I like where this guy is coming from, but it needs to be worked into becoming a sustainable application which would actually stack in the world which we all do/will live. For example, you & I may be co-dependent, based on a mutual friendship, but what of the person who made the screen you are reading this message on… & what of their co-dependence on you? This type of co-dependence on each other is based on consumption, not friendship… and unless all consumption is removed from the system globally, what this guy is proposing will break down as soon as any of us need a new “thing” which required the effort of a human that we have no relationship with to create this product. Please don’t get me wrong… for OWS to base their objective on emotional co-dependence I think is a really nice starting point (probably the best I’ve heard yet). It unites instead of alienates people while contributing the concept (& action) of an amazing foundation for a new system to be created on. But what I’d like to work on is developing a sustainable consumption model which factors in equality, in a global community, and is built around what this clip is about, & that’s the real challenge. Hmmmm.

It’s a good read…

If this analysis is correct, a Great Depression is all but inevitable.

I stumbled out into the autumn sunshine, figures ricocheting around in my head, still trying to absorb what I had heard. I felt as if I had just attended a funeral: a funeral at which all of us got buried. I cannot claim to have understood everything in the lecture: Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theory and the 41-line differential equation were approximately 15.8 metres over my head. But the points I grasped were clear enough. We’re stuffed: stuffed to a degree that scarcely anyone yet appreciates.

Professor Steve Keen was one of the few economists to predict the financial crisis. While the OECD and the US Federal Reserve foresaw a “great moderation”, unprecedented stability and steadily rising wealth, he warned that a crash was bound to happen. Now he warns that the same factors which caused the crash show that what we’ve heard so far is merely the first rumble of the storm. Without a radical change of policy, another Great Depression is all but inevitable.

The problem is spelt out at greater length in the new edition of his book Debunking Economics. Like his lecture, it is marred by some unattractive boasting and jostling. But the graphs and figures it contains provide a more persuasive account of the causes of the crash and of its likely evolution than anything which has yet emerged from Constitution Avenue or Threadneedle Street. This is complicated, but it’s in your interests to understand it. So please bear with me while I do my best to explain.

The official view, as articulated by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is that both the first Great Depression and the current crisis were caused by a lack of base money. Base money, or M0, is money that the central bank creates. It forms the reserves held by private banks, on the strength of which they issue loans to their clients. This practice is called fractional reserve banking: by issuing amounts of debt several times greater than their reserves, the private banks create money that didn’t exist before. Conventional economic theory predicts that when the central bank raises M0, this triggers a “money multiplier”: private banks generate more credit money (M1, M2 and M3), boosting economic growth and employment.

Bernanke, echoing claims by Milton Friedman, believed that the first Great Depression in the US was propelled by a fall in the supply of M0, which, he said, “reinforced … declines in the money multiplier.” But, Keen shows, there is a weak association between M0 money supply and depression. There were six occasions after World War Two when M0 money supply fell faster than it did in 1928 and 1929. On five of these occasions there was a recession, but nothing resembling the scale of what happened at the end of the 1920s. In some cases unemployment rose when the rate of M0 growth was high and fell when it was low: results which defy Bernanke’s explanation. Steve Keen argues that it’s not changes in M0 which drive unemployment, but unemployment which triggers changes in M0: governments issue more cash when the economy runs into trouble.

He proposes an entirely different explanation for the Great Depression and the current crisis. Both events, he says, were triggered by a collapse in debt-financed demand. Aggregate demand in an economy like ours is composed of GDP plus the change in the level of debt. It is the sudden and extreme change in debt levels that makes demand so volatile and triggers recessions. The higher the level of private debt, relative to GDP, the more unstable the system becomes. And the more of this debt that takes the form of Ponzi finance – borrowing money to fund financial speculation – the worse the impact will be.

Keen shows how, from the late 1960s onwards, private sector debt in the US began to exceed GDP. It built up to wildly unstable levels from the late 1990s, peaking in 2008. The inevitable collapse in this rate of lending pulled down aggregate demand by 14%, triggering recession.

