CategoryEconomics

The Rise (and Fall) of the US Dollar

The Visual Capitalist comes though again with an animated tale of the last 120 years of world reserve currencies. Some screen shots and commentary below: The start of the 20th Century is the end of the British Empire. The USD is a minor currency. The British Pound is by far the world’s most popular reserve currency and the world’s international trade settled in London, not New York...

Progress on Global Poverty

In the fight to eliminate global poverty, a statistic often quoted is the World Bank’s claim that the poverty rate is below 10%. True, but only when measured against a global poverty line of $2.15 per day. $2.15 is about the same as American’s spend per day on their dogs and cats. Progress is still positive if you pick a more realistic poverty line, but at $3.65 there are nearly 2...

Developed, Developing, and other outdated terminology

Hans Rosling was an impressive public speaker, with not just an ability to distill complex topics into easy to understand stories, but to do so with a flair of showmanship. One of the many lessons in those stories was the fact that the world is no longer divided into “developed” and “developing” economies, but is instead is now a world with a continuum of incomes. What...

The biggest business is… small business

The biggest employer in your neighborhood is likely not one big factory or hospital, nor the government or military. It’s unlikely any one corporation at all. The biggest employer nearly everywhere are the multitude of small businesses that operate the plethora of services needed to make up the modern lifestyle.

Africa is Next

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China had its economic boom… and this year saw its population peak at 1.4 billion and shrinking. India is in the middle of its economic boom… passing up China’s population with another 1.4 billion population, but with that population growth slowing down. Africa is the other place on earth with 1.4 billion people. Not a single country, but 54 countries, but also an area far...

The SDGs require Capitalism

UN SDGs

Seven years ago I wrote and delivered a talk about how we leave the big problems of the worlds for the philanthropists to solve, but they just don’t have enough money to do that. The 2020 update to that talk is below. Short story shorter… the total amount of money in philanthropy is less than $1 trillion, less than the value of just Microsoft alone, a tiny fraction of the total...

Warren Buffett was still Retired in 1974

Warren Buffett retires

After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, and he was still telling people he was retired in 1974. If you missed my first blog post about Buffett’s retirement, best to start with that one, which left off at the cliffhanger asking how he got from there to Berkshire Hathaway. Halfway...

Warren Buffett Retired (in 1969)

Warren Buffett retires

After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, never to be heard from again. The first half is completely true. The second, true as of the end of 1969. Learning about both of those facts has dropped me down a fascinating rabbit hole of corporate history and Buffett lore that I’ll...

Monopoly, but with “womb-lottery” capital

Monopoly board

Imagine the game Monopoly, but instead of every player starting the game with $1,500, create a pile of $5s, $10s, $20s, $100s and $500s that add up to $5,000, shuffle the money, and deal it out one bill at a time to the players. Some will have start with more than $1,500 and some with far less. Or to be even more like the real world, all but one player starts with $100 and the last player gets...

Books, Cleverness, and the 1933 Securities Act

1929 stock market crash headline

Over the years I’ve asked many smart people why, after the historic public market crash of 1929 did the U.S. Government then pass the Securities Act of 1933, which disallows the sale of shares in private companies to every American? Not surprisingly, given the hows and whys of laws written before not only the Internet but also before radio are mostly lost to history. But now we have a new...

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