housing crisis

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pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

‘Housing in London 2017’, London Datastore, GLA 10. Edwards, Michael, ‘The housing crisis and London’, City, Vol. 20 (2), pp. 222–37, 2016 11. ‘What are renters thinking?’, Briefing by Sian Berry, Green Party Member of the London Assembly, 2016 12. Skapinker, Michael, ‘London house prices push out the people the city needs the most’, Financial Times, 9 September 2015 13. Fifty Thousand Homes, ‘London’s housing crisis and what it means for business’, http://www.fiftythousandhomes.london/facts/ 14. Chakrabortty, Aditya, Keynote speech at ‘London’s Housing Crisis and its Activisms’ one-day conference, hosted by the University of East London and Birkbeck College at University Square, Stratford, 26 April 2016 15.

But as she returned to her seat, she tripped up on a misplaced lead and fell, breaking her arm. It was an upsetting incident and felt to me like a disturbing metaphor for London’s housing crisis. I went home feeling that it was necessary to combine my work so far with a specific investigation of the housing crisis. At the same time, Bob Catterall, the editor of the brilliant multi-disciplinary journal City, had commissioned a Special Feature on the housing crisis, which I was co-editing with Paul Watt, Reader in Urban Studies at Birkbeck. I owe Paul a huge debt of gratitude for the work we did together on that Special Feature and the accompanying housing conference we hosted at the University of East London in spring 2016.

Outside some of these buildings ‘anti-homeless spikes’ prohibit homeless people from sitting or sleeping on the pavement. Since 2008 much has been written about the housing crisis. Exploring the fallout from that year’s financial crash, which combined large increases in wealth in property assets for the richest with widespread austerity, Big Capital makes explicit the links between the sheer wealth at the top and the housing crisis, which does not affect just those at the bottom but the majority of Londoners who struggle to buy properties and pay extortionate rents. From the removal from their homes of people on low incomes to the use of property purely as profit and no longer as a social good, the active flouting of democracy by business and local councils alike, the scandal in housing benefit and the pressure on individuals and families at all income levels, this is a new politics of space.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Available at www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretary-speech-on-an-immigration-system-that-works-in-the-national-interest ‘Immigration “causing housing crisis”’ (2003): Daily Mail, 20 July 2003, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-189224/Immigration-causing-housing-crisis.html ‘Revealed: How HALF of all social housing in England goes to people born abroad’ (2012): Gerri Peev, Daily Mail, 15 April 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130095/Calls-British-people-given-priority-social-housing-queue-revealed-foreigners-HALF-properties.html ‘We don’t have a housing crisis – we have a population crisis’ (2017): Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 17 November 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5091383/We-don-t-housing-crisis-population-crisis.html ‘Immigration has pushed house prices up by 20 per cent over a 25-year period, says Tory minister’ (2018): John Stevens, Daily Mail, 8 April 2018, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5592189/Immigration-pushed-UK-house-prices-20-cent.html no evidence that social housing allocation favours migrants: ‘Migrants and Housing’, Postnote 560 (August 2017), Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

The State of Housing Having spent the past decade working as a journalist specialising in housing inequality, I have watched and listened as the term ‘housing crisis’ has been repeatedly used. I have used it myself hundreds of times; it is a convenient shorthand for an inchoate feeling of unfairness, a series of specific social and economic problems and myriad political failings. The very term housing crisis is problematic, though. It implies a sudden catastrophe. By their nature, catastrophes tend to blindside us, cannot be easily prevented and are usually temporary: a tsunami or an earthquake. That is not what this is. This was as predictable as it was avoidable. The housing crisis is made up of a series of distinct but related emergencies: the instability of the private rented sector; rising street and hidden homelessness; unaffordable housing enabled by our country’s economic reliance on the housing market; the hoarding of property wealth; and a lack of social housing.

Available at assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/858908/Social_Mobility_Barometer_2019-2020.pdf ‘accumulative dispossession’: See Loretta Lees and Hannah White, ‘The Social Cleansing of London Council Estates’. nowhere affordable for key workers: ‘Camborne NHS nurse “may have to leave job” over housing crisis’, BBC News, 25 November 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-59409301 companies are seeing staff members leave: Ben Chu, ‘London housing crisis forcing workers to quit their jobs, says CBI survey’, Independent, 26 April 2018, www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/london-housing-crisis-cbi-survey-workers-quit-capital-house-prices-rent-a8321551.html figures provided by housing officers in September 2020: Amanda Cameron, ‘New figures reveal exactly how many affordable homes have been built in Bristol’, Bristol Post, 18 September 2020, www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/new-figures-reveal-exactly-how-4530278 This was, in part, because of arbitrary caps: Darren Baxter and Luke Murphy, Priced Out?


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

See Feargus O’Sullivan, “Lisbon Has a Plan to Reclaim Housing from Airbnb,” Bloomberg CityLab, July 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/lisbon-s-plan-to-reclaim-vacation-rentals-for-housing. 32.  Matthew Desmond, “The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/rental-housing-crisis-minneapolis.html. 33.  Peter Calthorpe and Joe DiStefano, “Revolutionizing Transit and Solving the Silicon Valley Housing Crisis,” Urban Footprint, August 17, 2018, https://urbanfootprint.com/revolutionizing-transit-while-solving-the-housing-crisis/. 34.  Harry Truman, “Special Message to the Congress upon Signing the Housing and Rent Act,” June 30, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/131/special-message-congress-upon-signing-housing-and-rent-act. 35.  

Leilani Farha and Surya Deva, “Letter to Stephen Schwarzman” (March 22, 2019), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/Financialization/OL_OTH_17_2019; and Patrick Butler and Dominic Rushe, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” The Guardian, March 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un. The same year, Raquel Rolnick, who succeeded Kothari in the UN position, published a book that drew on her experience reporting on the violent entry of globalized finance into housing in Europe and the Americas: Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (New York: Verso Books, 2019).

Institute for Tourism Studies, “Disclosing the Economic Impact of the Vacation Home Industry on Osceola County,” prepared for Experience Kissimmee (Orlando: University of Central Florida, 2016), https://www.experiencekissimmee.com/sites/default/files/Vacation_Home_Impact_Study.pdf. 10.  Thorben Wieditz, “Addressing Toronto’s Housing Crisis?,” Fairbnb, January 9, 2019, https://fairbnb.ca/2019/01/09/addressing-torontos-housing-crisis/. 11.  According to a 2017 study, the increase in Airbnb listings nationally accounted for about one-fifth of rent growth and about one-seventh of housing price growth. Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio, “The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb,” Social Science Research Network, July 25, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’ Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years.

In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking. The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it? It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land.

And we need greater transparency around the planning system, with better online maps matching up land ownership, options and planning permissions, so the public can see who benefits from the planning process, and better engage with it themselves. 2. Fix the housing crisis: stop landowners hoarding land and leaving homes empty At its heart, the housing crisis is a land crisis. The real cost of a house isn’t the bricks and mortar, but the land underlying it – and land prices have spiralled upwards 400 per cent since 1995. Politicians can talk all they like about building more homes, or slashing planning regulations to free up developers.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

The housing market is as tight as it has ever been.”44 One should not have excessive faith that the business turndown of 2000–2001 will spell much relief for San Francisco’s overburdened housing consumers. But these same forces creating a housing crisis in San Francisco have also produced probably the strongest local housing movement in the nation. San Francisco’s Housing Movement TOOR’s fight against displacement from the South of Market area and related struggles in the Western Addition were the 1960s forerunners of San Francisco’s housing movement. Starting in the early 1970s, the Tenants Ac- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 337 tion Group and later the San Francisco Tenants Union45 organized individual buildings around maintenance and repair issues and provided tenants’ rights counseling, mainly in the Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore neighborhoods, via a “hotline” and publication of tenants’ rights handbooks.

In the early eighties, it was reported that “Mayor Feinstein wants to avoid turning the city into what she termed ‘a magnet for the homeless of the entire Bay Area, the state and the U.S.’ ”172 But it is highly unlikely that homeless folks just hanker to live on San Francisco’s streets as opposed to Chicago’s or Atlanta’s. The problem for the most part afflicts local residents who, due to poverty, the city’s housing crisis, and, for some, personal issues, are frozen out of the housing market. Sentiments such as those expressed by Feinstein are heard by city officials all over America and mask an unwillingness to provide the needed services. Paul Boden, director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness, accurately notes: “I don’t know of one city in the country that doesn’t say it’s a magnet and that homeless peo- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 381 ple come from somewhere else. Fargo, North Dakota, was calling itself a magnet.

City for Sale OTHER BOOKS BY CHESTER HARTMAN Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda (with Rachel Bratt and Michael Stone) Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America Paradigms Lost: The Post Cold War Era (with Pedro Vilanova) Housing Issues of the 1990s (with Sara Rosenberry) Winning America: Ideals and Leadership for the 1990s (with Marcus Raskin) Critical Perspectives on Housing (with Rachel Bratt and Ann Meyerson) The Transformation of San Francisco America’s Housing Crisis: What Is to Be Done? Displacement: How to Fight It (with Dennis Keating and Richard LeGates) Housing and Social Policy Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco The World of the Urban Working Class (Marc Fried, with Chester Hartman) Housing Urban America (with Jon Pynoos and Robert Schafer) City for Sale The Transformation of San Francisco R E V I S E D A N D U P D AT E D E D I T I O N CHESTER HARTMAN with Sarah Carnochan University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

Words and music © Leon Rosselson, 1975 The lyrics are derived from a seventeenth-century pamphlet attributed to the English Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley. ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOME ‘In this hard-hitting and timely book Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live?’ Paul Mason, journalist and author of PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future ‘A wide ranging and thorough analysis of where we have gone wrong in housing in Ireland, followed by innovative ideas for putting things right.’

Michelle Norris, Head of School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College, Dublin ‘Ó Broin argues that the Irish housing system is dysfunctional because of successive governments’ over reliance on the private market to meet housing demand. He argues for a new form of State involvement in housing – public housing – as the only way of ensuring that everyone will have an opportunity to live in a good quality affordable home. This book is accessible to anyone who is interested in solutions to the current housing crisis.’ – Simon Brooke, adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College, Dublin Democratic Programme Adopted by Dáil Éireann 21.1.1919 We declare in the words of the Irish Republican Proclamation the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be indefeasible, and in the language of our first President, Pádraig Mac Phiarais, we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, and with him we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.

From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control. In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists, and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live? Paul Mason is a British journalist and author of the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future Overture Inadequate Language Every day our attention is drawn to housing.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

(“The Death of the Fringe Suburb,” read one recent headline; “Struggling in the Suburbs,” said another; a third declared, “The Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia as We Know It.”) Meanwhile, a cache of articles, papers, and popular books has heralded the resurgence of cities. But what the headlines miss is that while much of the hurt can be blamed on the recent recession and its immediate effects, there are larger trends at work. Many of the suburbs affected by the housing crisis are not experiencing a temporary setback but a permanent one, the result of a powerful tectonic shift whose forces have been grinding away for quite some time

As of this writing, we have a 4.4-month supply of existing homes, the lowest housing supply since early 2006. But the migration of wealth from suburb to city started well before Wall Street concocted the no-income, “no-doc” loans that led to the housing crisis. Cities’ renaissance started as early as the mid-1990s, urban housing prices have been rising since 1980, and crime rates have been falling for almost as long. Toll Brothers started moving into the New York City market in 2003. The trend might have been accelerated by the housing crisis, but it was happening already. Home valuations are now reflective of the shift inward. Christopher Leinberger, analyzing data from the online real estate database Zillow, found this to be the case by comparing real estate prices in center cities and inner suburbs with their far-out suburban counterparts in the late 1990s and today.

One of the hottest areas is in multifamily construction—the market for apartment and condo buildings and other structures containing four or more housing units, whether in cities or in suburbs. Construction of this kind of housing has more than doubled since the housing crisis set in. Part of this growth is due to a boom in the market for rental housing. The number of renters surged by more than five million in the 2000s, the largest ten-year increase since World War II. Vacancy rates are down and rents are soaring across the country, even in markets with lots of foreclosures. The vast majority of multifamily housing starts these days are rentals, whereas in the height of the housing crisis they were predominantly condos for sale. Meanwhile, the urbanization of the suburbs has only just begun.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In March 2014, the following headline appeared in London’s Evening Standard: ‘Sell Public Land to Solve Housing Crisis, Boris Johnson Is Told.’1 And in this case it was not Whitehall doing the telling. Johnson, then London mayor, was being instructed to privatize public land in the capital by London First, a business lobby group. He would hear the same message from the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s leading property developers. In 2012, Johnson had commissioned the development analysts Molior to research barriers to housing delivery in London, which prompted Berkeley in 2015 to proffer its own diagnosis and advice regarding the same issue: ‘Despite the housing crisis and need for the public sector to raise funds, public sector land is not being released quickly enough for development’.

Wallwork, ‘UK Government Pledges £5 Billion Towards Housebuilding’, Property Forum, 3 October 2016, at propertyforum.com. 2 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land: Progress Report One Year On (London: DCLG, 2012), p. 5. 3 Cabinet Office, Government’s Estate Strategy, p. 4. 4 Local Government Association and Cabinet Office, ‘One Public Estate: Transforming property and services’, August 2014, p. 4, at local.gov.uk. 1 HL Deb 15 July 2014, c230GC. 2 DCLG, Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land, p. 5. 3 See, for example, H. Osborne, ‘UK House-Building Crisis – and How to Solve It’, Guardian, 19 May 2014. 4 G. Trefgarne, ‘Planning Log-Jam “Has Created Housing Crisis”’, Telegraph, 15 January 2003. 5 K. Niemietz, Abundance of Land, Shortage of Housing, IEA Discussion Paper No. 38, April 2012 – pdf available at iea.org.uk. 1 D. Bowie, ‘Responses to the Housing Crisis in the UK’, paper presented at the RC21 ‘The Ideal City’ conference, Urbino, Italy, 27–29 August 2015. 2 Bowie identifies two in particular – Paul Cheshire and Alun Evans – and cites two studies: P.

