December 07, 2008


Obama: Internet Key to Economic Recovery

This morning, after President-Elect Obama laid out the key parts of his economic recovery plan during his weekly address, he turned to the Internet and told the country that he intends to “renew our information superhighway.”

“It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President - because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world,” he said.

Source: Lidija Davis.

November 22, 2008


Global Trends 2025

From the National Intelligence Council's 2025 project:

1 - The whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China— have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.

2 - The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.

3 - Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.

4 - The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

November 18, 2008


U.S. In Deep Recession

The U.S. economy entered a recession in April. It will last 14 months, which would make it one of the longest recessions since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Only the 16-month recessions in the mid-1970s and early 1980s were longer. Even though the economy was technically growing in April this year it would not be unprecedented for the National Bureau of Economic Research to declare a recession was occurring then.

The NBER measures recessions by "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy," rather than the traditional definition of two consecutive quarters of falling GDP.

Source: Reuters.

November 16, 2008


GM Bankruptcy No Option

A study by the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) estimates that in case of a GM bankruptcy 2.5 million jobs would be lost in the first year. The logic: if any of the "Big Three" went bankrupt, many suppliers would also fail; because car companies share suppliers, all U.S.-based manufacturers would suffer crippling parts shortages.

Read Robert J. Samuelson's How to Bail Out General Motors.

November 02, 2008


Time for Fiscal Stimulus

From "When Consumers Capitulate" by Paul Krugman:

The ongoing efforts to bail out the financial system, even if they work, won’t do more than slightly mitigate the problem. Maybe some consumers will be able to keep their credit cards, but as we’ve seen, Americans were overextended even before banks started cutting them off.

No, what the economy needs now is something to take the place of retrenching consumers. That means a major fiscal stimulus. And this time the stimulus should take the form of actual government spending rather than rebate checks that consumers probably wouldn’t spend.

October 27, 2008


This Could Make 1929 Look
Like A Walk In The Park

A chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world's central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions.

"Liquidity doesn't do anything in this situation," says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression.

"It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue," she adds.

York professor Peter Spencer, chief economist for the ITEM Club, says the global authorities have just weeks to get this right, or trigger disaster.

"The central banks are rapidly losing control. By not cutting interest rates nearly far enough or fast enough, they are allowing the money markets to dictate policy. We are long past worrying about moral hazard," he says.

"They still have another couple of months before this starts imploding. Things are very unstable and can move incredibly fast. I don't think the central banks are going to make a major policy error, but if they do, this could make 1929 look like a walk in the park," he adds.

The Bank of England knows the risk. Markets director Paul Tucker says the crisis has moved beyond the collapse of mortgage securities, and is now eating into the bedrock of banking capital. "We must try to avoid the vicious circle in which tighter liquidity conditions, lower asset values, impaired capital resources, reduced credit supply, and slower aggregate demand feed back on each other," he says.

Source: Telegraph

October 03, 2008


Prosperity To End Just Around The Corner?

Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression — a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill.

It's fair to ask whether America's lawmakers could do it again. The bursting of the debt-fueled property bubble and the crippling losses suffered by banks, together with the political dithering of recent days, have set in motion a chain reaction that, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to something like a 21st century version of the Depression — even if a bailout package does eventually get approved.

Anyone looking at the bail-out package as the salvation for the banking system or the U.S. economy is dead wrong. The problems in the economy and the banking system have gone far beyond what the package can fix.

There is a crisis of confidence in the financial system, and that won’t be fixed by the bail-out package. There is a crisis of confidence in political leadership. There is a well deserved mistrust of Wall Street and others whose greed and recklessness got us into this mess. And there are signs the U.S. economy continues to get worse, including house prices which continue to decline.

And we know it’s not just a U.S. problem. There are fears of a worldwide recession.

According to George Magnus, senior economic adviser at UBS, about 40 percent of OECD economies are in effect already in recession. He puts it all down to deleveraging, as banks cuts back on their lending.

September 29, 2008


Congress Rejects Wall Street Bailout

U.S. lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted against the biggest proposed government intervention in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression of 1929.

Government officials, Treasury chiefs and political leaders from both sides of the political divide thought they had agreed Sunday on the details of a $700 billion rescue plan that would prop up the nation's ailing financial system -- and be supported in the House of Representatives.

