In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.
[This is the only part of the metaphor worth reading] There is one warning, however — Facebook's hegemony will seem impregnable right up to the moment it collapses. Because the attraciveness of these sites depends on the number of other users, there's always the possibility that an inflection point is reached in which everyone migrates from Facebook to Orkut or something else. And when that does happen, the fall of Facebook will be fast and hard.
Bad design. Decent journalism.
Go ahead. Break the chains. Stop paying on your mortgage if you owe more than the house is worth. And most important: Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.
Esther Dyson, "The creator who immediately writes off the costs of developing content--as if it were valueless--is always going to win over the creator who can't figure out how to cover those costs."
This is the most powerful question in this book. You can approach this question in two ways: What is the closest you can come to making something free, without actually pricing it at zero? Or, in a true gesture of enlightened generosity, you can figure out how to part with something very valuable for no monetary return at all.
The government then enacted a set of measures (informally known as the corralito) that effectively froze all bank accounts for twelve months, allowing for only minor sums of cash to be withdrawn. In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación ("peso-ification"), by which all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at official rate [less than 2 pesos per dollar]. This measure angered most savings holders and appeals were made by many citizens to declare it unconstitutional.
My biggest concern is that our politician leaders and their cronies running our government will continue to try and reverse the normal capitalistic course of recession and expansion. Companies need to fail, housing needs to find its bottom based on supply, demand and price. Those who gambled must be allowed to lose and suffer the consequences.
[The] central banks have pushed debt to fatal levels by holding interest too low for a generation, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
The American financial system has started to look as logical as “turtles all the way down” this week.
In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the US (most of them through iTunes) 24% sold only one copy and 91% sold fewer than 100 copies
They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree.
Their point: if you're driving a gas guzzler, even a small improvement in fuel efficiency can generate significant savings.
Unfortunately, new figures this week reveal that house prices have already fallen 14.1% More than in any year during the Great Depression, 10.5% at its worse.
real unemployment rate - between 9 and 12% / real rate of inflation - between 7 and 10% / real economic growth - about 1%
Is all this the end of the world? For the richest country on the planet, certainly not.
As long as the dollar was the only acceptable payment for oil, its dominance in the world was assured, and the American Empire could continue to tax the rest of the world. If, for any reason, the dollar lost its oil backing, the American Empire would ceas
Broda and Romalis, in their recent paper, calculate that between 1999 and 2005 alone the inflation rate for lower-income Americans was almost seven points lower than it was for the wealthiest Americans. (And lower-income Americans have better sex)
The change in oil prices from a year ago to today translates into $24.6 billion in added fuel costs for U.S. passengers and cargo airlines on an annualized basis, according to the Air Transport Association. That's more than the industry has ever earned;
A few years back, one prominent oil producer switched to trading in euros per barrel. That country was Iraq
Price of a Barrel of Oil by Currency and Barrels of Oil per Ounce of Gold
But suppose the worse. Suppose abundance is over. Must we fear that? The answer is no.
"Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio," said Stover, 28, of Marion, Ohio. "When we got here they were asking us if it's OK to harvest poppy and we said, 'Yeah, just don't use an AK-47.'"
In October 2004, when I started working on it, an Internet search for "peak oil" and "economic collapse" yielded about 16,300 documents; by April of 2005 that number climbed to 4,220,000.
Not "the market" as comprised of Lamborghini-driving Wall Street types, but the purer market made up of individuals acting to protect their economic interests.
While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the qual
"We will not have any more crashes in our time." - John Maynard Keynes in 1927
What kinds of decisions need a theory?
There are at least some ways out of the paradox.
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
The paradox states that if everyone saves more money during times of recession, then aggregate demand will fall and will in turn lower total savings in the population.