Geoghegan, ‘Budget 2017: HCA to get new planning powers in expanded role’, 22 November 2017, at planningresource.co.uk. 4 Part of the reason compulsory purchase powers are considered inadequate as currently constituted (including subsequent to the modest measures announced in the November 2017 budget) is that, since the beginning of the 1960s, councils have been required to pay inflated prices (instead of existing value) for compulsorily purchased land, because the price must take into account potential planning permissions and infrastructure developments (see Chapter 2). Hence growing calls for local authorities to be able to acquire land at existing-use value, as they were in the 1950s – see, for example, J. Evans, ‘Major Land Reform Urged to Fix UK Housing Crisis’, Financial Times, 23 August 2017; D. Bentley, The Land Question: Fixing the Dysfunction at the Root of the Housing Crisis (London: Civitas, 2017). In early 2018, the Labour party explicitly nailed its colours to this particular policy mast, with the shadow home secretary, John Healey, drawing up proposals for a new Sovereign Land Trust empowered to compulsorily buy sites with the ‘hope value’ removed and thus at prices closer to those without planning permission – a move, he said, that would cut the cost of building council houses by nearly 40 per cent.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

These studies all: Richard Florida, “How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism,” City Lab, May 23, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/residential-zoning-code-density-storper-rodriguez-pose-data/590050/; “Blanket Upzoning—A Blunt Instrument—Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis,” The Planning Report, March 15, 2019, https://www.planningreport.com/2019/03/15/blanket-upzoning-blunt-instrument-wont-solve-affordable-housing-crisis. “We can work together”: “Remarks by the President at U.S. Conference of Mayors,” Obama White House, January 21, 2016, http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/21/remarks-president-us-conference-mayors.

It’s the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today’s winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing technology and finance centers where good-paying jobs are plentiful and industries of the future are on the rise. California, home of the nation’s worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured in. This didn’t happen all at once. It has become a popular narrative, at least in a certain kind of high-cost city, to say that the reason housing has become so expensive is that working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified, foreign investors are parking money in U.S. condominiums, houses and apartments are being commodified by hedge funds, and companies like Airbnb are turning rental buildings into hotels.

When the country’s highest-growth regions become so expensive that it is considered an extravagant luxury for people to live near jobs and industries that everyone in America has played at least some role in building, that qualifies as a major national issue. Golden Gates is the story of how we got here and some of the early efforts to solve what is fast becoming a national housing crisis. It’s a story about one group of people searching for new homes while another group of people clings to the ones they have. The struggle at the center is the struggle to make space and coexist. This is fundamentally a struggle of politics, but those politics do not conform to a red/blue map. Cities are ultimately about people, so this book is too.


Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

Chapter 17, Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes, by Brendan O’Connor and Lukas Biewald, shows the correlations and patterns that emerge when people are asked to anonymously rate one another’s pictures. Chapter 18, Bay Area Blues: The Effect of the Housing Crisis, by Hadley Wickham, Deborah F. Swayne, and David Poole, guides the reader through a detailed examination of the recent housing crisis in the Bay Area using open source software and publicly available data. Chapter 19, Beautiful Political Data, by Andrew Gelman, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Yair Ghitza, shows how the tools of statistics and data visualization can help us gain insight into the political process used to organize society.

It could probably be argued that housing prices had a significant effect on the CPI throughout the period under study. With this basic overview in hand, we now drill down into the details. In the following sections we break the house sales into smaller groups, first by price and then by location. We are interested in finding out whether the housing crisis has affected some groups of homeowners more than others. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer Has the housing crisis equally affected the rich and the poor? Has the effect of the crisis been to improve or worsen the relative equality of these two groups? In this section, we will explore how the crisis has affected the distribution of housing prices.

The correlation between price drop and commute time is weak, but note that all of the cities with the longest commute times (more than 35 minutes) have particularly large drops in price. It appears that the housing crisis has been relatively more damaging in poorer areas. The county-level census data contains more variables than the data for cities, so we analyzed the county data for further explanation of the housing crisis. The plot at the top of Figure 18-12 shows, for each county in which we had sales data, the percentage change in the number of housing units (from 2000 to 2006) plotted against the median sale price in 2008.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Although the dominant global pattern is the eviction of the poor from the center, some Third World cities reproduce US-style urban segregation, with the postcolonial middle classes fleeing from the core to gated suburbs and so-called "edge cities." This has long been the case in Kingston, where one quarter of a million poor people inhabit the crime-ridden but culturally dynamic Downtown, wThile the middle 40 David Glasser, "The Growing Housing Crisis in Ecuador" in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter: International Perspectives and Prospects, Philadelphia 1988, p. 150. 41 Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanche%: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York 1961. 42 Kalinga Tudor Silva and Karunarissia Athukorala, The Watta-Dwellers: A Sociological Study of Selected Urban Tow-Income Communities in Sri Tanka, Lanham (Md.) 1991, p. 20. 43 Feng-hsuan Hsueh, Beijing: The Nature and the Planning of the Chinese Capital City, Chichester 1995, pp. 182-84.

As architect Djaffar Lesbet observes, however, this theoretically elegant balance between state aid and local initiative did not democratize access to housing: "The building plots have allowed those whom the system privileged to hold onto their lead, to achieve their own housing. They have also helped to reduce the dramatic and political tone of the housing crisis, by transforming this national issue into an individual problem."44 As a result, civil servants and others have acquired subsidized detached homes and villas, while the truly poor have ended up in illegal shacks in bidonvilles. Although lacking the revolutionary elan of Algeria, Tunisia also developed substantial state-subsidized housing, but 75 percent of it was unaffordable by the poor, who instead crowded into Tunis's sprawling slums such as Ettadhamen, Mellassine, and Djebel Lahmar.45 India illustrates the same trend in several different guises.

Most of the site-and-service lots ended up in the hands of state employees and the middle class.12 Planning expert Charles Choguill says this is unsurprising because the minimum savings required by the World Bank to qualify for a construction loan was so high that it automatically excluded most of the squatters.13 Likewise, in another site-and-service scheme in Lusaka, only one fifth went to the target group, and roughly the same dismal result obtained in Dakar.14 Writing in 1993, the ILO's A. Oberai concluded that World Bank slum-upgrading and sites-and-services projects had largely failed to have visible impact on the housing crisis in the Third World: "Despite efforts to make projects replicable, the project approach ties up excessive resources and institutional effort in a few locations and has not been able to achieve the desired level of housing stock. The project approach is therefore unlikely to have a significant impact on solving the problem of shelter in most developing countries."15 Other critics pointed to the programmatic disassociation of housing provision from employment creation, and the inevitable tendency for sites-and-services schemes to be located in peripheries poorly served, if at all, by public transport.16 11 Greg O'Hare, Dina Abbott, and Michael Barke, "A Review of Slum Housing Policies in Mumbai," Gties 15:4 (1998), p. 279. 12 A.


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Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

On one hand, the cottage suburbs presented a more idealistic and generous response to working-class housing needs, but pressures of space and affordability seemed to compel the tenement as a feasible solution. This contest between multi-storey living – densification in current jargon – and low-rise persisted, fought out in the competing visions of architects and planners and the conflicting priorities of politicians. After 1914, the political class would find that the Great War created a housing crisis among a working class that it both needed and feared more strongly than ever before. This compelled a new, larger and far more generous state operation to manage housing. And so, in 1919, the first great age of council house building began. 2 ‘The World of the Future’: The Interwar Period The ‘Homes and Property’ section of the Evening Standard describes the Dover House Estate as ‘a charming enclave on the western edge of Putney’.1 In 1919, the local middle classes looked far less favourably on this new LCC estate.

The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, ‘Start measuring for the lino’.4 Another expedient, begun under wartime emergency powers granted in 1939 but maintained through the post-war housing crisis, was requisitioning of empty properties to house those in need. A total of 71,493 properties were requisitioned during the war, and another 51,695 up to 1951.5 Some authorities, particularly Labour ones, used the powers enthusiastically. For example, in Hackney by 1950, 3,800 homes had been taken over to house those on the waiting list.

But, Carlisle City Council, having overseen the demolition of good council housing, soon came to identify a net annual shortfall of 708 affordable homes over the next five years.50 I doubt that Carlisle – far away from the overheated housing markets and relative affluence of the South-East – has suffered an excess of gentrification, but the Alice in Wonderland logic of tackling a housing crisis by destroying solid, genuinely affordable and much-needed council homes seems plain. Despite that criticism, it’s nevertheless important to make one simple observation. I’ve probably seen more council estates (many of them no longer ‘council’, of course) than most people in recent years and the vast majority of them look good: well-maintained, attractively landscaped, overwhelmingly – unless my experience is very unrepresentative or Panglossian – quiet and respectable.


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The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

BARBOUR, Elisa. (2006, February). “Time to Work: Commuting Times and Modes of Transportation of California Workers,” Public Policy Institute of California, http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=660. BARKHAM, Patrick. (2014, October 1). “Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/01/britains-housing-crisis-are-gaden-cities-the-answer-ebbsfleet-kent-green-belt. BARRAGAN, Bianca. (2014, April 2). “Los Angeles is the Biggest Anti-Sprawl Success Story in the US,” Curbed Los Angeles, http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/los_angeles_is_the_biggest_antisprawl_success_story_in_the_us.php.

CHRISTOPHER, A.J. and TARVER, James D. (June 1994). “Urbanization during Colonial Days in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Urbanization in Africa: A Handbook, Westport: Greenwood Press, 46–7. CHU, Ben. (2014, February 9). “Britain is suffering from a housing crisis—who is to blame and how can we fix it?,” Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/property/britain-is-suffering-from-a-housing-crisis—who-is-to-blame-and-how-can-we-fix-it-9113329.html. CINCO RANCH LIFE. “Cinco Ranch History,” http://www.cincoranchlife.org/page/20251~312161/Cinco-Ranch-History. CITY LIFE. (2014, April 25). “Micro Units—The Newest Trend in Real Estate,” CitiesJournal, http://www.citiesjournal.com/micro-units-newest-trend-real-estate/.

“Perth—Australia’s most diverse capital,” Committee for Perth, http://www.committeeforperth.com.au/pdf/Advocacy/ReleaseCulturalDiversityJan2013.pdf. MONTEFIORE, Simon Sebag. (2011). Jerusalem: The Biography, New York: Knopf. MOORE, Rowan. (2015, March 14). “Britain’s Housing crisis is a human disaster. Here are 10 ways to solve it,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/14/britain-housing-crisis-10-ways-solve-rowan-moore-general-election. MORGAN, Edward. (2012, August 14). “Sex (Or Not) and the Japanese Single,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003019-sex-or-not-and-japanese-single. MOROZOV, Evgeny. (2011, January 8).


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The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Boomers confronting a bad job market have often faced an agonizing choice between struggling to find work in the area where they’ve lived for years, or having to sell houses that might now be worth less than they paid for them just to have a chance at moving somewhere else where jobs are more readily available. Unquestionably the Boomers were hammered by a housing crisis. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Millennials have been, too. Or more precisely, Millennials have been hammered by all the steps the Boomers took to try to rescue themselves from their own housing crisis. Meet Generation Rent We all know the stereotypes about Millennial living arrangements—the basement-dwelling, couch-surfing, with-parents-living stuff of Boomer parents’ nightmares.

The Boomers wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for homeownership, and that’s true even after the financial crisis erased trillions of dollars of housing equity and pushed millions of mortgages into foreclosure. That’s why it’s a pretty big problem that Millennials can’t buy houses. And yes, there really is a Millennial housing crisis. This is the one area of any survey of Millennial misfortune where Boomers are likely to have the least sympathy. Millennials, who were too young to have bought houses in large numbers during the boom, didn’t see large amounts of home equity wiped out in the 2007 housing meltdown. Boomers and Gen Xers did.

Now millions of people could enjoy the stability of a salaried job, while also having the means to accumulate wealth every month with their mortgage payments. The housing market had helped create a new middle class—and with it, a new American economy. The problem is that in the 1990s, as they came into their own politically, the Boomers got greedy. It all started with what at the time seemed like a housing crisis afflicting the Boomers. The homeownership rate started a gentle decline from above 65 percent in the late 1970s to less than 64 percent in the mid-1980s.29 Far more worrying, homeownership among younger buyers ages twenty-five to forty-four fell during the 1980s from just above 60 percent in 1980 to just below 56 percent in 1990, a level lower than it had been in 1960.


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Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

* * * According to the system’s designers and funders, coordinated entry upends the status quo in homeless services that privileged stronger clients. It builds new, deeper bonds between service providers throughout Los Angeles, leading to increased communication and resource sharing. It provides sophisticated, timely data about the nature of the housing crisis that can be used to shape more responsive policy-making. But most crucially, by matching homeless people to appropriate housing, it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of people. One of those people is Monique Talley. I met Monique, a round-faced, freckled African American woman, at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a nearly 40-year-old organization dedicated to addressing the needs of poor and unhoused women.

South LA is very family oriented. My grandmother saw five generations here.” Surrounded by flatlands and low warehouses full of stitching garment workers, the shelter has a dramatic view of downtown, floating like a jeweled island three miles north. Pathways to Home is trying to bridge the gap between South LA’s housing crisis and its thoroughly inadequate resources, offering beds to approximately 315 men and 115 women nightly. It is a low, large, beige building packed wall-to-wall with bunk beds with about two hand-spans of space between them. Despite the staff’s attempts to make everyone feel welcome and to preserve clients’ dignity, it feels like what it is: a warehouse for people.

There was a period of time, a lull of people being unresponsive to us. People were upset because—you come out here, you’ve been collecting information, what is the outcome?” Their cynicism is not unwarranted. It is not the first time the homeless have been offered a magic-bullet solution to the seemingly intractable housing crisis in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of services out there where they will meet with you, ask you all of these questions, promise you something, and never come back,” says Richard Renteria. “So, they got all this information to create this database, talk about how many thousands of people are homeless, [but] never come back to serve them


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

In Britain rough sleeping barely existed before the late 1980s. But by 1989, all along the Strand, in the heart of London’s theatreland, homeless people were bedded down in one doorway after another. This sudden flood of people on to the streets was a result of the crash which followed the ‘Big Bang’ and the consequent housing crisis, when thousands of homes were repossessed. Benefit cuts and policies on mental health also played a role, with the 1980s witnessing the closure of the old mental asylums, replaced by what became known as ‘care in the community’. Pressures on the NHS, which hit mental health particularly hard, meant that rather than being cared for in the community, many with mental health problems slipped through the net – and on to the streets.

The process of introducing market forces into the part of the public sector which was once housing policy began with Mrs Thatcher and was stepped up by Labour. While the debate over health and education is fairly robust, there has been no debate over the future of housing. The result is effectively the end of social housing in Britain, a national housing crisis and the creation of new slums. HOW PUBLIC HOUSING WAS KILLED OFF In 1978, the last year before Mrs Thatcher came to power, the government built more than 100,000 council homes and the private sector built 150,000. 17 Since then the figures for private-sector house building have remained roughly stable – although that fell with the downturn – but the government builds hardly any, which is the simple reason why there is such a shortage of housing, not merely for people on low incomes but for many professionals.

It went on to say, ‘Shelter, the organization for homeless people, has said the move will increase the number of homeless people and decrease the number of homes available to accommodate them.’19 More than 1.5 million people did buy their homes and the policy, which was very popular with those who could afford to buy, became one of the emblems of the Thatcher government, continuing once Labour came to power. So did the housing shortages predicted by Shelter, which have affected millions more than those officially defined as homeless, fuelling the housing crisis in the process. There are currently more than 1.67 million households on the waiting list for social housing in England, a staggering figure which reflects a 64 per cent increase since 1997. More than 600,000 of these households are homeless, living in overcrowded, temporary or other unsuitable accommodation.20 ‘Right to buy’ was a justifiably popular policy.


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Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But even architects should remain skeptical of the power of well-tested traditional models in the face of extreme social isolation. Diggstown, in Norfolk, Virginia: a neighborhood-style retrofit of a previously distressed inner-city project that epitomizes HUD’s new standards THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Virtually all the thought brought to bear on the housing crisis has been directed toward the urban poor, and rightly so, for they inhabit an environment that most would find unbearable. But the housing crisis is a middle-class issue, too. It has become increasingly difficult for the middle class to own satisfactory housing. In 1970, about 50 percent of all families could afford a median-priced home; by 1990, this number had dropped below 25 percent.4 There are many reasons behind this phenomenon, but the most significant factor is evident in the image on the left.

TWO WAYS TO GROW THE FIVE COMPONENTS OF SPRAWL A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPRAWL WHY VIRGINIA BEACH IS NOT ALEXANDRIA NEIGHBORHOOD PLANS VERSUS SPRAWL PLANS 2 - THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS WHY TRAFFIC IS CONGESTED WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY THE CONVENIENCE STORE VERSUS THE CORNER STORE THE SHOPPING CENTER VERSUS MAIN STREET THE OFFICE PARK VERSUS MAIN STREET USELESS AND USEFUL OPEN SPACE WHY CURVING ROADS AND CUL-DE-SACS DO NOT MAKE MEMORABLE PLACES 3 - THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS 4 - THE PHYSICAL CREATION OF SOCIETY ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF A SOCIAL DECLINE DRIVERS VERSUS PEDESTRIANS PREREQUISITES FOR STREET LIFE 5 - THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY 6 - SPRAWL AND THE DEVELOPER THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DEVELOPER THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MARKET EXPERTS QUESTIONABLE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM STRUGGLES WITH THE HOMEBUILDERS A VISIT TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOME BUILDERS’ ANNUAL CONVENTION 7 - THE VICTIMS OF SPRAWL CUL-DE-SAC KIDS SOCCER MOMS BORED TEENAGERS STRANDED ELDERLY WEARY COMMUTERS BANKRUPT MUNICIPALITIES THE IMMOBILE POOR 8 - THE CITY AND THE REGION THE POSSIBILITY OF GOOD SUBURBS SUBURBS THAT HELP THE CITY THE EIGHT STEPS OF REGIONAL PLANNING THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AS A MODEL 9 - THE INNER CITY THINKING OF THE CITY IN TERMS OF ITS SUBURBAN COMPETITION THE AMENITY PACKAGE CIVIC DECORUM PHYSICAL HEALTH RETAIL MANAGEMENT MARKETING INVESTMENT SECURITY THE PERMITTING PROCESS 10 - HOW TO MAKE A TOWN REASONS NOT TO, AND REASONS TO DO SO ANYWAY REGIONAL CONSIDERATIONS MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT CONNECTIVITY MAKING THE MOST OF A SITE THE DISCIPLINE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD MAKING TRANSIT WORK THE STREETS THE BUILDINGS PARKING THE INEVITABLE QUESTION OF STYLE A NOTE FOR ARCHITECTS 11 - WHAT IS TO BE DONE THE VICTORY MYTH THE ROLE OF POLICY MUNICIPAL AND COUNTY GOVERNMENT REGIONAL GOVERNMENT STATE GOVERNMENT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ARCHITECTS CITIZENS SUBURBAN NATION Acclaim for SUBURBAN NATION APPENDIX A - THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST APPENDIX B - THE CONGRESS FOR THE NEW URBANISM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX Notes Copyright Page PREFACE TO THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION THE STORY OF SUBURBAN NATION Now that Suburban Nation has managed to stay in print for a decade and sell close to 100,000 copies, it seems excusable to tell the story of how it came to be.

This would be an important first step toward creating public spaces worthy of habitation. 3 THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING; PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM; THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME; TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements? —JANE JACOBS, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES (1961) THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING Sprawl is made up mostly of housing.


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The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

The Wisconsin activists, who believe housing is a human right, seize and occupy abandoned homes for homeless families without consent. For years, consumer advocates, human-rights and political activists, and others have called on the Obama administration to aggressively investigate and prosecute bankers and lenders whose actions led to the worst housing crisis in decades. We now know that the housing and subprime mortgage bonanza was rife with fraud and deception. This complicated enterprise included bankers, appraisers, notaries, investors, and disreputable middlemen who fabricated, altered, and cobbled suspect documentation together to sell properties quickly—whether people could afford them or not.

Unoccupied, blighted, and foreclosed properties are “health hazards” to the community, Fleming said. Since no one’s forcing the banks to come to the table and discuss rates that poor and struggling people can afford, “the people of the community are house sitting or community sitting.” It’s called the “community economic development plan,” Fleming added. The housing crisis has endangered the American Dream—where every family can own a home or simply have a decent place to live and raise their families. Say what you will about the home occupiers’ tactics, they have the courage to speak truth to power—and they refuse to be powerless. They have the audacity and courage to take on a multibillion-dollar institution.

Smith Goes to Washington” passion and purity. But too often, once lobbyists begin to exert their extraordinary influence, previously principled men and women sometimes become pawns in a game that only the spineless survive. This is why there has been such an absence of serious investigation into the housing crisis and no indictments against the multibillionaire bankers who profited from the subprime lending boom. In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said that he plans to create a federal mortgage crisis unit charged with investigating the alleged wrongdoings of bankers related to real estate lending.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Travers T (2012b). Devo Max for London? Urban Government and Fiscal Autonomy. Presentation. Available at www2.lse.ac.uk/government/research/ resgroups/BGatLSE/Documents/Devo-max-for-London.pdf. Accessed 2013 Mar 14. Travers T (2013a). London’s housing crisis triggers a culture war. Evening Standard. Jan 29. Available at www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/tony-travers-lon dons-housing-crisis-triggers-a-culture-war-8471038.html. Accessed 2013 March 1. Bibliography 217 Travers T (2013b). Tony Travers on how Ed Koch’s style paved the way for Britain’s mayors. The Guardian. Feb 1. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/ 01/ed-koch1?

It is particularly gratifying that Greg sees London: World City with a legacy that persists, leading to a fresh agenda for 2021: updated challenges to be addressed if London, a quarter of a century on, is to retain and enhance its global xii Foreword leader status in the face of today’s competitor cities – the same intention and some familiar themes, although some of the challenges are new. Chapter 13 sets out eight ‘imperatives’ – critical policy priorities. They include a worsening housing crisis, seen as ‘perhaps the single major concern’: a worsening imbalance between need and supply, with issues of affordability, tenure and quality, in danger of becoming a serious drag on London’s future success. Related to this is the lack of any mechanism for relating London within its administrative boundary to its wider functional (in housing, labour market and transport terms) region in south-east England, requiring the creation of a fit-for-purpose governance structure: a challenge for the next Government.

Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economic Geography at LSE, has warned that the shortage of good-quality, affordable long-tenure accommodation may create 106 The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 knock-on effects on salary demands and in effect render the city less competitive. There are also risks of serious price volatility brought about by the combination of inelastic supply and tied-up wealth (personal communication, 9 December 2013). There is no consensus on the appropriate spatial solutions to the housing crisis. On the one hand, the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and suburban lobby groups have found allies in pro-city supporters of densification. Conversely, economists and opponents of the planning system support the social and commercial rationale behind housing development on underdeveloped land, including the possible creation of ‘garden cities’ in the south east (Travers, 2013b).


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Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants by Bethany McLean

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, crony capitalism, housing crisis, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, negative equity, obamacare, Pershing Square Capital Management, race to the bottom, Savings and loan crisis

The analysis was very similar to that in a paper called “Fannie Mae Insolvency and Its Consequences” that was circulating among senior officials at the National Economic Council and the Treasury. Even the language was similar. “A government seizure is inevitable,” it began. It noted the same accounting concerns, and even ended with a version of the same conclusion: “A fully government owned guarantor of mortgage debt might be exactly what is called for given the current housing crisis . . . without the need to satisfy a fiduciary duty to shareholders, Fannie might finally be able to perform its affordable housing mission in a helpful and proactive manner.” The Monday after the Barron’s story ran, Fannie’s stock fell 13 percent. Then, in mid-July, stories appeared in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Later, in a 1936 speech to the National Association of Real Estate Boards—which would become the politically powerful National Association of Realtors—Roosevelt said, “We have not yet found a satisfactory solution to one of the most fundamental of our economic problems—the provision for all American citizens of the kind of homes in which they have a right to live. I know you, with me, will not be content until a sound housing program is established for the whole nation.” The attempts to fix the housing crisis brought about by the Depression, which became the roots of the housing finance system we have today, actually began with President Herbert Hoover. In the summer of 1932, Congress passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act; the idea was that federally backed regional banks would make cash advances to their local member banks, thereby encouraging those banks to lend.

Less than ten minutes later, Geithner fired back a letter saying that the GSEs’ own analysis showed that principal reduction could help up to half a million borrowers and save several billion dollars. The core difference was in their views of the risk of strategic defaults, which Treasury argued was minimal. “You have the power to help more struggling homeowners and heal the remaining damage from the housing crisis,” Geithner wrote to DeMarco. But DeMarco would not budge. Treasury officials, and at least some of the National Economic Council economists, thought DeMarco’s view was ridiculously narrow. Taxpayers, after all, would benefit from what benefited the broader economy. “The White House couldn’t believe it,” says a former official.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Concrete tubes just over eight feet wide, with a bench that turns into a bed, could be your solution,” Daily Mail, January 15, 2018, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5271411/8ft-concrete-tubes-solution-housing-crisis.html; James Heartfield, “Britain’s Housing Crisis: The Places People Live,” New Geography, January 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003432-britains-housing-crisis-the-places-people-live. 50 Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male (New York: Harper, 2017), 11. 51 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 52 Office of the New York Comptroller Scott M.

CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

genericContentID=249797&channelID=311; Joel Kotkin, “The Progressives’ War on Suburbia,” New Geography, November 16, 2014, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004773-the-progressives-war-suburbia. 5 Patrick Condon, “Government should supply housing for up to 40 percent of Vancouver wage earners,” Think Pol, December 3, 2017, https://thinkpol.ca/2017/12/03/condon-govt-should-supply-housing-for-up-to-40-percent-of-vancouver-wage-earners/; Edward Ring, “The Density Delusion,” California Policy Center, August 20, 2019, https://californiapolicycenter.org/the-density-delusion/. 6 “A home truth for the Tories: fix the housing crisis or lose power for ever,” Spectator, April 21, 2018, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/a-home-truth-for-the-tories-fix-the-housing-crisis-or-lose-power-for-ever. 7 Joseph Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households,” Inter Press Service News Agency, February 22, 2017, http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/02/the-rise-of-one-person-households/; Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin, 2013), 38–39; Council on Contemporary Families, “Reminder: Marriage Is No Longer the Mode,” September 12, 2017, https://contemporaryfamilies.org/singles2017factsheet/. 8 Jan Woronoff, Japan: The Coming Social Crisis (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1984), 349–50. 9 Choe Sang-Hun, “A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success,” New York Times, September 8, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/asia/shin-kyung-sook-mines-south-koreas-sense-of-loss.html. 10 “All the Single Ladies: China Leads World in Unmarried People—Report,” Sputnik International, December 21, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/art_living/201612211048842308-china-unmarried-people/; Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households.” 11 Joel Kotkin, “The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future,” Chapman University and Civil Service College of Singapore, 2012, https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/_files/the-rise-of-post-familialism.pdf. 12 Mary Eberstadt, “‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life,” Quillette, August 27, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-great-scattering-how-identity-panic-took-root-in-the-void-once-occupied-by-family-life/. 13 Klinenberg, Going Solo; Liz Greene, “Why Millennials Are Choosing to Be Child-Free,” Role Reboot, February 6, 2019, http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2019-02-why-millennials-are-choosing-to-be-child-free/; Claire Cain Miller, “Americans Are Having Fewer Babies.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

I grew up in communist Poland, a once-proud nation razed to the ground in the final days of World War II, then subjugated by Stalin and unceremoniously subsumed into the Soviet Bloc. I remember childhood tales of distant relatives vanishing without a trace, and I recall long lines and ration cards for basic necessities like sugar and soap. Later, when I came to the United States, I lived through the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, and then through the housing crisis of 2007 to 2009. I watched friends go from earning cozy six-figure salaries to having their cars and homes repossessed. I kept telling myself this would never happen to me—all the way until, through a stroke of bad luck, I almost ended up on the street. In the end, my fascination with emergency preparedness isn’t rooted in a mean militaristic streak or a bleak outlook on life; it stems from a simple realization that disasters aren’t rare today, just as they weren’t rare in days gone by.

In a highly cited 2015 survey published by Bankrate.com, about two-thirds of Americans indicated they didn’t have enough savings to cope with an unexpected expense of $1,000.3 Although the findings of that study are also sometimes overstated by commentators, the underlying problem is real. During the 2007–2009 housing crisis (a comparatively mild recession next to some of the earlier crashes of the 20th century), the number of foreclosures in the United States exceeded 1.6 million,4 with a peak at more than five times the normal annual rate. Part of this involved investors or house flippers purposefully walking away from underwater nonrecourse mortgages, but part involved genuine tears and pain.

Filburn, a landmark Supreme Court case that greatly expanded the reach of the federal government. But both sides spend little time discussing the dynamics of the money supply in that era, or the contents of the balance sheets of multiple large banks that went bankrupt in the run-up to the crash. The housing crisis of 2007–2009 is another well-remembered instance, and so is its European counterpart—a sovereign debt crisis accompanied by bank closures and limited-scale deposit confiscations in the Eurozone (euphemistically dubbed bail-ins).11 But the analysis of its causes is entirely subservient to the political narrative too.


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$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Those concerned about the affordable housing crisis often focus a spotlight on rising rents. Clearly, a few million additional government rental subsidy vouchers would help. In addition, there is a place for investment in the building or rehabbing of more affordable housing. There’s actually already an underutilized mechanism in place at the federal level that could help with this—the National Housing Trust Fund. The NHTF is supposed to act as a pot of money that could be tapped by states to help support the building of affordable housing developments. Yet the recent housing crisis derailed efforts to fully fund the NHTF, and the federal government has yet to build the program up.

At some point, if the authorities were to find out that Kaitlin and Cole were sharing a room, Jennifer would be at risk of losing custody due to “neglect.” By today’s standards of child well-being, Jennifer can’t move into a studio apartment to help balance her family’s budget. The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters.

And yet they are America, as much as any other place in the country. Though these forgotten places are indeed a world apart, much of what the extreme poor in other regions experience is reflected in the experiences of these families, too. In the central Delta, welfare is just as dead as it is in the rest of the country, if not more so. The affordable housing crisis and the perils of doubling up are also richly evident in the Delta. So is the stubborn spirit of those with nothing to survive by any means necessary. But a key difference between other places and the economically distressed small towns and rural regions concentrated in the Deep South and Appalachia is the combination of a virtually nonexistent cash safety net and the virtual lack of any formal-sector jobs.


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

From 2007 to 2009, one out every six Tennessee workers producing these goods lost their job. The sharp drop in household spending in California, Florida, Nevada, and New York directly affected Tennessee workers. We cannot be certain of the number of jobs in Tennessee that would have been saved by policy efforts to mitigate the housing crisis elsewhere. But the view that helping troubled home owners in California and Florida was “terrible public policy” from the perspective of Tennesseans is suspect. When it comes to problems associated with levered losses, it does not matter where you live. As we’ve said, the ripple effects on the labor market mean that we are all in this together.

However, DeMarco’s position as head of the GSEs was different. The GSEs by this time were a public entity and effectively belonged to taxpayers. It was DeMarco’s responsibility to act in the wider interest of the American public and pursue principal write-downs. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the failure to respond adequately to the housing crisis was likely the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession. Some have argued that debt restructuring would have had little benefit because spending out of housing wealth, even for indebted households, is too small to have made a significant contribution to GDP.21 This is a narrow view. As we explained in the first part of the book, the collapse in spending by indebted households infected the entire economy through foreclosures and employment.

Further, such an intervention would have cost very little taxpayer money—only the trustees would have needed to be compensated. The proposal would have allowed for more efficient renegotiation of mortgages that would have reduced debt and left both home owners and MBS investors better off—at little taxpayer cost. Another proposal put forth at the beginning of the housing crisis was the allowance of mortgage cram-downs by judges in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, an individual with too much debt submits a debt payback plan to a bankruptcy trustee in order to reduce his overall debt burden.36 Chapter 13 bankruptcy allows people to reduce debt that is not explicitly secured by some collateral.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

And that realization, that nobody has designed this experience for you—it’s terrifying. LESLIE DREYER We meet near City Hall and I make a joke about the number of times she’s probably protested outside this building. Part artist, part activist, she came to San Francisco to build a life with her partner. Then, the financial crisis hit in 2008, and the San Francisco housing crisis followed. Many of my friends were being evicted. Rents were skyrocketing. Starting in 2010, 2011, it was just a huge upward curve. And at the same time, the Google buses were all over the streets, the program had really amplified in those two years. So that was on the tips of people’s tongues.

Recently, the Board of Supervisors reclassified “affordable housing” to be for people earning 100 percent to 120 percent of the median income. That is no longer affordable; that’s just a developer giveaway. But developers fund their campaigns. It’s just this constant squeeze. It’s a global crisis. In Austin and Seattle—tech companies are growing there and a housing crisis along with it. Berlin and Barcelona and London and all these places are trying to deal with deregulated housing markets because of “home sharing” companies like Airbnb. The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful, but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or coopted.

The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available. The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable. That’s why everybody is confused. There are virtually no protests at City Hall because nothing is being voted on. The crisis isn’t driven by decisions at City Hall or the planning commission.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

Many of these young adults will appreciate that they can live in a well-maintained, family-sized suburban home and send their children to good public schools without committing to decades of mortgage payments, tying up their savings in down payments, or risking entrapment in another market collapse. By renting, though, they forsake the method through which most Americans build wealth. Last decade’s housing crisis threatens a more lasting and far-reaching impact on American society than other historic market meltdowns because the previous crashes have generally been in the stock market and share prices mostly affect the rich. The behavior of voters and consumers might be swayed by the direction of stock prices, but most people don’t own much in the way of equities.

Even if Phillips was winning in court, the reception from buyers for the finished product at San Carlos was not a good sign for other towers topping out along the beach. It was clear the air was whooshing out of the condo bubble, but I still hadn’t made the connection between surgeons trying to wriggle out of a regrettable investment over some mildew and my own fortunes. 12 OVER THE HEDGE A timeline of the housing crisis prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis points to February 27, 2007, as an early sign of the brewing calamity when Freddie Mac announced that it would no longer buy the riskiest types of subprime mortgages. For me, the first hint of trouble was the smell of hot garbage wafting over the hedge.

NOTES Much of the reporting for this book was undertaken by the author for newspaper articles published by the Mobile Register, which was renamed the Press-Register in late 2005, and The Wall Street Journal. Included in each chapter’s notes are the relevant articles in the order in which the reporting first appears in the narrative, along with more specific citations for work that was not produced by the author. 1. THIS IS THE ONE Ryan Dezember, “My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2018. The collapse of the U.S. housing market wiped out Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, xv. At its depths, more than twelve million Americans CoreLogic, “New CoreLogic Data Shows Second Consecutive Quarterly Decline in Negative Equity,” news release, August 26, 2010.


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The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

When the status quo of climate change became untenable, it was these places that were sacrificed, these places that were the first victims of the logic of retreat. The rivers that run through the two towns may start far apart from each other, but they empty into the same ocean. CHAPTER THREE Burnout WILDFIRES, INSURANCE, AND THE HOUSING CRISIS Santa Rosa, California I. The Fire on Tubbs Lane Even five years later, the precise facts of the Tubbs Fire incident remain unknown. Here is what we can say for sure. Early on the evening of October 8, 2017, the wind started to blow in Northern California. This wind had begun as a high-pressure system rotating clockwise over the deserts of Nevada and Utah, but the descending jet stream had given it an extra push, boosting it over the Sierra Nevada and into California.

Almost every major city in the United States faces a housing shortage of some kind or another, but California’s combination of restrictive laws and rapid growth has made homeownership burdensome for middle-class families and all but impossible for low-income households. According to one estimate, the shortage exceeds four million units, which means ten million people need a home but do not have one. Although the housing crisis originated in the meteoric growth of the Bay Area and Los Angeles metroplexes, its tentacles have spread to every corner of the state, raising costs in the agricultural towns of the Central Valley and in remote mountain towns like Greenville. Santa Rosa is more than an hour away from San Francisco by car, but the region is still well within the reach of the Bay Area’s economy, and over the past thirty years it, too, has felt the pain of the region’s housing shortage.

Even so, the primary factors in the decision were economic. The Trans might have considered moving to a similar neighborhood with lower fire risk, and their insurance company would have been more than happy to see them use their claim payout to go somewhere safer, but there was no such neighborhood in Santa Rosa or indeed in all of Wine Country. The housing crisis had squeezed the area’s middle class almost to the point of nonexistence, and for the Trans, moving elsewhere would have meant upgrading to a much more expensive property. Their insurance policy gave them only enough money to build a Coffey Park–caliber house, and there was only one Coffey Park.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Despite the warning, the day felt like a victory. For now, they’re safe, and each has placed a red sign in the window that in big block letters reads “No Buyouts.” New York City is in the midst of a housing crisis. New York is also, because of its liberal politics, its wealth, and its semi-strong welfare state, in possibly the best position, at least compared with other US cities, to handle a housing crisis. And unlike in other cities, where the electorate is still split on how to solve the gentrification problem (San Francisco mayor Ed Lee ran unopposed except by a few protest candidates who garnered low percentages of the vote and who were not backed by party money; mayors of other cities will not even mention the G-word), New Yorkers appear nearly united in their desire for a progressive solution.

Around the same time, Baruch College and New York 1 (a local news station) conducted a survey that found 65 percent of all New Yorkers feared being priced out of their homes in the next few years. The findings cut across economic and racial lines: low-income residents, Latinos, and black New Yorkers were more likely to be worried about rising rents, but everyone, including a majority of people making over $100,000 a year, feared they were next in line. This is what a housing crisis looks like. If the middle class and even some upper-income people can barely afford New York, what does it mean for the working class and the poor? My brother and sister-in-law are lucky they’re able to afford more, even if it does strain their budget to remain in this city. I am flexible. I’m young, I have money, and I have no immediate family.

Even the city’s private developers have been pleasantly surprised by how pro-development the de Blasio administration is. His deputy mayor for housing and economic development, Alicia Glen, came not from a lefty think tank or nonprofit but from Goldman Sachs, where she oversaw $3 billion in investment in cities. In 2015, I got a chance to sit down with Glen and ask her about the city’s housing crisis. Our interview made it clear that she saw the need for action, but that her solution would not fundamentally challenge gentrification. De Blasio and Glen are progressives, but without challenging the fundamentals of real estate capitalism, their vision is severely limited. I asked her if she understood people’s concerns about being priced out of neighborhoods that were rezoned by the administration she works for.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

This has, as was intended, led to a dramatic increase in debt ratios, both in the public and private sectors. The main exception in recent years has been the reduction in the leverage ratios of banks, whose dangerous level in 2007/2008 was a major factor in causing the GFC, and household leverage in countries where this sector has gone through a housing crisis. Although debt ratios have risen dramatically, there is not enough concern about leverage. That’s because debt service ratios have not risen along with debt ratios, thanks to an almost exact inverse correlation between rising debt ratios and declining interest rates. This is set out in Chapter 11.

The speed at which the labour market adjusted is also striking. GDP growth fell from 6% in 1989 to −2% in 1994. The unemployment rate rose from around 2% in 1990 to 3% by 1995. It is only by 2003 that the unemployment rate peaked at just 5.4%. By contrast, the unemployment rate infamously rose to 10% in the USA during its own housing crisis. The unambiguous message from the labour market is that if there is one part of Japan’s economy that does not participate in economic adjustment, it is employment, i.e. the Phillips curve has always been flat in Japan, more so than in other advanced countries. The origins of Japan’s labour customs: World War II changed Japan’s labour market.

As a result, in countries like Canada, Australia and Sweden, households across North Asia, Poland and Chile have seen double-digit increases in household debt. Household debt in China, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand has risen around 20–25%. Household debt to GDP ratios in Malaysia and Thailand now are closer to levels seen in advanced economies, while the household leverage in Korea is not far from that in the USA on the eve of the housing crisis. With the personal sector in sizeable surplus, and asset markets very strong, the wealth of the household sector increased in the post-GFC decade far faster than its liabilities (n.b. the same was true in the previous decade 1997–2007). The problem, both then and now, is not with the general level of household indebtedness, but with that group, mostly young families, where debt is high, albeit temporarily because of age profile or unemployment, relative to income.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

I arrived at work bursting to discuss alarming economic data erupting on all fronts. Stock market volatility, the collapsing subprime mortgage industry, and the mountain of household debt was unnerving. And not a sounding board for miles. My new colleagues shrugged, uninterested. They believed any housing crisis would be regional. After all, their boss Bernanke had said just that. Their indifference—and subtle hostility—was maddening. As far as I could tell, none of them watched CNBC in the morning. Of course they read the financial newspapers, if they bothered to check their mailboxes. I was often unnerved to find days of the Financial Times stacked up in someone’s box.

However, once inside, I confronted an uncomfortable question: Why were so many of its highly-educated and well-paid economists oblivious as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was about to break over their heads? Why had Greenspan been so resolutely blind to the housing bubble his low-interest-rate policies had created? Why didn’t Bernanke sound an alarm instead of repeatedly opining that the housing crisis was “likely to be contained”? Why was Janet Yellen, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, astonishingly clueless as the housing market in her region imploded? And later, why couldn’t Yellen—an economist known for her brilliant forecasting skills—foresee the consequences of the Fed’s disastrous zero-interest-rate policies after she succeeded Bernanke as Fed chairman?

In 2002, Bernanke, while on the Board of Governors, had paid tribute to Milton Friedman at a conference at the University of Chicago. Acknowledging Friedman’s work on the Depression and his criticism that the Fed’s tight monetary policy had deepened its deprivations for millions of Americans, Bernanke told Friedman, “We did it. We’re very sorry. But we promise not to do it again.” After years of downplaying the housing crisis, Bernanke had finally awakened to the imminent danger. The markets were in turmoil, with the S&P 500 Index down over 16 percent by the third week of January. On Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Day, Bernanke went into his office believing dramatic action by the Fed was needed before the next FOMC meeting, scheduled for January 30.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

But it would greatly benefit America’s children and make it much easier for middle-class people to have the number of kids they say they want. As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it. The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in-demand cities. The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow. Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its aging northeastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away.

The return of land scarcity It’s no mystery why a house might cost more to buy than to build—it’s because houses usually come with land attached and land can be expensive. Given the right setting, even a broken-down shack can sell for huge sums of money. A few years back, an eighty-year-old, nine-hundred-square-foot house in Palo Alto sold for more than $2.5 million and became the poster child for how land scarcity drives the housing crisis.* At the dawn of the economics profession, land scarcity loomed extremely large as a consideration. To the nineteenth-century British economist David Ricardo, diminishing returns were the central fact of economics. He felt that as a country’s population grows, people would increasingly need to move not to places where incomes were highest but to places where land was cheapest.

In other words, you can make a town allow duplexes but if the town says a duplex is going to need ten off-street parking spaces then nobody is going to build any. These concerns are not merely hypothetical. Way back in 2002, the California State Legislature attempted to address the state’s housing crisis by allowing single-family homeowners to build “accessory dwelling units” (aka granny flats or mother-in-law apartments). But as Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett showed, local governments simply responded by “imposing burdensome procedural requirements that are contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the state-law requirement that ADUs be permitted ‘as of right,’ requiring multiple off-street parking spaces, and imposing substantive and procedural design requirements.”* It was only about fourteen years later that a new, stronger pro-housing coalition emerged in the state legislature, passed a series of new rules designed to allow ADUs, and an ADU boom began.* Then in 2019, the legislature responded by passing a package of five new ADU laws—four aimed at further knocking down local barriers, and one allowing homeowners to build two ADUs rather than just one—fueling a further boom.* ADUs alone aren’t going to solve the California housing crunch.


Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

Below is the rest of the shark: a 13 who have art, activis just the new American economy HOLLOW 14 in which most of us thing will be ble. faster, will CITY be poorer, a few will be more homogenous and more far richer, and every- controlled or controlla- The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast- forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland. A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future —urban warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and decay, open the new corruption— ^but future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of numbness of incessant work hours and homes and neighborhoods. this country is in the a ripple effect Napa and Sonoma sive the anxiety of destabilized jobs, Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/ boom that started in Silicon Valley has pro- throughout the region from south of San Jose to in the north. ^ San Francisco has had the most expen- housing of any major American city in the nation for but in the past few years housing prices —^both skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate sales two decades, and rents —have been New businesses are coming in new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the industry's workers have been outbidding out from under tenants at a for rentals breakneck pace.

All over the city, and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant built and into dot-com sold, old industrial buildings offices Program puts and upscale down buildings are being torn lots are being filled in, and former nonprofit condos offices turned As San Francisco's Urban Habitat lofts. "The growing gap between low wage and high wage it, workers and the scarcity of housing, especially affordable housing for low income households, is resulting in the displacement of by middle and high income households ties of color."^ San Francisco and ing this housing crisis new jobs without many in historically traffic by encouraging the influx of new technology was the sprawling suburban enterprises and live capital and an aggravation in the nation. of the first become both a bedroom community for the Val- highly paid workers and the capital of the next technological wave the Internet, aka multimedia, with biotechnology about to huge presence in Mission Bay.

yuppies, and there is definitely tension Some on both filled the people have focused on sides of that divide —those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it's not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there's a housing crisis, and it's the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some human need —housing— exists largely as a need takes back seat to profit. My own a fault a system in which a basic free-market commodity, so that writing has been about culture and politics in other senses.


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance.32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.33 Imagine if we didn’t provide unemployment insurance or Social Security to most families who needed these benefits. Imagine if the vast majority of families who applied for food stamps were turned away hungry. And yet this is exactly how we treat most poor families seeking shelter. — A problem as big as the affordable-housing crisis calls for a big solution. It should be at the top of America’s domestic-policy agenda—because it is driving poor families to financial ruin and even starting to engulf families with moderate incomes. Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.34 America can and should work to make its cities livable again.

In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion, increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion. The figure is likely much less, as the estimate does not account for potential savings the expanded program would bring in the form of preventing homelessness, reducing health-care costs, and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.56 It is not a small figure, but it is well within our capacity. We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners.57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance.

On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves, California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market’s Big Buyers,” Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity.”69 It’s a laudable goal. However, tackling it will first require not only compassion from world leaders, but real change in Wall Street’s business model. In the midst of the housing crisis and Great Recession a few years back, I spent a lot of time traveling through the Inland Empire, a large metropolitan area in the middle of Southern California. It stretches an hour or two east of Los Angeles and Orange County, but is about as far away from the tony “OC” lifestyle as you can imagine.

In the early 2000s, predatory lenders flocked to the area, offering dicey deals to the largely minority and lower-middle-class white populations who, unable to afford housing on the coast, still craved the American Dream of homeownership. It ended, as it did in so many neighborhoods and cities across America, in tears and massive foreclosures, turning entire cities into ghost towns of derelict properties. As recently as 2012, when I visited the Del Rosa neighborhood of San Bernardino, one of the hardest-hit cities in the housing crisis, remaining homeowners’ efforts to keep their properties up were being thwarted left and right. Groups of young men and school-age kids with pit bulls in tow hung out in front of corner bodegas at midday. For every well-kept bungalow with freshly cut grass and potted plants on the porch, there was an abandoned building spray-painted with gang graffiti or strewn with dirty mattresses and empty liquor bottles.

Home values began rebounding from their post-financial-crisis trough in the beginning of 2012, and by July 2015, home sales had increased to their highest pace in eight and a half years.6 But the percentage of Americans who can call themselves homeowners is still declining from its peak in 2004, and many experts expect it to fall further as credit continues to be tight, young people struggle with higher-than-average levels of unemployment, and baby boomers begin moving into retirement housing.7 Fixing this housing crisis, as Warren Buffett once told me, is a fundamental prerequisite for fixing our economy. And yet, nearly eight years after the crisis of 2008, we aren’t there yet. The national housing market is in recovery, but like the larger economic recovery, it is incredibly bifurcated. Sections of Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are booming, while Detroit, Atlanta, and California’s Inland Empire are still coping with foreclosures and mortgages that are underwater.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Regional inequality was making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another—one world wracked with painkillers, the other tainted by elite-college admission schemes. It was making it difficult to settle on nationwide programs that could apply across such wildly disparate contexts—in one set of places, the housing crisis was about blight and abandonment, while in the other, it was all about affordability and gentrification. Inequality between regions was also worsening inequality within regions. The more prosperity concentrated in certain cities, the more it concentrated within certain segments of those cities, exacerbating long-standing imbalances or driving those of lesser means out altogether.

In his acceptance speech, Rubenstein said that as he was contemplating what to say, Andrew Carnegie had written him a letter from the beyond. “‘Good philanthropists invariably live very long lives,’” the “letter” read, “‘and when their time is up they are warmly welcomed into a special place in Heaven.’” * * * Seattle’s housing crisis had been building for half a decade—ever since Amazon had started building that enormous headquarters in South Lake Union—but the Seattle Times headline on April 6, 2017, still had the power to shock: SEATTLE’S MEDIAN HOME PRICE HITS RECORD: $700,000, DOUBLE 5 YEARS AGO In fact, the Seattle region had the fastest-rising home prices of any metro area in the country for the prior five months.

Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities. The cranes kept going up—there were fifty-nine in the air in April 2019, still the most in the nation. Work resumed on the tower that Amazon had threatened to cancel. Meanwhile, the company announced that it was taking steps to address the housing crisis it had helped create—philanthropically, that is. It would donate $5 million to an affordable housing developer and set aside eight floors in one of its new buildings for a 200-bed homeless shelter for families, complete with its own health clinic. It was far less than the $500 million that Microsoft had previously announced it was investing in local housing, but it was something.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

The return had not proved any easier since many of the apartments in Jaffa had been destroyed in their absence or requisitioned by new Arab tenants. Secondly, floods of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe after World War I (an immigration wave known as the ‘Third Aliya’) had only increased what was fast becoming a serious housing crisis.114 In the short period between September 1920 and May 1921 alone, 10,000 Jewish immigrants entered through the ‘Gates of Zion’ (or infested the ‘Bride of the Sea’, depending on one’s ethno-religious allegiance).115 Lastly, and most importantly however, was the ideological make-up of this latest batch; having survived their infancy in among the pales and pogroms of Tsarist Russia and their adolescence absorbing the revolutionary fervour of 1917, these immigrants were considerably more radical than previous influxes.

It was no longer possible to try to keep a mixed, double or in-between identity, like that of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche. Jews had nothing to look for in Jaffa, and the city had been transformed from a cosmopolitan city into an Arab one. Jewish enclaves within Jaffa, such as the Feingold Houses in Manshieh, had gradually deteriorated, atrophied and been abandoned. The housing crisis in the region initially caused by the waves of immigrants from Europe had worsened due to the massive departure of the Jewish population from Jaffa, and soon, the whole region of Tel Aviv and Jaffa was swamped in tent encampments.129 As a result, Tel Aviv’s population in the 1920s multiplied twenty-fold, from 2,084 inhabitants at the beginning of the decade, to 42,000 at its end.130 Mass overcrowding encouraged more land acquisitions and the majority of deals for plots in what is today considered part of Tel Aviv were conducted during this period.

Some were new immigrants, some were internal refugees having fled Arab neighbourhoods in the wake of the May Day riots, and nearly all were homeless, living in tents. In light of the increasingly untenable situation in Jaffa, which had been twitching with rancour ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the severe housing crisis developing in Tel Aviv, this displaced collective understood the necessity of starting over. The members of the association decided to unite as a collaborative corporation, to purchase a tract of land, and to build a new neighbourhood south of Tel Aviv. Neve Sha’anan in the 1930s, as seen from south to north-east.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

World War II improved the situation greatly, as 16 million young service men and women shipped out to the European and Pacifi theaters. But this improvement was only temporary. After demobilization, the situation worsened again. In Chicago in 1946, for example, the housing crisis was so bad that over 100,000 veterans—mostly unemployed young men—were homeless.24 In their book Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen eloquently illustrate just how acute the housing crisis had become:“In Atlanta,2,000 people answered an advertisement for one vacancy. A classifie ad in Omaha newspaper read, ‘Big Ice Box 7 by 17 feet. Could be fi ed up to live in.’”25 In 1933, under FDR, the federal government responded to the crisis with a series of experimental moves that would ultimately render old techniques and styles of housing construction obsolete.

They were one example of what the sociologist Sharon Zukin calls liminal spaces—public areas for meeting, mixing, and transit.33 For low-income inner-city tenants, these liminal spaces, including front stoops, hallways, parks, sidewalks, squares, bus stops, and train terminals, can be sites of uncomfortable interactions—elevator silences, excessive noise, physical aggression. Especially during a depression or other housing crisis, liminal spaces are always overcrowded. Unemployed adults spend long hours there, as do children, poor relatives, and newlyweds forced to bunk-in with family members because they cannot afford their own apartment. The appeal of the porchless suburban house was the escape it offered from intense, overcrowded interaction with one’s neighbors.34 Contrary to popular myth, the urban working class was not driven to Levittown by crime; it was lured there by the promise of space and privacy offered by a detached home.

There was no communal path, no common service area.”35 Alfred, who was the exact opposite of his gregarious brother, was obsessed with privacy in housing design and expressed his belief that it could be made compatible with the mass production of homes. “Without even a trial balloon you guess in advance just how far you could push and persuade [people] to take either open planning or living in a fis bowl until the landscaping grows to give them privacy.”36 After 1948,when the housing crisis eased somewhat,the Levitts committed themselves to constructing detached housing for veterans. They could hardly lose. The government guaranteed veterans’ mortgages and made them available without any down payment at all. So, just as competition was entering the Levitts’ new downscale market, Alfred redesigned the Cape Cod to make it attractive to a middle-class clientele.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The problems of the 'white working class' were ascribed to their whiteness, rather than their class. argued against this false portrait. Indeed, working-class communities and workplaces are more likely to be ethnically diverse than their middle-class counterparts. Problems faced by working-class people who are white-s-like the housing crisis, the lack of good jobs, poor rights at work, declining living standards, safe communities--are to do with class, not race. These are problems shared by working-class people of all ethnic backgrounds. Where race does come into it is the fact that working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds suffer from other forms of oppression and exploitation.

Aside from the millions who are spending years of their lives on waiting lists, the number of people in temporary accommodation soared by a stunning 135 per cent between 2001 and 2008. And the government might not be spending much on social housing, but instead it spends £21 billion a year on housing benefit, much of which ends up subsidizing private landlords. With the housing crisis worsening year by year, and with accommn, dation so central to people's lives, why did a Labour government leave the whole policy to go to rot? I asked Hazel Blears, whose fonner department when in the Cabinet included responsibility for housing. She accepted that New Labour had failed to build sufficient capaciry.L but with caveats.

Things like crime and drug addiction are more common in working- class areas than in the average middle-class suburb. A working-class teenager is considerably more likely to give birth than her middle-class peer. But the reality is rather different from the vicious generalizations and victim-blaming that accompanies chav-hare. Poverty, unemploy- ment and a housing crisis provide fertile ground for a range of social problems. These are working-class communities that took the brunt of a class war first unleashed by Thatcher three decades ago. Indeed, it would be far more startling if life had gone on, much like before, even as the pillars of the community collapsed one by one


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality,” unpublished working paper, April 2012, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeim JobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 4.See Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (January 1, 2011), http://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-inequality-that-matters/. 5.http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/must-read-steve-teles-the-scourge-of-upward-redistribution-2/. 6.William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014), https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity. 7.See Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 3–28. 8.Justin Lahart, “Number of the Week: Finance’s Share of Economy Continues to Grow,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/. 9.General Accounting Office, “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements,” July 1996, http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ai96123.pdf. 10.See David Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis,” The Atlantic, December 16, 201l, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/for-the-last-time-fannie-and-freddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/. 11.Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 207. 12.Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, p. 253. 13.See Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis.” 14.See Neil Bhutta, “GSE Activity and Mortgage Supply in Lower-Income and Minority Neighborhoods: The Effect of the Affordable Housing Goals,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 45, no. 1 (2012): 238–61. 15.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

New York City, for example, built fewer new units in the recovery boom of the 2010s than it did in the Great Depression of the 1930s.8 In the smaller suburbs that dot regions like the great bays of California and Massachusetts, zoning has emerged as an effective tool for blocking any and all development, locking many communities in amber. As a result, many coastal housing markets now operate in a context of permanent housing crisis. Relatively little housing is built, and where it is built at all, the housing is kept prohibitively expensive by unnecessary mandates and a costly permitting process.9 With restrictive zoning already on the books in those cities that remain somewhat affordable—usually thanks to an increasingly scarce supply of undeveloped land—the housing affordability crisis is unlikely to remain an exclusively coastal phenomenon for long.

Molly Boesel, “Home Prices Reached Highest Annual Growth Since 1979,” CoreLogic, August 3, 2021, https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/home-prices-reached-highest-annual-growth-since-1979/. 2. Erick Trickey, “How Minneapolis Freed Itself from the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes,” Politico, July 11, 2019, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/11/housing-crisis-single-family-homes-policy-227265/; Todd Gill, “Fayetteville Eliminates Minimum Parking Requirements,” Fayetteville (AR) Flyer, October 7, 2015, https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2015/10/07/fayetteville-eliminates-minimum-parking-requirements/; Angie Schmitt, “Hartford Eliminates Parking Minimums Citywide,” Streetsblog, December 13, 2017, https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/13/hartford-eliminates-parking-minimums-citywide/. 3.

On top of the tens of thousands of dollars the applicant had to spend on a team of environmental consultants, any local opponent of the project with a couple hundred dollars to spare will also have standing to further delay the project with a frivolous lawsuit challenging the environmental review in court. 26. Combined with the risk of creditors or partners dropping out of the project, these delays can and often do kill projects. 27. As Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) find, those who speak at public hearings in opposition to housing are often highly unrepresentative of their communities, both demographically and in their opposition to new housing. The authors find that speakers at public hearings are systematically more likely to be elderly male homeowners and to be far more opposed to housing than the average local resident. 28.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

It sounds unthinkable, but the few who are beginning to do this will be better off than those who reach out for the government lifeline, prolonging high payments for 30 years. The outcome would be a shorter recession, for the housing market would quickly readjust rather than suffer from the agonizing slow-motion erosion in prices and perpetually high inventories that are occurring today. Socialism’s solution to the housing crisis is reminiscent of the Japanese perpetual recession, where a bear market in equities has run 19 years and counting. The moral hazard that has been built into the nation’s mortgage market is a function of the structure of the system, something that the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman drives home in his nostalgic plea to return to a simpler, 1950s-style banking system.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), 229–252. A sprightly discussion of this is in The Black Swan’s Chapter 15: “The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud.” Notes 383 14. Zillow, The Majority of U.S. Homeowners Thinks Their Home is Insulated From the Housing Crisis (August 6, 2008), http://zillow.mediaroom.com/index. php?s=159&item=64. Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Hard Money 1. Laurence H. Meyer, Remarks by Governor Laurence H. Meyer, December 5, 2001, www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011205/default. htm. 2. Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994), 42. 3.

