Often when I want to write some simple comments on recent events, I start poking around a bit, and so much pops up that I think I should include, before long I don’t know how to start anymore, or finish, let alone appear coherent in between. Like in this case where Europe is the (intended) topic. But here goes, and I hope you distinguish a thread all the way through. Let’s start with Saxo Bank’s annual list of 10 outrageous
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Nicole Foss: Countries caught in the grip of financial crisis, with austerity measures compounding their problems, are continually being told to follow Iceland’s example. The assumption is that if a state can disregard the claims of the banking sector, it can address the threat of financial crisis relatively painlessly and get back to ‘normal’ quite quickly. Iceland is held up as an example, but the situation is actually far more complex. As such, it is worth exploring the situation in
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A great video interview from Dutch business TV channel RTL-Z with a very dear and close friend of The Automatic Earth, Steve Keen (who did several presentations together with Nicole), the only economist in the world who I take serious, and certainly not because we agree on everything; we don’t. But Steve is as close as one can get to taking economics to a scientfic level: see what the numbers say, not bend them to what you would like them
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Plant your tree in Automatic Earth this Christmas! It was a race against the clock, but we’ve managed to get it to you for the holiday season. In Facing the Future, easily the most dense and jam-packed presentation we’ve made available yet, The Automatic Earth first delves into the depths of the crisis and then moves beyond it into the range of options available for us today to start building a more crash-proof world for tomorrow. Facing the Future is
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The Automatic Earth is on the verge of introducing a whole new well over 4 hour video presentation shortly, entitled Facing the Future, which features Nicole Foss with our dear friend and “localizer” Laurence Boomert, and contains all new material only (no, we definitely do not sit still). Facing the Future is more densely jam-packed with information than anything we’ve presented yet (watching it once won’t do), so we’re very and rightly proud of it. It looks in depth at
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What worries me most about the world today, in the last weeks before Christmas and New Year’s Day 2014, is that all the plans we make for our futures and more importantly our children’s futures are DOA. This is because nobody has a clue what the future will bring, and that’s more than just some general statement. Is the future going to be like the past or present? We really don’t know. But we do exclusively plan for such a
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Last week, I was reading parts of a report issued by Japanese investment bank Nomura, which started out saying that the “Global Financial Crisis” is over. If I lay out a statement like that side by side with a lot of other things I see, I can only conclude that Nomura doesn’t reside in the same universe I do. Well, it’s either that or they have the idea that a financial crisis is something that exclusively plays down in, and
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OK, this is enough, I’m getting seriously pissed off now. Time to introduce an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. That is, let’s combine modern technologies. First: Buy lots of 3-D printers. They’ll be real cheap soon. And why not order them from Amazon, just for the perverted irony of it. Second: Use these printers to produce an endless supply of drones. Third: Send those drones out there to spy on (or just annoy) our governments, military, police
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There has been a lot of attention focused on shenanigans at the federal level in the USA this year, with games of brinkmanship and political theatre over the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and the government shutdown. Cheap political points were scored in a series of unedifying spectacles, but there was no serious risk of default, despite the dramatic rhetoric. It is not at the federal level that the rubber meets the road in the US, but at the state
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Well, if you thought you’d seen all the madness and absurdity that could possibly come out of the financial system by now, you are definitely being caught on the wrong flat foot as we speak. And there can be no doubt that much more of this will be revealed as we go along. Jamie Dimon renting Buckingham Palace to celebrate his $13 billion settlement with US regulators is just the beginning, though it’s a pretty clear statement of just how
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