Tag: collapse

Depaving Rural America

Rural counties across middle America are turning paved roads back into gravel.  The WSJ article is from 2010, and I wonder to what extent this trend has continued.  I can’t say that it seems like much of a loss.  I suspect that much of the rural pavement was laid down without a good understanding of how much O&M it was committing the local governments to paying for.  As state and federal budgets shrink, and counties are left to pay for their own infrastructure, they realize that maybe cheaper gravel and lower speeds are actually a better value proposition.

PLoS ONE: The Network of Global Corporate Control

The Network of Global Corporate Control, as revealed by a research group at ETH Zurich (kind of the Swiss MIT).  Their core finding: a densely connected “super entity” of 147 corporations, about 75% of which are financial intermediaries, has an amount of control which is ~10 times as great as their economic scale would suggest.  They are all majority owned by by other members of the super entity, and so have co-incident interests, and are likely to act as a bloc to protect themselves and each other, and to be subject to simultaneous group failure when under duress.  Not like this is a huge surprise or anything, but it’s nice to see it described in a quantitative framework.

Wall Street Isn’t Winning, It’s Cheating

Matt Taibbi blows his stack at a fellow commentator who accuses the OWS protestors of simply being envious of the rich.  He gives a litany of examples of how, in fact, the Wall St. illuminati have gotten to where they are by cheating and gaming the system, or at the very best, by being lucky.  Not through hard work or supernatural skill.  Being pissed off about that isn’t being jealous of someone else’s success.  At what point do the “deviant” and “legitimate” financial sectors simply merge, with little to nothing in the way of externally imposed rules governing what’s acceptable, and what’s not?

Shared Links for Mar 4th

What is the Fed doing?

Trying to keep track of all the shenanigans innovation going on at the Federal Reserve is difficult.  Econbrowser and Interfluidity among others have been trying to help…  but every time I read about how our money system works, I find my head spinning in incredulity.  And that’s just when I’m reading about how it’s “supposed” to work.  It’s been getting more confusing lately.

Continue reading What is the Fed doing?

Rearranging vs. Reinventing the Global Economy

The US road to recovery runs through Beijing says Asia Times Online, and Thomas Barnett emphatically agrees.  Everyone is talking about how to reorganize the global economy, but mostly the discussion is about how to most efficiently export our recently collapsed model of growth to the developing world.  Better this time around for sure, we say, but not fundamentally different in any way.  The Chinese need (and want, it turns out) more domestic consumption and consumer debt.

Continue reading Rearranging vs. Reinventing the Global Economy