Artwork: Ilargi for the Automatic Earth The US Supreme Court heard a case on February 19 that is interesting perhaps not even so much because of the topic at hand but more because of the level of absurdity involved. It feels like we warpsped our way into a parallel universe where the laws of nature are entirely different from those on earth. That is to say, the court should never have been in a position to hear the case, but
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The expansionist post war era has been characterized by the development of the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), with a greater and greater dependence on leveraged risk. A necessary consequence has been increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for operating at financially rarified levels far removed from any basis in real wealth. As the network of economic and financial connections has broadened exponentially, and become increasingly complex, greater attention had been paid to apportioning and diverting risk, and to anticipating and
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Artwork: Ilargi for The Automatic Earth This is a guest post by friend of TAE Dave Fairtex, who writes at Market Daily Briefing. Dave Fairtex: I've recently been exploring the statistical data warehouse provided by the ECB, and I was able to assemble the following chart, comprising MFI Loans (MFI = monetary financial institution) + Bonds (sovereign & corporate). It was good timing, because it shows that for the first time during this whole crisis, the eurozone has
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In the fall of 2011, The Automatic Earth was on another European lecture tour. Nicole Foss had done a series of talks in Italy the previous year, and there was demand for more. This was remarkable, really, since a knowledge of the English language sufficient to understand Nicole's lectures is not obvious in Italy, so we had to work with translators. Certainly none of this would have happened if not for the limitless drive and energy of Transition Italy's Ellen
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Dorothea Lange River Food June 1936 Memphis, Tennessee. Original caption: "Coon dawgling." The Automatic Earth (TAE) is now five years old (as of January 22). That's five years of wide-ranging discussion on a huge range of issues, in the process of developing the biggest possible big picture of our present predicament. We are reaching limits to growth in so many ways at the same time, but it isn't enough to understand which are the limiting factors, but also what time
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It's sort of funny that it had almost even escaped both Nicole and I altogether, but it's true, and we can therefore albeit belatedly remind both you and ourselves that The Automatic Earth turned 5 years young on January 22, 2013. I think perhaps the reason we tend to forget that date is that the start of the Automatic Earth in our view was largely a continuation of the work we had already been doing together for a few years,
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