This should be easy enough to see with the benefit of hindsight, but what lends weight to Keen’s analysis is that he saw it with the benefit of foresight. In December 2005, while drafting an expert witness report for a court case, he looked up the ratio of private debt to GDP in his native Australia, to see how it had changed since the 1960s. He was astonished to discover that it had risen exponentially. He then did the same for the United States, with similar results. He immediately raised the alarm: here, he warned, were the conditions for an economic crisis far greater than those of the mid-1970s and early 1990s. A massive speculative bubble was close to bursting point. Needless to say, he was ignored by policy-makers.

Now, he tells us, a failure to address these problems will ensure that this crisis will run and run. The “debt-deflationary forces” unleashed today “are far larger than those that caused the Great Depression.” In the 1920s, private debt rose by 50%. Between 1999 and 2009, it rose by 140%. The debt-to-GDP ratio in the US is still much higher than it was when the Great Depression began.

If Keen is right, the crippling sums spent on both sides of the Atlantic on refinancing the banks are a complete waste of money. They have not and they will not kickstart the economy, because M0 money supply is not the determining factor.

President Obama justified the bailout of the banks on the grounds that “a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect”. But the money multiplier didn’t happen. The $1.3tn that Bernanke injected scarcely raised the amount of money in circulation: the 110% increase in M0 money led not to the 800 or 1000% increase in M1 money that Obama predicted, but a rise of just 20%. The bail-outs failed because M0 was not the cause of the crisis. The money would have achieved far more had it simply been given to the public. But, as Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy demonstrated over the weekend, governments have learnt nothing from this failure, and seek only to repeat it.

Instead, Keen says, the key to averting or curtailing a second Great Depression is to reduce the levels of private debt, through a unilateral write-off, or jubilee. The irresponsible loans the banks made should not be honoured. This will mean taking many banks into receivership. Otherwise private debt will sort itself out by traditional means: mass bankruptcy, which will generate an even greater crisis.

These are short-term measures. I would like to see them leading to a radical reappraisal of our economic aims and moves to develop a steady-state economy, of the kind proposed by Herman Daly and Tim Jackson. Governments and central bankers now have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from the catastrophic mistakes they’ve made. It is an opportunity they seem determined not to take.

]]> http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/21/soup-is-good-food/feed/ 0 http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/06/well-do-it-live-part-2/ http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/06/well-do-it-live-part-2/#comments Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:34:42 +0000 Enjoy Cox http://enjoycox.com/?p=656 Over the coming how ever long, I am going to randomly post ‘chunks’ of what for me are the best songs I’ve ever seen performed live, just because I want to… which is fair enough really, being my blog and all.

Sigur Rós – Popplagið. This track would have to be in the top three best performances I’ve ever witnessed. This is what I imagine dying sounds like. Epicnesss beyond explanation. Buy their albums.

Faith No More – Malpractice. Waaay back in ‘92, Angeldust was my favourite album… and seeing Malpractice performed live was the single most relentless, aggressive and crushing execution of a track I’d ever witnessed. I have been firmly based in Team Patton for 20yrs+, but seeing Angeldust live has always stood head & shoulders above anything else FMN & related Patton subsidiaries turned out (well, maybe excluding this). The footage above is their first gig back after a 11yr hiatus, and thankfully, Malpractice (01:02:00) was well represented. This is the full set of their comeback show. Drink caffeine, and enjoy.

PJ Harvey – Rid Of Me. Serendipity. With two cancelled Australian tours, I (an uber-brutal PJ fanatic to put it mildly) impatiently waited almost 10 years before I got not only to see her play, but tour with her on the Big Day Out festival for 2001. I sat side of stage for a number of her performances, and with each set, I ended up a broken man, curled up underneath a soundboard blubbering uncontrollably at the sheer volume of talent that a single person can possess. For a solo artist to hold a 60,000 strong crowd (who are there to see Limp Bizkit) in broad daylight is truly a skill. The woman is a god… and for good reason.

Slayer – Raining Blood. The first time you see Slayer live, you remember it. And when you remember it, you remember this.

Björk- Thunderbolt. I don’t really now what to say here apart that I have a bais towards this artist, because I love her! But there is a reason why this is so. Biophilia IS the best show I have seen in the last ten years. I remember first seeing her at a festival 18 years ago playing right before The Ramones. She was brilliant then (as were The Ramones), but to watch her evolve through a body of incredible work to now successfully tackle (and nail) a project as wide and deep as Biophilia, is truly awesome.