As it became apparent the vote was lost, the Dow plunged about 500 points on the day.


Who should take the call?

It’s 3 a.m., a few months into 2009, and the phone in the White House rings. Several big hedge funds are about to fail, says the voice on the line, and there’s likely to be chaos when the market opens. Whom do you trust to take that call?

I’m not being melodramatic. The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out — sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it’s not what you’d actually call a good plan, and it won’t end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.

Read all of Paul Krugman's analysis.

September 01, 2008


US's National Innovation Deficit

Though Ms. Estrin, the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, generally is not an alarmist, she has become more and more concerned about the state of her country and its innovation. Vint Cerf agrees: “There is a remarkable telescoping in of vision and an unwillingness to make long-term bets,” and Robert Compton, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, feels that the United States is losing its innovation edge to China and India.

Read Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown.

August 15, 2008


Economic slowdown weighs on oil market

Oil prices dropped below $114 a barrel as investors speculated slowing economic growth in the world's largest economies will continue to undermining global crude demand.

Europe's biggest economies -- Germany, France and Italy -- all contracted in the second quarter. Japan said this week its gross domestic product also shrank in the April-June period. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a bigger-than-expected drop in gasoline supplies, but also said U.S. demand for refined fuel products continues to fall.

Read this Businessweek article.

August 02, 2008


Germany's Sinking Economy

After three years of economic growth and job creation, the Germany economy is starting to upend. Although the industrial sector may still have orders to fill, there is a dearth of new orders coming in at the moment, turnover is declining and profits sinking.

The speed with which the economy is deteriorating is almost unprecedented -- with economists not having seen it go down this fast in years. During the second quarter, Germany had shrinkage of between 0.7 and 1.5 percent, government experts estimate. If the trend continues during the current quarter, then Germany will meet the technical definition for a recession.

Source: Der Spiegel.

July 26, 2008


Thinkernet Launched

The Thinkernet is Internet Evolution’s moderated blogosphere, where the leading minds of the Internet blog and exchange opinions – as well as interacting with registered members of the Internet Evolution site via message boards.

More than 60 of the Internet’s leading luminaries have signed on to blog on the Thinkernet – including world famous authors, entertainment executives, economists, politicians, CIOs, investors, activists, and Internet entrepreneurs.

July 20, 2008


Shades of the 1930s

It certainly seems like 1933. As happened 75 years ago, Wall Street—after two terms of a business-friendly Republican president—self-immolated on a pyre of greed, incompetence and excessive optimism. The troubles thought to be contained to a particular sector (stocks then, subprime mortgages now) spread throughout the entire financial system. And with confidence shattered, the federal government stepped in with unprecedented efforts.

The New Deal left behind plenty of important landmarks, from the Appalachian Trail to Hoover Dam. But its financial infrastructure has proved just as important. The Banking Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and forced member banks to submit to regulation. The Securities and Exchange Act (1934) brought forth a body to oversee the nation's stock exchanges. Later in the decade, Fannie Mae was established to revive the dormant mortgage market.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play a huge role in the mortgage business by lending cash and guaranteeing loans made by others. But with the spread of the mortgage crises their stocks have plummeted in recent weeks, and questions have been raised as to whether the government would do what it implied it would all along when it established the two government sponsored organizations: stand behind their debt. Federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the epic financial meltdown of the Great Depression, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave an emphatic "yes," as they described to occasionally hostile Congress members their plans to allow Fannie and Freddie to borrow money from the Federal Reserve, and to empower the Treasury Department to buy (and buoy) the companies' stock and stand behind their $5.2 trillion in debt.

Read the whole Newsweek article here.

July 13, 2008


Infectious Exuberance

America, from its inception, was a speculation,” begins the historian Aaron M. Sakolski’s 1932 classic, The Great American Land Bubble. George Washington himself was a land speculator, Sakolski notes, and by Washington’s time it was widely perceived that America would eventually be populated much more densely by vast numbers of immigrants, leading many investors to dream of rapidly rising land prices. Waves of speculative mania swept towns, cities, and regions from the 18th century onward, even along the vast and empty frontier. Up, up went the prices. And then, inevitably, down.

Read Robert J. Shiller's article in The Atlantic: "Financial bubbles are like epidemics— and we should treat them both the same way."

