Michael Lewis is the author of The Big Short and a rare storyteller who can convey complex economic topics as stories with interesting characters and plots. Boomerang tells stories in and around the financial meltdown (a.k.a. Panic) of 2008-2009, but for Americans these are mostly the far less discussed stories of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and Germany. The fact that Iceland was able (within a...
Have I mentioned I love a good assumption? Have I mentioned my fascination with norms that were normal for our grandparents which seem totally odd today? Did you think 29 knuts in one sickle, and 17 sickles in a galleon was making fun of non-metric countries? Nope! It was making fund of pre-decimal British pounds, shillings, and pence. Note too this video is from 1970, not 1870 or 1670. In 1969...
From all my readings of the history of currencies, I felt the need to create a my own collection of worthless paper currencies. The first of these are on their way now, but in the meantime, I came across a website selling souvenir Zero Euro bills, and what better way to begin this collection than with a paper bill commemorating Euro’s most famous anti-Capitalist economist, Karl Marx. You...
A good question recently came up on Quora: What is the concept of currency? How am I simply able to buy things and services with just a piece of paper? You have an item or provide a service someone else wants. They give you a token in return. You have needs for other items and services. Those providers accept your token. Each token represents historic effort. The harder it was to produce or...
American banks fail when unregulated, and they fail when improperly regulated. That is the one sentence summary of Broken Bargain by Kathleen Day, the latest book in my series trying to understand how the financial system is failing. My key learnings from his book are highly unlikely what the author intended. She’s a bit too anti-bank for my taste. We’d seem to agree on 99% of what is...
This idea of corporations with a purpose beyond just shareholders continues to be discussed in the news. This week in The Economist published an op-ed “What Corporations are for” ($), repeating the Friedman Doctrine and dissing the 181 signers of at the Business Roundtable earlier this month. The key word in the Economist’s essay is their measure of success of American business...
This year I turned 50 and and with that half century milestone, I’ve been looking back quite a bit more than normal this year. Case in point, in my recent post on the $80 trillion world economy, I pointed out there that the U.S. economy is one quarter of the total, or $20 trillion. 50 years ago, back in 1969, the U.S. economy was only $1 trillion (World Bank, reported in non-inflationary...
When the news talks about “the economy” they always talk about percentages, especially growth or recession. Meanwhile, the U.S. GDP (a flawed but popular measure) is almost $20 trillion, almost one quarter of the $80 trillion world economy. The $80 Trillion World Economy in One Chart Put the pretty picture and the giant numbers aside for a moment and take a step back. The U.S. news is...
I’m in the middle of yet-another economics history book and came across the fact that investors in the first Bank of the United States purchased their shares for $25 in gold, then the remaining $375 in a mix of gold and other means. The book then continued on to talk about how the bank functioned. But not me. I was sitting there wondering what other currency those investors were using, as...
100 years ago, in 1919, the Michigan Supreme Court made a comment in their ruling of Dodge v. Ford saying (in its common paraphrased form), “The purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value.“ In 1970, Nobel Laureate in economics Milton Friedman repeated this in an essay in the New York Times entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits...
