Category: A sustainable economy

Money and the crisis of civilisation

admin /16 October, 2008

Charles Eisenstein – Reality Sandwich

Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, “Invest this profitably, and I’ll pay you well.” I’m a sharp dresser — why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, “Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment.” You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.

Now I’ve got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these “assets” as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default — and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody’s asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we’ve created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.

The 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult

admin /15 October, 2008

By CHRIS FLOYD – Counterpunch

Perhaps the most striking fact revealed by the global financial crash — or rather, by the reaction to it — is the staggering, astonishing, gargantuan amount of money that the governments of the world have at their command. In just a matter of days, we have seen literally trillions of dollars offered to the financial services sector by national treasuries and central banks across the globe. Britain alone has put $1 trillion at the disposal of the bankers, traders, lenders and speculators; and this has been surpassed by the total package of public money that Washington is shoveling into the financial furnaces of Wall Street and the banks. These radical efforts are being replicated on a slightly smaller scale in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and many other countries.

The effectiveness of this unprecedented transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the top tiers of the business world remains to be seen. It will certainly insulate the very rich from the consequences of their own greed and folly and fraud; but it is not at all clear how much these measures will shield the vast majority of people from the catastrophe that has been visited upon them by the elite.

Malthus theories are outdated

admin /16 August, 2008

The environmental agenda, as we know, has been largely taken up by the Malthusian problematic. The environmental issue is often formulated in quantitative terms: scarcity of natural resources, excessive population, shortage of space for dump sites. It is true that the concept that growth of food production would not keep pace with population increase, which characterized Malthus’ own initial formulation, has not been empirically confirmed by history. Particularly, since the 1960s, world food production has systematically grown above demographic rates. Moreover, high levels of inequalities in food consumption both between different nations (wealthy and poor) and within countries themselves continue to prevail. Therefore, a distributive problem exists – unequal access to income and food resources. 

Finding a new form for the corporation

admin /3 July, 2008

by Susan Mac Cormac at the Centre for Policy Development

Most debates about corporate responsibility narrowly define a stark choice between government regulation and free markets. A US-based organisation called Corporation 20/20 advocates a third path: system redesign. While the corporate responsibility and governance movements have achieved some notable progress, they argue that a more systemic, integrated transformation is both needed and plausible at this moment in history. The following article is an edited extract of a paper given at the ‘Summit on the future of the Corporation‘, hosted by Corporation 20/20 in Boston, November 2007.

How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?

admin /29 June, 2008

Richard Heinberg on Global Public Media  Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.   What do you get?   Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it. Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, Continue Reading →

China moves on from low price manufacturing

admin /4 May, 2008

Rising inflation and wage costs are transforming the Asian giant’s industries and its role as the world’s low-cost factory. John Garnaut reports from Shanghai.

The world’s second largest sportswear company, adidas, is confronting a new and unexpected problem. The costs of labour, materials and red tape are spiralling upwards in its great production heartland in southern China.

It used to be that money made the rules and multinationals such as adidas could always extract a better deal by threatening to move offshore. The company runs more than 250 factories here, after all. And each clothing factory employs 3000 people, on average, while every shoe factory has seven times that number.

But the Chinese Government is no longer interested. It has recently abolished export rebates, introduced tougher environmental and labour laws and increased the minimum wage – squeezing production margins even tighter.

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