed by Lehman pursuant to those derivatives (Murphy and Sakoui 2010).
AIG Interconnectedness. Of course, it was the very failure of Lehman, and the cascading adverse and substantial impacts its bankruptcy has caused, that led the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to alter course on the day after Lehman‘s failure, and to prevent AIG‘s bankruptcy and then to recommend the TARP bailout. Those actions revealed to the world the correlation between interconnectedness of unregulated OTC swaps transactions and the too big to fail doctrine (Congressional Oversight Panel 2010, 9).
All Swaps Are Masked By Opaque Accounting Principles. A final reason all derivatives—not just credit derivatives—played a role in the onset of the crisis is that they were by virtue of swaps dealer lobbying never properly accounted for on balance sheets. Because of a major lobbying effort by ISDA,
banks and corporations that trade swaps do not play by the same rules as other individuals and businesses. Banks are permitted to exclude their full exposure to swaps from their financial statements and instead report only the ―fair value‖
17
changes in those swaps over time. Such reporting is like an individual reporting only the change in their debt balances, instead of reporting the debts themselves. (Partnoy and Turner 2010, 88)
Thus, prior to the meltdown, swaps of all kinds were masked by a double barrier of opacity, i.e., not only were they private and bilateral, but they were even hidden on the balance sheets of those institutions most likely to suffer from their adverse impact. This kind of balance sheet opacity blinded regulators and market observers from the explosive and toxic nature of the contractual obligations embedded in swaps. And, when the crisis became full blown in September 2008, this opacity led both the extenders of credit and policy makers to fear the worst. As a result, bank lending froze up, causing the credit crisis.
Conclusion
By officially removing the multi-trillion dollar swaps market from the traditional norms of market regulation in 2000, a highly speculative derivative bubble was created that was opaque to federal regulators and market observers alike. Thus, there were no capital adequacy protections, and the lack of oversight allowed trillions of dollars of financial commitments to be made with no assurance that those commitments could be fulfilled beyond the highly illusory AAA ratings of the counterparties in question.
Had the norms of market regulation been applicable, these swaps transactions would have been adequately capitalized by traditional clearing norms; and the dangers building up in these markets would otherwise have been observable by the transparency and price discipline that accompanies exchange trading.




ninjamik wrote:but what we now have is Corporatism! which is actually just fascism!...the head and founder of the Facists (italians)...in ww2 Mussolini described it as this! Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.
This is what we have now!.... who were the last people to have homeland security groups! The National-sosialist fascists that were the third reich!!
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

ninjamik wrote:To catch up! my answer to the problem is Individualist capped capitalism! (basically a return to your constitution in its un bastardised version.) we/ sorry your founding fathers did get it right that people should be free to better them selves. But....

ninjamik wrote:there should be a cap to how much you can earn ... say a few billion for a company, and no individual is allowed more than say 100million?
this still fits under a individualist ideology where everyone is free...you could say what if i don't want to limit to 100million, i have a right to my individual freedom to earn money!...yes but your right is infringing on everyone else s' right to do the same because you are buying up markets and politicians and ruining competition...
I also think there should be a re -distribution of wealth. I don't mean shared out equally a few dollars each...the rich can still be quite rich, they worked for it (apparently all legally and tax paid!!) but not as rich... No companies richer than Countries, and certainly no off shore banks, this is how globalist corporate tyranny sets in when it can buy international politics and law making...





Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest