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Archive for the 'Economics' Category
History: Niall Ferguson – The 6 killer apps of prosperity
We finally found some time to watch Niall Ferguson’s Ted Talks presentation with the “killer applications” he also describes in his latest book “Civilization The West and the Rest”
Niall Ferguson starts his presentation outlining his playing field, pointing us to the facts that more than 106 billion people have walked this planet and 94% of those are already dead. Out of those 106 billion 60% were or are Asian and most of them were or are very poor (shortening their life span / economic output). He then bridges over to explain the concept of the “Great Divergence“, that the majority of today’s wealth (US$195 Trillion) was made after 1800 by so-called Westerners and till today 66% of the world’s wealth is owned by these Europeans, North-Americans and Austral-Asians that only make up 19% of the world’s population…
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Opinion: ACTA – speaking out the unspeakable
Kader Arif, the Rapporteur for the ACTA agreement in the European Parliament has today resigned over the issues he sees with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (AKTA). To express his views and issues as a member of the European Parliament he issued the following statement on his blog (in French – English translation below) …
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USA: Elizabeth Warren at the Democrats in Massachusetts
Elizabeth Warren at the first debate of Democrats in Massachusetts:
“…Everyone has to follow the law. That has to be the story in place. But no one understands better what the frustration is right now.
The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there is still no basic accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it…”
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Life: We are the 99 percent
This is not about right versus left … about the poor versus the rich … It’s about right versus wrong. When people are loosing their homes, their pensions or their jobs having worked whole lives often multiple jobs at the same time while those very few who profit from the current “business climate” often have never really worked all their life, breaking and bending the law left, right and back, not paying or paying nearly no taxes while those who have nearly nothing pay most, something is substantially wrong and must change very quickly before the overall situation explodes. But this is maybe what some of those few “really” want besides bringing back fascism and slavery…
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Portugal: Where you have to study to be a slave – Parva Que Sou – Deolinda
Not only in the Arabic world where young protesters have overturned regimes installed decades ago and kept alive by generous aid from abroad and oppression of their citizens, this summer also in Europe young people in many countries were filling the streets with their protest and anger.
In Lisbon, Portugal earlier this year about 300’000 people were protesting against so-called austerity cuts and the way how current politicians want to remedy the damages from the global financial crisis on the back of the poorest and the young. These were the biggest protests in Portugal since the Carnation Revolution in 1974 that overturned dictatorship.
A song that got accidentally famous on the Internet in Portugal is currently making its way across Europe. It strongly expresses the feelings of …
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Finance: Currency wars and the emerging-market countries
The threat of a currency war between the US and China is one of the main concerns for the G20 ahead of this month’s meeting in Seoul. This column say that while policymakers appear to grasp some of the issues, they underestimate the impact of quantitative easing by large economies on exchange rates worldwide…
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