., 248 Conspiracy of Fools (Eichenwald), 223 Council on Foundations, 176 Counterfeiting, 38, 53 Countrywide Financial, 212, 214 Cramer, Jim, 141–142, 143, 145–146, 289, 303 Crawford, Michael, 246 Credit Crisis of 2008–2009: forced lending, 128–133 Index overview, 116–121 “too big to fail” policy, 121–128 See also Housing Crisis Crispus, Gaius Sallustius, 248 Culture of irresponsibility: chilling of inquiry, 293–296 moral vacuum, 296–299 morality, 290–292 overview, 277–281 rationality, 285–290 secular society, 281–285 See also Moral hazard; Self-indulgence Cuneo, Jonathan W., 326–327 “Curveball,” 363 Damn Yankees, 303 Dawes Plan, 62 The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions (Fisher), 131 Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here (Bernanke), 117 Democracy Alliance, 185 Derivatives, 22.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Six regions, all in the Sunbelt, posted ratios of 15 or greater. Another twelve metropolitan areas, again all in the Sunbelt, had ratios above 10. Las Vegas’ ratio was 9, Miami’s 8.4, and Phoenix’s 7.2, all sky-high by any standard.9 With their debt-fueled economies driven by housing, it’s no surprise that the housing crisis has brought severe economic pain to many Sunbelt cities. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, of the twenty worst-performing regions in the country, fourteen were in the Sunbelt, including Las Vegas and Miami.10 Both Las Vegas and Phoenix saw their economic Stress Index value—a composite measure of economic hardship developed by the Associated Press—more or less double between December 2007 and March 2009.11 At the peak of the crisis the Sunbelt states and cities witnessed something that had once been unthinkable: after a century of unchecked growth, many locations had their first taste of mass outmigration and population decline.

We’ve seen the ways in which the importance of home ownership became overblown and began to undermine the economy; how it consumed an ever-larger share of income for far too many, constraining their lifestyle and sometimes even bankrupting them; and how it encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real estate economy dominant. We could well look back on this moment in history as a time when people lived like indentured servants, with their own homes as lord and master. For too many, the dream of home ownership turned into an economic trap, one of our own making. The most staggering damage caused by the housing crisis may not be the impact on the financial markets; it may be the long-run competitive disadvantage caused by the inability to relocate the labor force to where the jobs of the future lie. It’s not that home ownership per se is bad, it’s that home ownership on the scale it has grown to is plainly ill suited to today’s postindustrial economy.

Even though prices have declined somewhat, it’s still very expensive to buy a home in many of these places. More people have no choice but to rent in those cities. Renting is much more prevalent in metro areas such as New York, where 66 percent of residents are renters, as well as D.C. and Chicago, where more than half (56 and 51 percent, respectively) rent their homes.11 The housing crisis creates additional opportunities for rental housing. Across the country, there is an accumulation of foreclosed homes and failing condo projects that could be turned into rentals. With prices down 30 or 40 percent or more in some places, this kind of conversion increasingly makes economic sense.


pages: 258 words: 71,880

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street by Kate Kelly

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, fixed income, housing crisis, index arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, moral hazard, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, technology bubble, too big to fail, traveling salesman

This was the issue most bothering Geithner and Paulson that night. Bear wouldn’t fail in a vacuum, they knew. The crisis of confidence among lenders and clients would likely spread to the next most vulnerable firm—be it Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch. Both firms were thought to be overexposed to the housing crisis, Lehman had its large commercial real-estate portfolio as well as its sprawling mortgage-origination and packaging activities, and Merrill was invested heavily in enormous underwater investments in CDOs. If skeptical investors and frightened customers and lenders were able to sink Bear, a series of dominoes could fall after it—potentially taking down most or all of Wall Street.

“Well, our financial institutions, our banks and investment banks, are very strong,” Paulson said. “And I’m convinced that they’re going to come out of this situation very strong. Our markets are resilient. They’re flexible. I’m quite confident we’re going to work our way through this situation.” Apparently having exhausted his Bear questions, Stephanopoulos moved on to the housing crisis. It was a grueling television circuit. Paulson’s other two interviewers, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, grilled him about both the Fed loan and the state of the banking business in general. An overwhelming number of economists polled by the Wall Street Journal thought the economy was in a recession, they pointed out, and with Bear’s teetering status, the entire Wall Street business model seemed potentially at risk.

Paulson at Goldstein, Michael Grasso, Dick Great Depression Greenberg, Alan (“Ace”) Buffett’s friendship with Cayne’s relationship with as chairman Glickman’s relationship with market-risk gatherings of ousted as CEO partner memos issued by post-CEO role of spending curbs of Greenberger, Mala Greene, Maryann Greene, Tim Greenspan, Alan Greenwich Capital group Griffin, Ken Harrington, Donald Harrison, William Harriton, Richard Harvard University hedge funds Bear balance reduced by failure of see also specific funds Hernandez, Carlos High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund Hill, Jeremy Hogan, John Hom, Dennis housing boom housing crisis HSBC Iger, Bob IndyMac Federal Bank ING insurance, against debt default International Swaps and Derivatives Association investment banks: demise of discount window and see also specific investment banks IPOs (initial public offerings) Japan Jardine Strategic Holdings Limited J.C.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Conversely, the reporters found it was much more likely to predict that White criminals would not offend again, despite the data showing that this was not at all accurate. Sitting next to me was Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and the author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, who has an insider’s view of the way that math and big data are directly implicated in the financial and housing crisis of 2008 (which, incidentally, destroyed more African American wealth than any other event in the United States, save for not compensating African Americans for three hundred years of forced enslavement). Her view from Wall Street was telling: The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings.

See also Google PageRank; Kandis Ali, Kabir, 80 Alphabet, 34–35; cultural imperialism, 86; expansion into surveillance technologies, 28 Anderson, Benedict, 136 Angwin, Julia, 27 Anonymous (hacker group), 112, 194n4 Anti-Defamation League, 42, 44, 157, 160 “antidiversity” manifesto, 2 Apple: labor condition in China, 164, 199n43; profiling in store, 163 Arreola, Veronica, 155 artificial intelligence, 1–2, 148; financial and housing crisis of 2008 role, 27; future criminality predictions, 27 ArtStor, bias in metadata management, 145–47 Ascher, Diana, 29 Associated Press v. United States, 190n57 Baartman, Sara, 94–96, 100 Bagdikian, Ben, 41 Bar-Ilan, Judit, 47 Barlow, John Perry, 61 Baron, Jill, 134 Battelle, John, 148 Berger, John, 58 Berman, Sanford, 139, 143–44 bias.

., 89 purchasing products online, 175 racial and gender profiling, 28 racial categories: PubMed/MEDLINE, 95; South Africa, 95 The Racial Contract (Mills), 60 racial formation theory, 84 Racialicious (blog), 4 racism and sexism, 9, 186; application program interface (API), 187n5; Black people as a problem, 142–43; “colorblindness” and multiculturalism, 167–68; contributions of African Americans erased, 108; fantasy of postracialism, 108, 168; financial and housing crisis of 2008, 27; first search results, 5; future criminality of White and Black defendants, 27; #Gamergate comments, 63, 191n96; Google’s default settings, 88–89; history of enslavement and exploitation, 92, 96–98; impact of stereotypes, 105, 155; internet as a tool, 89; internet marginalization of Blacks and women, 58, 108, 165; Jezebel image, 70, 96, 98; male impact online, 58; Mammy or Sapphire image, 70, 98; n*gger application program interface (API), 4–5; race hierarchy theory, 79–80; recognition of, 25; search engine bias, 29, 31–32; traditional media images replicated, 55–56, 59.


pages: 287 words: 81,970

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

See Treasury bonds Deflation bailout, effects on economic impact of myths about “pushing on a string” argument De Gaulle, Charles Deng Xiaoping Digital gold currencies GoldMoney Dollar as currency reserves deterioration, and oil-pricing alternatives devaluation and Fed overseas holdings Dollar standard benefits to U.S. global dumping of Economic collapse, signs of Economic crisis (2008- ) bailouts command economy threat credit crisis and dollar standard federal debt government actions. See Federal Reserve housing crisis impact of and interest rate cuts Iraq war, cost of and job losses See also specific topics e-gold Elements ETNs Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), operation of Energy independence, myth of Energy trusts, recommendations Enerplus Resources Fund Trust (ERF) Engelhard England coinage debasement, impact of goldsmith as banker inflation and paper money See also Great Britain Erhard, Ludwig Ethanol Euros euro ETF (FXE) replace dollar Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) bond cautions about commodities-based foreign currency-based gold-based nationalization risk oil-based silver-based trading/operation of Exchange-traded notes (ETNs) commodities-based Elements ETNs Fannie Mae China/Japan holdings Federal debt amount of (2009) debt ceiling, increase foreign holders of hidden debt infinite horizon discounted value concept inflation as remedy interest expense on Medicare Part D, unfunded liability example monetizing debt percentage of GDP in trillions Federal deposit insurance Federal Reserve auditing of bailout funds cooling economy, actions for criticisms of system and debt monetization and devaluation of dollar federal funds rate fractional reserve banks inflation, creating by interest rate cuts and monetary policy and mortgage meltdown open market operations and Plunge Protection Team and politicized money public/private nature of secrecy related to stimulating economy, actions for as unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act (1913) Federal Reserve Notes Fiscal policy, defined Fisher, Richard Florin Food production demand, future view See also Commodities as investment Ford, Gerald Foreign currency, hard currencies Foreign currency as investment digital gold currencies exchange-traded funds (ETFs) speculative nature of Foster, Richard S.

., historical view Goldman Sachs GoldMoney Gold Reserve Act (1934) Goldsmiths, as bankers Gold standard abandoned, United States Bretton Woods agreement Grant, James Great Britain gold standard nationalization oil reserves of Great Depression Greenbacks Greenspan, Alan on dollars held abroad on housing bubble interest rate cuts on WIN program Gresham’s law Gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt in Gulf War Hard Assets Producer (HAP) fund Hard currencies Hayek, F.A. He Fan Hickey, Fred Hitler, Adolf Housing crisis and Fed and interest rate cuts jingle mail Hunt, Bunker Hunt, Herbert al-Husseini, Sadad Hyperinflation and “crack-up boom,” features of Israel past periods of political implication of Index-type fund, gold-based India, poverty, decline of Indian rupee ETF (ICN) Infinite horizon discounted value Inflation as alternative to taxation and coinage debasement core inflation rate and distortion of market double-digit.

See Hyperinflation Federal Reserve, creation of historical view inflationary recession and malinvestment as monetary phenomenon official explanations of persistence of and price ceilings and price increases as remedy to debt as remedy to inflation and stagflation as theft Interest rate cuts economic impact of and housing crisis to stimulate economy Interest rates and bond prices raising, to cool economy and stagflation Investment recommendations bonds commodities foreign currencies gold gold/silver ratio information/resources for investors oil silver Iran, oil, pricing in euros Iraq war cost of and global rejection of America nonsupporting countries IRS bank transactions, reporting to financial behavior, reporting to See also Taxation Isaac, William iShares COMEX Gold Trust (IAU) iShares Silver Trust (SLV) Israel, hyperinflation James II, King of England Japan Fannie and Freddie holdings yen payable Treasuries, call for Japanese yen ETF (FXY) Johnson, Chalmers Johnson, Lyndon B.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

The largest deal was the $8.5 billion purchase of HD Supply, the contractor-oriented arm of Home Depot, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Perhaps to underscore Conway’s own point, that deal turned into one of the more troubled of the boom era, struggling mightily in the teeth of the U.S. housing crisis. Conway is, at his core, a deal guy, and widely regarded as one of the smartest investors in private equity. He is affable and physically imposing, and while charming and self-effacing, he is arguably the most feared person inside the firm. A practicing Catholic who attends Mass most days, he grew up in New Hampshire and earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth.

In 2009, at the depths of the credit crisis, private equity deals were less than 7 percent. By 2011, they’d regained their place, accounting for just less than 17 percent. Any explanation of the leveraged buyout boom of 2005 to 2007 inevitably includes the phrases “cheap debt” or “easy credit.” The parallels to what led to the housing crisis are hard to ignore. Just as financing was available for homebuyers to buy houses beyond what they thought they could afford, so too was debt available for private-equity firms to eye targets, bid up prices and buy companies that had previously been far beyond their reach. Part of it was the size of the equity funds they’d collected from pensions and endowments eager, and in some cases desperate, for the returns buyout firms had historically delivered.

CD&R paid $1.5 billion for the business and eventually took it public in 1995. CD&R has largely stuck with the business of carve-outs, buying Hertz with Carlyle from Ford and US Foods from Royal Ahold in well-timed deals, and the contractor supply business from Home Depot (called HD Supply), in a very poorly timed deal at the onset of the financial and housing crisis. In its modern iteration, CD&R has become a full- or part-time home for some of the highest-profile former chief executives of global companies, including Jack Welch, arguably the most famous CEO of all time. After Welch joined as a senior advisor in 2001, CD&R added A.G. Lafley, who ran Procter & Gamble, and former Tesco CEO Terence Leahy.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

But it is the poor, and African-Americans, who are most likely to spend their late teens and early twenties in prison, rather than at school.1 The article takes up the issue in the context of America’s housing crisis, and one aspect of it in particular: the “robo-signing crisis.” In their rush to issue bad mortgages, banks didn’t pay attention to record keeping. When the inevitable housing crisis arrived, and it came time to throw people out of the homes for which banks had gladly lent them money only a few years earlier, the banks’ records of who had repaid what were a mess. Many states have a system in which banks can simply sign an affidavit that they have examined the records and that the individual who is being declared in foreclosure does in fact owe the money alleged.

We could have prevented the mortgage crisis, if we had only more effectively enforced laws already on the books, regarding predatory and discriminatory lending—and if the Fed had lived up to its responsibilities in enforcing standards of lending in the mortgage market. “The One Housing Solution Left,” written with Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s, argues that there were alternative ways of handling the housing crisis, after it emerged—borrowing an idea that had worked in the Great Depression and that would have cost the government nothing. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a bill, Rebuilding American Homeownership, which would have accomplished this. And there was even a strategy for doing this within the political constraints of the time.

Then comes bewilderment: How could we let this happen again? Officials promise to fix things. Something is done about the most egregious abuses. People move on, reassured that the crisis has abated, but suspecting that it will recur soon. The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down—some to a point even lower than where they began. This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

There were African American-run savings and loan associations that financed black homebuyers, but because they were undercapitalized, they made little impact. Blacks looking for their own homes were left to turn to loan sharks or to buy homes using land contracts at high interest rates.43 Urban Redevelopment Postwar highway and urban redevelopment projects further exacerbated Detroit’s housing crisis, especially for blacks. Detroit’s city planners promised that the proposed system of cross-city expressways would dramatically improve the city’s residential areas, as well as bolster the city’s economy. For the thousands of blacks who lived in the path of Detroit’s first expressways, both promises were false.