]]> http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/06/well-do-it-live-part-2/feed/ 0 http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/06/fight-the-powers-that-be/ http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/06/fight-the-powers-that-be/#comments Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:13:09 +0000 Enjoy Cox http://enjoycox.com/?p=620

]]> http://enjoycox.com/2011/11/01/they-cant-take-that-away-from-me/feed/ 0 http://enjoycox.com/2011/09/22/tu-non-sei-buono-bebe-tu-non-sei-buono/ http://enjoycox.com/2011/09/22/tu-non-sei-buono-bebe-tu-non-sei-buono/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:07:23 +0000 Enjoy Cox http://enjoycox.com/?p=727 Hello from Olbia, Italy.

A year of academia now concludes with this…

This place is beautiful. Great beaches, awesome food, Fiat Panda burnouts, brilliant coffee, and GelatoBurgers!!!

Today also saw S&P downgrade Italy’s sovereign credit rating. People here are nervous to say the least. In speaking with one particular lady, locals were very thankful for all the infrastructure which had been dropped into Sardinia since joining the euro, but now that are all like “WTF?” about having to service the bill. So far, I have not come across anyone here who is an advocate of Silvio Berlusconi. Actually, there is a sizeable push for the island to become its own separate sovereign state. Regardless of his commendable taste in women, Berlusconi looks to be a rabbit in the headlights of the eurocrisis. Greek Prime Minister Papandreou almost lost his head. Both Prime Ministers Sócrates and Zapatero took the hit for Portugal and Spain respectively.  If Italy’s treasury bonds spike for any length of time, I think either Rome will burn or Berlusconi will be hung.

Respectfully, I call “shotgun” on his little black book. These people will need help once this is over, and I am an excellent listener.

FYI: @02.01mins, Ol Dirty isn’t dead, he’s a hobo livin large in “Mumbai Zu”!

]]> http://enjoycox.com/2011/08/05/the-evil-that-mbas-do/feed/ 0 http://enjoycox.com/2011/08/05/tears-dry-on-their-own/ http://enjoycox.com/2011/08/05/tears-dry-on-their-own/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:32:09 +0000 Enjoy Cox http://enjoycox.com/?p=553 This isn’t good.

I have a reasonable assumption on how Amy Winehouse will be judged in the months and years to come, but from my prospective, this is a painfully massive loss. In a time where contemporary art is really struggling for artists which combine both depth and scope with maturity and style to actually reach people, the passing of such an amazing talent with so much promise this young is just heartbreaking.

The media and internet are quickly filling up with tributes to this incredibly gifted woman, including this very well written blog entry from Russell Brand. Having such a strong infatuation for a person I who never met, as small as it may have been, I too, felt no other choice than to also throw my hat in the ring. I copped a lot of shit for wearing this to a party only days after her death, but deep down inside, I know the woman with the wicked sense of humor approved… so yeah, fuck the haters.

Sorry about the nightmares. Amy loves you. x

I am at the end of a two-week trip to Tanzania and Zanzibar, and I have to say with this being my first trip to the continent, this place is truly amazing. I am down here doing some work for a British NGO who source human and financial capital from fund managers and European organisations who wish to invest in social and sustainable ventures in emerging economies.  Nice.

So let’s get the travel component of this blog out of the way first. Africa is awesome, but in a really unique kind of way. Firstly, the people are the best. Almost everyone we bumped into could not have been more helpful or welcoming. With a profile dwarfed by the neighbouring, more popular destination of Serengeti, the Mikumi National Park is truly one of the most amazing places I’ve ever visited. The only thing that was cooler than the local people in Mikumi it was the animals… and I’m talking thousands of them!! I never really had the desire to go on safari, but now having done it, I would say it is a “must do” when comes to building a bucket list.

Zanzibar is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. All the people are super cool, the beaches are great and there is plenty of rad quality seafood which is pulled straight out of the ocean. The island is very much structured around tourism, but is quite thin on other industries, as everything (including energy) is supplied from the mainland. It is a great place to have a break and truly unwind. And “Yes”, I did sing “Fuck Her Gently” each time I’ve ordered food from a restaurant (obviously).