July 05, 2008


An Amazing 60-90 Billion Euros

European banks may find it necessary to raise between 60 and 90 billion euros (94-141 billion dollars) to shore up their finances in the face of a nearly year-long credit crisis.

June 21, 2008


The Secret of Bill Gates' Success

Nice homage from the BBC. And by all means also check Fortune, as well as the Reuters coverage of the moment supreme of Bill actually saying goodbye on Friday, Jun 27, 2008. Plus the hilarious official "leaving" video featuring Bono, Clooney, Hillary, Obama and others.

June 18, 2008


Less jobs & surging fuel prices . . .

. . . they may just be the beginning of bigger problems for the US and global economy.

Rising oil prices combined with falling wages will force governments and citizens to tighten their belts. If inflation strikes, governments and citizens will have little choice but adapt by purchasing smaller cars or bicycling, adjusting eating habits and pursuing a simpler lifestyle.

Whole story here.

June 07, 2008


New Oil Price Shock

Energy ministers are meeting in Japan a day after a record one-day jump in the crude oil price, to $139 a barrel.

Under pressure from the US, Japan, China, India and South Korea have agreed on the need to end fuel subsidies, blamed for boosting demand.

US energy secretary Samuel Bodman said the price surge was a "shock" but not a crisis, amid fears the oil price spike could help tip some of the world's economies into recession.

Some suggest crude oil could reach $150 a barrel by July.

May 29, 2008


The Mutually Reinforcing Housing and Oil Shock

The twin shocks from housing and oil have become mutually reinforcing, potentially turning what may be a mild recession into something more threatening. Even those economists who think the U.S. might dodge a recession are concerned.

Crazy prices at the pump are pushing even the survivors over the edge. "They're asking, 'Do I put gas in my car or do I pay this utility bill or do I pay the mortgage?'

Read this BusinessWeek article.

May 25, 2008


Microsoft's Innovation Engine

"Ultimately the goal of Microsoft Research is to make sure Microsoft is still here in 10 years," says Rick Rashid, charged with overseeing research worldwide. Rashid made the comments as Microsoft offered a glimpse at some of the projects aimed at ensuring the company goes from strength-to-strength, including:
= Programming for kids
= Botnet detection
= LaserTouch
= E-Science in the cloud
= Tablet PC
= Privacy Integrated Queries
= WorldWide Telescope
= Bilingual Built-ins that Break Language Barriers
. . . and more

May 16, 2008


Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050

In 2100 the world’s energy system will be drastically different from today’s. Renewable and nuclear energy will be more widely used and humans will have found ways of dealing with air pollution and greenhouse gasses. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? But of course much depends on how we get there. Shell have outlined two possible routes in their new Scenarios to 2050: Scramble and Blueprints.

In the first route, Scramble, nations rush to secure energy resources for themselves, fearing that energy security is a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers. Policymakers pay little attention to curbing energy consumption, supplies run short and greenhouse gas emissions are not addressed until major shocks trigger political reactions. Too little too late? You bet.

The second scenario however, Blueprints, is more positive. Coalitions emerge to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security, and environmental pollution through cross-border cooperation. National governments introduce efficiency standards, taxes, and other policy instruments to improve the environmental performance of buildings, vehicles, and transport fuels.

Services:
= Download the PPT
= Watch our video about the two scenarios, Scramble and Blueprints, with Jeremy Bentham, VP, Global Business Environment
= Download the PDF of the Shell Energy Scenarios 2050
= Download the video transcript
= More

May 04, 2008


From Anti-Americanism to Post-Americanism

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

It's true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead.

Read Fareed Zakaria's The Rise of the Rest.

May 02, 2008


The Cognitive Age

Hillary Clinton summarized the narrative this week: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage economic anxiety. It allows them to treat economic and social change as a great mercantilist competition, with various teams competing for global supremacy, and with politicians starring as the commanding generals.

But there's a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn't really explain most of what is happening in the world.

We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

Read it all here.

May 01, 2008


Luminaries look to future web
at its 15th anniversary


Tim Berners-Lee, W3C
Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
David Belanger, AT&T
Kai-Fu Lee, Google China
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
Mark Bernstein, Parc
Robert Cailliau, Cern
Robert Scoble, blogger
Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 inventor

Read it all here.