The debates over housing in the 1940s were to have profound ramifications for the fate of federal policy in the city for the next twenty years and would set the terms for debate on—and limit—the next generation of social policy, the Great Society.5 A New Deal in Housing From the 1930s through the early 1950s, the federal government, city officials, and housing reformers looked to an alternative to Detroit’s private market to solve the city’s housing crisis. In place of inferior accommodation for the poor, government-subsidized developments would be built throughout the city. The construction of public housing, argued its advocates, would eliminate the city’s overcrowded, dangerous slums. Not only would public housing offer workers and the poor clean, new, affordable shelter, it would serve as a tool of social engineering.

Official approval of segregation, he argued, “has a detrimental effect,” fostering “distrust and disbelief in government on the part of minority and liberal” groups, and giving “official sanction to the prejudices of others.”106 During the Cobo administration, DHC policy remained unrelentingly segregationist, as officials defended “the right of the landlord to operate his property as he wishes or take the tenants he wants to take in.”107 In response to pressure from civil rights orgnaizations, city officials began the token integration of public housing projects in 1953 and 1954, but not until 1956, after the Detroit Branch of the NAACP won a lawsuit that challenged the city’s racial policy, did the city open all public housing to blacks, and even then desegregation was haltingly slow. As late as the early 1960s, four public housing projects were virtually all-white, with token black residents, and two projects were all-black.108 The dilemma of the housing crisis for Detroit’s poor was still unresolved in the late 1950s. The city directed blacks needing homes to its already crowded center-city projects, and defended the concentration of blacks as the necessary consequence of slum removal. James Inglis, director of the City Housing Commission in 1949, stated that black housing projects were by necessity high-density because of the high land prices in the center-city areas where slum housing had been cleared.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

After he led groundbreaking urban renewal efforts in the deteriorating cities of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s, and Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, Logue was hailed as the savior of New York State’s troubled cities—until the UDC’s sudden downfall. In his defense, Logue stressed the UDC’s undeniable accomplishments. Faced with an acute housing crisis and New York voters’ repeated rejection of referenda to remedy it, the UDC had innovated a new public-private funding approach. In place of old-style urban renewal, which depended on federal funds in ever shorter supply with the rising costs of the Vietnam War, Logue and Rockefeller had developed a new paradigm for urban revitalization.

As I watched events unfold in New Orleans, the debates that animated Logue’s story—who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill—took on real-life resonance before my eyes. Similarly, the Great Recession of a few years later, with its massive wave of foreclosures and talk of shrinking cities, gave me another ringside seat from which to watch urban decline and strategies of revival. As my writing of this book neared its end, the urban housing crisis of our own time became more pressing. And the United States elected a real estate developer for its forty-fifth president, with yet unknown long-term consequences for urban policy. This history of making and keeping American cities viable remains relevant in the twenty-first century because many cities are still challenged by formidable problems.

Margaret’s keenness for modern design was interspersed in her letters with political commentary condemning racial segregation and endorsing liberal candidates in Smith’s mock Democratic Party convention, indicating that all were a part of a consistent worldview. A year later, as Margaret contemplated their next move to Hartford, she wrote, “I’d love a Lustron home,” referring to the innovative, prefabricated, porcelain-enameled steel houses developed to meet the housing crisis after World War II.120 Soon after the Logues returned to New Haven in 1953, they decided to build a new house in the modern style. They hired Chester Bowles’s son Ches, who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, to design it. “We live in the only modern house in our part of town,” Logue proudly reported to his Yale class secretary.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Such properties, the Observer’s Alex Preston argues, ‘have become lavishly upholstered safety deposit boxes’66 – buildings that consume iconic views for largely absentee owners while appreciating vast speculative profits. As in Vancouver and New York, many will remain unoccupied, their darkened façades and empty rooms looming arrogantly and absurdly over a population experiencing its worst housing crisis in living memory. London also provides a classic example of the ways in which simplistic critiques and representations of the supposed failures of vertically built mass social housing have paved the way for the proliferation of towers for the super-rich. Speaking of one of the forty-three-floor elite housing towers in Stratford, one legacy of London’s Olympics-based ‘regeneration’ in 2012, architecture critic Juston McGuirk ponders that the building is the ‘sort of high-rise that was supposed to be unpopular in this country [the UK], discredited architecturally and politically, at least when it was called council [social] housing.’67 In 2013, 85 per cent of all housing purchases in inner London – largely those in the higher and ‘super-high’ price brackets – were being snapped up by non-UK nationals (mainly nationals from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia and Hong Kong, places where London real estate agents hold lavish prebuild sales events).68 Such frenzied speculation, often as a means of anonymously recycling money derived from corruption in a city now widely regarded as the world capital of money laundering,69 is pushing already-astronomical prices further ‘into the stratosphere’.70 Startlingly, as in New York, the numbers of residential super-high towers in London are rapidly overtaking the more traditional towers of corporate and banking headquarters.

Meanwhile, the totally inadequate production of affordable or social housing means that London’s poorer and middle-class populations are either displaced altogether or squeezed into ever more overcrowded and overpriced accommodation within the rest of London’s housing stock. Between 2012 and 2015, over 50,000 low-income families were physically displaced from inner London because of the housing crisis combined unprecedented cuts in welfare funding.75 Many low-wage workers who remain are pivotal to the functioning of the city, but are crammed into tiny, illegally rented and often dangerous spaces in attics, basements, sheds and garages. Often highly overcrowded, with no provision for decent sanitation or fire escapes, and with no official record on maps and statistical registers, such improvised dwellings become extremely vulnerable to fires.

, Too Much, 14 March 2014. 74Knight Frank, ‘Tall Towers’, London, 2012. See knightfrank.co.uk/research/tall-towers-2012-1101.aspx. 75Daniel Douglas, ‘Over 50,000 Families Shipped Out of London Boroughs in the Past Three Years due to Welfare Cuts and Soaring Rents’, Independent, 29 April 2015. 76Antonio Olivo, ‘Housing Crisis Drives Families into Overcrowded Living Conditions’, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2010. 77Rowan Moore, ‘London Is Being Transformed with 230 Towers: Why the Lack of Consultation?’ Observer, 29 March 2014. 78Mira Bar-Hillel, ‘What Does the Skyrocketing Price of Property in the Capital Mean for Society?’


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Oscar is living with friends, so the idea of escaping a full house and staying with the Ogawa community for the night was appealing. Though he didn’t think that there were very many people there in the same position as he, he did feel very welcome and at home. Oscar had been out of work since the housing crisis began three years ago. Though he considered Occupy Oakland a good start, he was skeptical about whether the system could be changed at all. He wasn’t sure if he would stay another night, though I did see him there later after sunset setting up a tent. The space had attracted some homeless people as well who seemed to have a mixture of practical and political reasons for being there.

One of the speakers representing Move On, Charles Davidson, was someone I had interviewed in April at the US Uncut tax day demonstration.2 I remembered that at that time he expressed frustration at the national Move On organization, and was dissatisfied with some of their capitulations and their retreat on US wars and occupations. I asked him via email if he had a statement about the issue. Davidson wrote that the march was focused on budget cuts on healthcare, social programs and infrastructure, and on pressuring Congress to create jobs and address the housing crisis. Davidson also stressed that he did not trust the Democratic Party, and that he didn’t support Move On’s alliances with the party in general, but that he did support certain progressive Democrats such as Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich. He also stressed that there were many Move On members who’d been involved in political activism for years, and that the Occupy movement should try to embrace, rather than alienate, them and the union members that would be involved in the event.

People are living too long There have also been a rash of stories recently in the UK, scapegoating old people for just about every economic woe we have. First, there are too many pensioners and we can’t afford them – so they need to pay more, work for longer and get less.6 Then, a report by the Intergenerational Foundation told us that the housing crisis was down to these pesky old-timers living in houses that were ‘too big’ and were therefore off limits to young families.7 That’s right, it’s not a property bubble. It’s not that all the council houses were sold off to bribe some working-class people into thinking they were Tories. It’s nothing to do with extortionate house prices and unachievable deposits.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In North and South America, Europe, and Asia, Blackstone has acquired buildings and converted them into rental units, which tenants have demonstrated are often uninhabitable. As the company increases rent prices, it ruthlessly evicts those who cannot pay, and in the United States, Blackstone has also been fighting against rent control. The United Nations’ housing advisor has flagged Blackstone as a major contributor to a global housing crisis in which tenants increasingly find themselves at the mercy of “faceless corporations.”46 Blackstone has also extended its reach into the Amazon rainforest. Blackstone-owned firms develop ports and roads, thereby fueling the hostile takeover of lands by agribusiness that damages indigenous land and sovereignty.47 Blackstone’s practices fit within a long history of dispossession sanctioned by state violence and international government alliances.

New York University, “New Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Launches: First of Its Kind Dedicated to the Study of Social Implications of AI,” press release, November 20, 2017, https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-artificial-intelligence-research-institute-launches.   46.   Patrick Butler, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” Guardian, March 26, 2019.   47.   Ryan Grim, “A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation,” Intercept, August 27, 2019.   48.   Jon Lee Anderson, “Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy,” New Yorker, April 1, 2019.   49.   See Group of MIT students, faculty, staff and alumni, “Celebrating War Criminals at MIT’s ‘Ethical’ College of Computing,” Tech, February 14, 2019; Danny McDonald, “MIT Group Calls for University to Cancel Celebration of New College, Apologize for Henry Kissinger Invite,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2019; Zoe Sheill and Whitney Zhang, “Protesters Gather Against College of Computing Celebration,” Tech, March 7, 2019.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency 81 (2018): 1–15. Butler, Patrick. “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis.” Guardian, March 26, 2019. Campolo, Alex, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford. AI Now 2017 Report. AI Now Institute, January 2017. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/ai-now-2017-report/. Caplan, Robyn, Alex Rosenblat, and danah boyd. “Open Data the Criminal Justice System and the Police Data Initiative.”


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

As we shall see, these three problems—plus a myriad of details—made mortgage modifications look economically difficult, legally problematic, and politically toxic. HAVEN’T WE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE? Once before in history, America experienced the frightening double whammy of a megarecession coupled with sharp declines in home prices. That was during the Great Depression. Back then, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress reacted to the housing crisis with a burst of policy activism that put the governments of 2007–2010 to shame. The New Deal housing programs included establishing the FHA to insure home mortgages, Fannie Mae (then the FNMA, a government agency) to create a secondary market in mortgages, the Federal Home Loan Banks to provide funds to mortgage lenders, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to insure deposits at thrift institutions.

And I sketched a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that the new HOLC, like the original, could turn a modest profit in the end. I was not alone in doing so. Economists Paul Davidson and Alex Pollock had the idea of reviving the HOLC before I did, and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) advocated something similar. By coincidence, a few days later I attended a meeting of House Democratic leaders where the then-budding housing crisis was on the agenda. My HOLC idea came up in passing—but, believe me, only in passing. It was rejected instantly as being wildly too expensive. At that stage, the TARP was still eight months away, and neither politicians nor their constituents were thinking about committing hundreds of billions of dollars of public money.

The banking plan that Treasury Secretary Geithner sketched in his first major speech on February 10, 2009, had four main components. One of them was the bank stress tests. Two others were new programs meant to accomplish the original stated purposes of the TARP: buying troubled assets. The fourth was, in Geithner’s words, “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis.” Unfortunately, he also added, “We will announce the details of this plan in the next few weeks,” which led all hell to break loose in the jittery financial markets. After all, the new administration had been in office for three weeks already, and their plan was not complete! It took Geithner only eight more days to finish the job.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

According to Wolff, both the increasing gap in wealth inequality and the financially fragile state of the middle class stems from their overinvestment in their homes. The overconcentration in housing and the high levels of debt the middle class carry in their homes hurt them badly in the Great Recession and housing crisis of 2008. Wolff looked particularly at the years 2007 to 2013 to assess the impact of these two events and found that they hurt the broad middle class the most: “The sharp fall in median net worth and the rise in overall wealth inequality over these years are traceable primarily to the high leverage of middle-class families and the high share of homes in their portfolio.”

Housing has delivered persistently low rates of return relative to other asset classes like stocks and mutual funds.5 The middle class has overinvested in an asset that underperforms. The long-term rate of return (from 1983–2013) for financial assets like stocks has been about 9 percent, compared to the 3.5 percent return on residential real estate over that same time period. During the Great Recession and housing crisis (2007–2010), residential real estate returns fell by about 7 percent, twice as much as financial assets returns, which declined by only 3.7 percent. And real estate has been slow to recover. After the recession, from 2010–2013, residential real estate returned nearly 5 percent, but financial assets have delivered more than double the returns—over 12 percent.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Whereas the Baby Boomers and Gen X “divorced” their professional lives from personal and civic arenas, Millennials have blurred the line between professional development and personal self-expression (for example, using social media to deliberately leverage their individuality) and eagerly seek out to reconcile their personal values and desire to serve others in a professional setting. Millennials were raised to believe that “they can be whatever they want to be” and don’t want to settle for a less-than-meaningful life. In a major study of Millennials, the Pew Research Center recently concluded: “Whatever toll a recession, a housing crisis, a financial meltdown and a pair of wars may have taken on the national psyche in the past few years, it appears to have hit the old harder than the young.…Millennials [are] confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”4 Millennials were not only born into a world of much more perceived affluence than prior generations, but also into one in which these values and aspirations were gaining traction.

The threat is no longer distant; we no longer look outside our immediate communities to see people suffering devastating consequences from our warming climate, the scarcity of freshwater, or the infiltration of our reservoirs by toxic wastes. The threats are omnipresent. The economic disaster and housing crisis of 2008—the “Great Recession”—has also forced many people and companies to change their behavior as consumers and employers. The impact of this recession still isn’t entirely clear, but Millennials, who came of age in this reality, developed a different set of priorities in response to this new context.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS The Global Financial Crisis Other Books of Related Interest: At Issue Series The American Housing Crisis Introducing Issues with Opposing Viewpoints Series Globalization Opposing Viewpoints Series Consumerism Debt The Global Financial Crisis Noah Berlatsky, Book Editor Christine Nasso, Publisher Elizabeth Des Chenes, Managing Editor © 2010 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Gale and Greenhaven Press are registered trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact: Greenhaven Press 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at gale.cengage.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The Weakness of Banking Regulations Caused the Crisis Vince Cable Some British banks have grown too big to fail, and perhaps too big for regulators to handle. Yet they want freedom from regulation and freedom to persue high risk investments. But the British taxpayer should not be responsible for financial risks taken outside the nation’s borders. 42 5. Low Interest Rates Caused the Crisis Tito Boeri and Luigi Guiso 53 The housing crisis was fueled by the actions of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who kept interest rates low. These circumstances encouraged people to borrow too much to pay for homes they could not afford. 6. Abandoning the Gold Standard Caused the Crisis Dominic Lawson 59 If currency is not backed by gold, politicians and bankers will simply print money, resulting in inflation and a cycle of boom and bust.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Indeed, the proportion of tenants who receive Housing Benefit is typically higher in ex-council properties that are now privately rented than it is across the private rented sector as a whole; in 2015, in Renfrewshire in Scotland, some 43 per cent of Housing Benefit claimants in the private rented sector were found to be living in properties purchased under Right to Buy.56 Another state-facilitated mechanism of gain realization for rentiers has involved public bodies buying back, at inflated prices, the very land that they had previously privatized at a discount. This has happened with housing land: in the face of a mounting housing crisis, numerous local authorities have reacquired homes sold under Right to Buy – Ealing council in London, for instance, spending over £100 million buying back 516 properties originally sold for less than £20 million.57 And this has happened with other types of land as well. A striking example is railway freight sidings and yards.