Dar es Salaam is an interesting city. With a population of just under 2 ½ million people, the city has a massive waste problem. I have nothing against the city, but man, there is shit everywhere! When speaking with locals, many believe that it is the responsibility of the government to keep the city clean. When I put it to them that maybe they might have more success if the citizens decided to clean up the city, I got some very weird looks. “Why in Gods name would we do that?!?” was the most common response I received to this question.

This takes me to the work I was doing in Dar es Salaam, which was due diligence on start-ups businesses that creates positive social impact and are looking for capital. I interviewed companies in the areas of media, bio diesel, construction, finance and logistics. Across all these businesses, were two consistent themes to these business people were only too keen to discuss… the influence of China in Africa, and the entrenched culture of corruption throughout Tanzania.

I didn’t come across many people who had anything nice to say about African assets being purchased by the Chinese in recent years. Actually, to provide a more accurate explanation, they were ‘passionately bitter’ when it came to this topic. But when it came to the issue of corruption within the country, their real passion for change came out. Unfortunately, the majority of people I spoke with were at a loss to how they should deal with this crippling issue, especially when corruption is so entrenched in the culture of doing business in this part of the world. Their feeling of desperation got me thinking that surely there is someone in the country who has a half reasonable strategy to address this. So I made it a little bit of a mission of mine to talk to as many people as I could to find out what that answer is.

I heard a couple of good ideas, and a whole lot of bullshit (from poisoning the water supply to torching the Government Ministry Christmas Party). But I did have the pleasure of sitting next to a newly married couple for a few hours while on a boat journey from the mainland to Zanzibar. As with most locals who come across a foreigner’s willing ear, they were very quick to move our conversation (without being prompted) to the national issues which their country faces, which were unsurprisingly, China and corruption.

Like most locals, they too believed that China was being opportunistic (I think the word they use was “predatory”) in Tanzania. I explained that there is also another side of the story (ie: a Chinese prospective) which they weren’t particularly interested in hearing. They also were passionate about how the level of corruption in the country was a noose around the neck of the nation and their citizens. So I propose the question… “How do we fix it?” For the following 90 minutes, we vigorously conceptualised, challenged, and debated possible ways forward. We worked…. HARD! Although the three of us may not have come up with the silver bullet for a nation’s problems by the time we docked, I do think we made some inroads:

1. Tanzania is a nation where its culture is holding its people at ransom. The actions of their leadership have dictated the behavior of those who follow. As one of my new Tanzanian friends so beautifully put it:

“A farmer’s responsibility is to look after his cows. If a farmer feeds his cows, the cows will follow. If a farmer moves left, the cows will follow. If the farmer moves right, the cows will follow. If the farmer moves away from corruption, the cows will follow”.

The focus for change must start at the top. Fighting the corruption culture at street level is futile.

2.  By creating an environment in which the government can consciously move away from the culture of corruption, you then begin to create an environment which is conducive to long-term thought processes. Once citizens begin to think like this, a business culture based on what it is considered to be ‘fair value’ can begin to emerge.

They firmly believe the only way that unity could be brought into an anti-corruption or ‘fairness’ culture would be under the instrument of religion. Although I am someone who does not have a religious bone in the body, I have a strong understanding and respect for the role of religion in society. The case that my newfound friends put forward, although not airtight, sounded better than most things I had heard on the continent. At the end of our ferry ride, we wished each other well and went our separate ways, but their views have kept me thinking… how can a country like Tanzania truly break the corruption cycle to become the country I know it can be? And more importantly, who will make the first move?

All if this talk of China and corruption is from what I heard from the locals, but I have a question based on what I saw; Since when did Africa become the dumping ground for the developed world’s shit?!? Seriously, all of our unsold and ‘used’ products end up here! I saw shipping containers of what I could only describe as ‘landfill’ rolling into port to be sold on the street. Hey, I’m good for bringing stuff of actual use and value into a country which needs it, but some of this shit IS SHIT! I have a story or three about this topic, but a plane back to London awaits, so I’ll pick this one up later. x

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