Angela Cummine— Last week, Alaskans received their annual dividend check from the Alaska Permanent Fund. The $53 billion savings fund was set up in 1976 to preserve and augment a share of the state’s resource revenues for future generations through prudent investment in financial markets. Every year since 1982, a
Stephen Davis— If you need an example of how the financial system has failed the test of public trust, look no further than Wells Fargo. But it is vital to go deeper than the headline story about fraudulent cross-selling into systemic miscarriages of governance and shareholder oversight. The scandal appears
James K. Galbraith— In the United States we do not consider that there is such a thing as a people of Florida or Rhode Island or even of Texas, who have specific and intrinsic rights to their houses and businesses; nor apart from “buy local” campaigns do we care whether
Guido Calabresi— A century and a half ago John Stuart Mill said of English philosopher and political radical Jeremy Bentham, in effect, that he approached the world as a stranger. And, if the world did not fit his theory, utilitarianism, he dismissed what the world did as nonsense. Mill then said
William R. Summerhill— Brazil is mired in its worst crisis in more than thirty years. The economy and employment are shrinking, while high inflation is eroding consumers’ purchasing power. The currency has tanked, and along with it the government’s benchmark bond. A major corruption scandal that has already implicated national politicians,
Michael Murphree and Dan Breznitz— The front pages are crowded with eye-grabbing headlines declaring that the end is nigh for the Chinese economic miracle. The stock market collapse over the last three months as well as signs of declining energy consumption, slower export growth, and declining demand for industrial raw
Follow @jentaub To address the 2008 financial crisis, congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bailout out the banks and the federal government committed trillions of dollars to save the entire system. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke defended the massive government intervention to rescue the banks. He said, “it wasn’t
Everyone from Liza Minnelli to R. Kelly knows that money makes the world go round. This month, Yale University Press authors are expanding on that observation to explore the fields of economics and global finance under the banner Where is the Money? It might seem like a simple question, but
Follow @guardian_clark Exploring “Where is the Money?” in the current economic crisis also begs the question “what is the human cost of the financial slump?” Acclaimed journalist Tom Clark investigates this question with “the most rigorous accumulation of evidence to date,” as declared by The Guardian, in Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the
Bitcoin is on the rise. The completely digital currency has been covered by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others. Bitcoins have the power to buy anything from a hot dog at a Sacramento Kings NBA game to a hotel room at a Holiday Inn in