April 20, 2008


Climate Change:
A Shameful Lack of Urgency

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Read it all here in The New York Times.

April 12, 2008


Mega Regions Rule

"When people talk about economic competitiveness, the focus tends to be on nation states, but this focus is off the mark. The real driving force of the world economy is a new and incredibly powerful economic unit: the mega-region.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The world's largest mega is Greater Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic activity. Next is the 500-mile Boston-Washington corridor, with some 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in output. Also in the top 10 are mega-regions that run from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Atlanta to Charlotte, Miami to Tampa, and L.A. to San Diego. Outside of the U.S., you can find megas around Amsterdam, London, Osaka and Nagoya, Milan, Rome and Turin, and Frankfurt and Stuttgart."

All this is certainly not new, but still: interesting findings from Richard Florida.

America 2050 is here.

April 06, 2008


Brand New Global Warming
Solutions Unavoidable

Jeffrey D. Sachs is economist and the head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In a recent article in Scientific American he states:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

April 05, 2008


Being Human 2020

By 2020 the terms "interface" and "user" will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans.

It is one prediction in a Microsoft-backed report drawn from the discussions of 45 academics from the fields of computing, science, sociology and psychology.

Article plus movie here.
Report plus crew info here.
Report itself here.

March 28, 2008


RECESSION
The Movie

From the guys who brought you "The Iraq War", comes a sequel unlike anything you've ever seen: RECESSION !
Here.

March 16, 2008


COMMON WEALTH
Economics for a Crowded Planet

The challenges of sustainable development - protecting the environment, stabilizing the world's population, narrowing the gaps of rich and poor and ending extreme poverty Рwill render pass̩ the very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources.

Read this letter to Jeffrey Sachs.

March 15, 2008


Hillary Clinton: recession here now

President Bush, seeking to bolster faith in the economy amid fears of a recession, acknowledged on Friday the United States was going through hard times but said growth would resume over the long run because economic fundamentals were sound.

Democratic presidential candidate Clinton countered that much of the country was already in a recession.

With oil prices at record highs, the mortgage market on the verge of meltdown and the specter of recession looming, Bush has been scrambling to halt the slide in the economy.

Read it all here.

March 06, 2008


The End of Oil As We Know It

From the New York Times:

The Age of Oil is at an end. Maybe not this year. Maybe not for five years. But signs of the coming collapse are evident.

Start at the White House. There, a week ago, President Bush touted tax breaks for oil companies that have just posted the largest profits in the history of American business. Yet he was dumbstruck when asked about the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a price that will force many families to choose between food and basic travel.

“Wait — what did you just say?”, the president asked after a reporter solicited his advice for Americans facing that price, which was predicted by many analysts.

February 29, 2008


Ten Emerging technologies 2008


Technology Review presents the 10 technologies that they think are most likely to change the way we live.

1 Modeling Surprise Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events, says Microsoft's Eric Horvitz.

2 Probabilistic Chips Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

3 NanoRadio Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

4 Wireless Power Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

5 Atomic Magnetometers John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before.

6 Offline Web Applications Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.

7 Graphene Transistors A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors.

8 Connectomics Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

9 Reality Mining Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

10 Cellulolytic Enzymes Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

Read it all here.

February 19, 2008


One 100 Dollars A F*ckin Barrel !


H O L Y $ H I F T . . .

February 14, 2008


Tech Pioneers 2008

Here.

February 05, 2008


Sudden Climate Shifts Expected

Many of Earth's climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change. A number of these shifts could occur this century. Society should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that climate change will be a gradual process.

The work by an international team appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

January 21, 2008


The Great Recession of 2008

No one can be sure when a recession has begun, or when it has ended. The NBER designates the beginning of a recession months after it has started and designates its ending months (or sometimes years) after it has ended.

An inaccurate forecast of whether or not there is a recession today will not be proved false for 12 months or more. Read this article, which was published a month ago.

Ben Bernanke's book on The Great Depression.

January 08, 2008


US Recession A Fact

The US has entered its first full-blown economic recession in 16 years, according to investment bank Merrill Lynch.

This is how a recession works.

January 02, 2008


A Wireless & Mobile 2008

In 2008 these are the five technologies that definitely will take off, BBC News predicts: Web To Go, Ultra Mobile PCs, IPTV, WIMAX and Mobile VOIP.

Click to enlarge picture.