And yet the very same credit-fuelled boom in residential land prices that made many people feel like neoliberalism’s winners – and helped them to ride out its vicissitudes – has ultimately pushed homeownership beyond reach for younger generations, dragging owner-occupancy rates back down to around 60 per cent and crystallizing the grievances of millions of renters who not only feel but know themselves to be neoliberalism’s losers.113 The Resolution Foundation estimated in 2016 that the UK’s millennial generation born between 1981 and 2000 will on average have spent £44,000 more on housing rent by the time they reach 30 than the baby-boomer generation born between 1946 and 1965 did.114 ‘The current housing crisis’, Will Self is therefore right to conclude, is not so much emblematic of a transmogrification from a social market economy to a neoliberal one. It is constitutive of that process: the asset transfer from the state to the rich; the pump-priming of the value of those assets; the forcing of the poor into more expensive private rental accommodation – all of which measures are underpinned by a financial system heavily dependent on mortgage lending.115 In a sense, Right to Buy, in aiming to reduce levels of rentierism (albeit public-sector rentierism), was always a contradictory, doomed project.

See, for example, M. Watson, ‘House Price Keynesianism and the Contradictions of the Modern Investor Subject’, Housing Studies 25 (2010), pp. 413–26. 24. M. Stephens, ‘Mortgage Market Deregulation and Its Consequences’, Housing Studies 22 (2007), pp. 201–20, at p. 211. 25. M. Robertson, ‘The Great British Housing Crisis’, Capital & Class 41 (2017), pp. 195–215, at p. 199. 26. Oren and Blyth, ‘From Big Bang to Big Crash’, pp. 610–11. 27. Bush et al., ‘Why Is the UK Banking System So Big’, p. 386. 28. M. Singh and J. Aitken, ‘The (sizable) role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system’, IMF Working Paper WP/10/172, July 2010, p. 4 – pdf available at imf. org. 29.


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Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

.: UC San Diego, Department of Economics, 2009. Hammes, David, and Douglas Wills. Black Gold: The End of Bretton Woods and the Oil Price Shocks of the 1970s. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=388283. Harrington, Mark. “Oil Credit Crunch Could Be Worse than the Housing Crisis.” CNBC Commentary. January 14, 2016. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/14/oil-credit-crunch-could-be-worse-than-the-housing-crisis-commentary.html. Harvey, Fiona. “World’s Climate Pledges Not Yet Enough to Avoid Dangerous Warming–UN.” Guardian, October 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/30/worlds-climate-pledges-likely-to-lead-to-less-than-3c-of-warming-un.

The Bank for International Settlements noted an “intense debate” about how falling oil prices would impact economies, flagging in particular the high debt burden of the oil and gas sector, which had grown by 250 percent from 2006 to 2015 and stood at roughly $2.5 trillion.99 Some worried that crashing oil prices could trigger a banking crisis and downturn as the Lehman crisis had spectacularly done six years earlier. “Oil credit crunch could be worse than the housing crisis,” blared one commentary headline on CNBC.100 Others noted that while the oil crisis was leading to losses at Wall Street banks that had lent producers sizable sums, comparisons with the mortgage crisis were overblown as the scale, complexity, and direct economic impacts were less severe in the case of shale oil debt.101 Whatever the true extent of the risk, crashing oil prices in January and early February 2016 exhibited a reminder that there is a downside to price busts, even for economies that ought to benefit from cheaper oil prices.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president’s efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli asked the assembled traders. He asserted that Obama should “reward people that could carry the water” as opposed to those who “drink the water,” and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as “losers.” Race was implicit in Santelli’s harangue—the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap—and it culminated with a call for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama presidency.

And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other sociologists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in “hardworking” manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. And if anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past twenty years of the wealth gap between black families and their country. But the cultural condescension and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery. Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The Broadgate development in the City was no sooner declared open by the Queen than its developer, Rosehaugh, went into receivership with debts of £350 million. An extraordinary one-third of office accommodation in the City and Docklands was reported vacant. The residential market peaked and home ownership experienced ‘negative equity’. Housing ‘crisis’ had once meant soaring prices, but now meant plummeting ones. They did not recover until 1994. None the less, London’s economy was firmly set on a new course, with financial services in the driving seat. The City Corporation was able to claim that the number of foreign banks in London, seventy-six in 1959, had reached 580.

All was forgiven when the games were declared a success, with the prime minister, David Cameron, promising they had been worth £13 billion in exports, an absurd figure. But there was no question a pride surged over London that summer, as Nero’s bargain held, of ‘bread and circuses’ for public contentment. London 2012 saw a curious inversion of London’s traditional modesty. Housing crisis – or not A sense of suspended hysteria followed the 2012 Olympics, including much controversy over their ‘legacy’. Tourism did not rise, sports activity fell and a huge site at Stratford stood aching for reuse. On one thing all agreed, the legacy must have to do with housing, for housing was ‘in crisis’.

Such investment could only divert resources from those in real housing distress. They were not those eager for a cheaper ‘more affordable’ home, as the jargon put it, but those in genuine need of adequate housing. As in the nineteenth century, policy seemed to concentrate on the ‘deserving’ poor. London’s housing ‘crisis’ lay in distorted housing policy not a lack of house-building. The inevitable consequence for councils wishing to continue building for social rent was to cross-finance ‘affordable units’ by selling parts of their old council estates to the private sector. This was the case with the large Pepys estate in Lewisham, and Heygate in Southwark.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Figure 4.7 reproduces the same data. The authors of the original graphic noted that the bottom 60 per cent of Americans had 65 per cent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 per cent, in contrast, had just 10 per cent of their wealth locked up in the bricks and mortar of their property. Consequently: ‘The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the super-rich.’99 Taxing the rich through their property holdings alone may not be enough. Figure 4.7 Wealth in the USA: it’s the Inequality, Stupid By 2012 it had become apparent that these graphics, publicised widely in the US during 2011, were badly out of date.

Allen, ‘Home Buyers Left Behind in Britain’s Two-Speed Housing Market’, Financial Times, 18 January 2014. 44. M. Griffith, ‘Foreign Demand Comes with Risks’ (letter), Financial Times, 5 March 2014. 45. B. Goldacre, ‘Generation Game’ (letter), The Times, 29 November 2013. 46. M. Duell, ‘All Aboard My New Home! The Shipping Containers Being Rented Out for £75 a Week to Try to Solve London’s Chronic Housing Crisis’, Daily Mail, 9 October 2013. 47. N. Shaxson, J. Christensen and N. Mathiason, ‘Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of It’, Tax Justice Network, 19 July 2012, at taxjustice.net. 48. L. Slater, ‘Keeping Up with the Zahoors: Inside the Super-Rich World of Londongrad’, Times Magazine, 23 November 2013, p. 41. 49.


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Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

I agreed with the city’s engineer’s recommendation to, essentially, go big or go home: make the larger strategic investments now and the city was going to have financial rewards in the future. It was option (c), with my hunch that the bypass would prove to be the most profitable. I was at a total loss when the results were presented. This was before the 2008 housing crisis, thus optimism was built into these calculations. Even so, for every dollar potentially to be invested by Pequot Lakes, here is the projected return on investment in each scenario: Through Town Alternative Required Improvements: –$7.34 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$34.32 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$46.63 Bypass Alternative Required Improvements: +$1.43 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$3.11 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$12.62 The city of Pequot Lakes was expected to lose money on all but one scenario.

With the enthusiastic support of contractors, developers, trade unions, and others involved in the business of construction, the ASCE regularly calls for large increases in all levels of infrastructure spending. They boldly cite the obvious benefits of more infrastructure, claims that are parroted nearly unquestioned by politicians and media outlets. For example, in 2011, as governments everywhere were having their budgets hammered by the lingering effects of the housing crisis that began three years earlier, the ASCE published a report called Failure to Act,8 an analysis of the economic impacts of infrastructure investment trends. In this report, the ASCE detailed the hundreds of billions our failing infrastructure is costing American families and businesses. At that point, ASCE estimated that families and businesses had lost $130 billion due just from deficiencies in transportation systems.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Sophisticated investors could vet their purchases.20 Computer models could identify and mitigate risk. But the replacement of regulation by automation turned out to be as fanciful as flying cars or space colonization. 106 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY Machine Dreams Consider the role of computer models in a critical part of the housing crisis: mortgage-backed securities. While investors may not be interested in any one particular mortgagor’s stream of payments, an aggregation of such payments can be marketed as a far more stable income source (or security) than, say, any one loan. Think, for instance, of the stream of payments coming out of a small city.

Journalists and legal scholars help the persistent to peer into fi nance’s black box. They need a stronger voice in a regulatory process too often dominated by the few who profit from opacity. To be sure, there are many conscientious souls working on Wall Street. But their voices and values matter little if they can be summarily overruled by their bosses. The aftermath of the housing crisis has exposed a critical mass of unethical and hugely costly deals. It has created a presumption of suspicion for large firms—particularly those that now enjoy “too big to fail” status. Black box finance ranges from the crude to the cunning, the criminal to the merely complex. Countless narratives and analyses of the crisis have tried to pin down whether bankers, mortgage brokers, regulators, and insurers knew or should have known that the mortgage industrial complex was building a house of cards.

Although 50 separate states run Medicaid programs, antifraud programs appear to be unifying these once-disparate sources of data. The data miners can also compare findings of noteworthy activity in the Medicare program across states.159 Functionality of this kind, spotting repeated patterns of mortgage fraud around the country, would have been very helpful in the run-up to the housing crisis. Just as a network of fusion centers can readily transmit suspicious patterns of criminal intelligence horizontally (to other state- or local-level agencies) or vertically (to national agencies), state Medicaid Integrity Programs both empower and are empowered by rapid data flows.160 The Medicare-Medicaid Data Match Program breaks down the barriers between the surveillance and analysis done by each program.161 Its successes should be a model for the entities now comprising the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which may be able to find efficiencies (and new insights) by sharing data.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

É urgente renegociar a dívida de São Paulo. Escola de Governo: Artigos. Available at http://www.escoladegoverno.org.br/artigos/1984‐qe‐urgente‐renegociar‐a‐divida‐ de‐sao‐pauloq. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. Holmes, C. (2016). São Paulo Is Betting Better Urban Planning Can Solve a Housing Crisis. Next City. Available at https://nextcity.org/features/view/sao‐paulo‐housing‐crisis‐master‐ plan‐zeis‐haddad‐habitat‐iii. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. IBGE (2016). Population projection for Brazil and federal units. Available at http://www.ibge. gov.br/apps/populacao/projecao/index.html. Accessed 2016 Jan 20. Jovem Pam (2014). Dilma elogia resultado de privatização do aeroporto de Guarulhos, SP.

There has been no broad framework resembling a ‘national urban policy’ in the US for over 30 years, with national urban programmes instead focusing upon small‐area‐based initiatives for community‐led housing and eco­ nomic development. The federal government did previously play a substantial role in investing in affordable housing programmes and many of these were uti­ lised in New York City. The gradual loss of this investment stream into New York over the past 20 years has contributed to New York’s affordable housing crisis. The federal tier has also withdrawn from many financing responsibilities and focused primarily on security, immigration and healthcare challenges. Instead, it is the federal support that New York City tends to receive in response to major crises that emerges as a recurrent theme of this chapter.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

., manufacturing of aerospace equipment, recruitment agencies, luxury goods, or technology and telecom providers), it came from the use of financial products and services to leverage underlying economic activity. Formally, in national accounts, financial products are treated as activity, though in reality they simply involve the purchase and reallocation of risk, and by 2007, this risk was not well allocated. The housing crisis was a great case in point. Cheap money boosted house prices, high house prices boosted transaction leverages, and exotic and ultimately dangerous derivative instruments magnified the impact of the housing sector on the economy. All the while, banks made money at each of these turns, and by 2006 nearly 40 percent of all the earnings of corporate America came from finance (as an aside, technology now occupies this role, and potentially, from a regulatory point of view, technology may be the new banking sector).

., that education and health are public goods), and needs to better oversee the state’s role as an economic actor and procurer of services. The second issue is that Ireland still regularly suffers from imbalances in its economy, the most obvious one today being that house prices and rental charges are higher than during its bubble period, and that there is a resulting housing crisis. Ireland’s overheated property market is one area where it can learn from other small countries. In the past it has found it too easy to copy the policy model of the United Kingdom and has ignored the lessons of other small open countries (notably, the Scandinavian banking crisis of the 1990s came to the notice of Irish policy makers only after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger).

For example, if eurozone interest rates were very low by the standards of the Irish economy and produced a housing bubble, the Irish central bank then could increase the deposit-to-loan ratio on mortgages or the finance ministry could increase the tax on property transactions so as to dampen the risk of a housing bubble. In a sign that Ireland has not fully learned the lessons of its housing crisis, it is now enduring its second housing bubble in ten years, with housing affordability very stretched and homelessness a very public social problem. Allowing, encouraging, and helping individual states to use policy tools like this would allow them to exist in the eurozone in a more stable way.


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Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

But I wasn’t ready to provide much detail yet. We hadn’t figured out how the stress test would work. And the rest of my speech was just as vague. I would announce a new program to buy some of the distressed assets that were weighing down banks, while acknowledging that it wasn’t ready. I would promise “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis,” with little further explanation. And I would signal that we would not allow any more Lehman-style failures, a crucial commitment designed to prevent an even more chaotic run, but that line was hedged and buried in my twenty-sixth paragraph. As the President had promised, this would be my moment in the sun.

We needed to design a strategy to fix the broken financial system and a large fiscal stimulus package to arrest the economic free fall. We had to figure out a way to save the dying U.S. auto industry in order to prevent a regional depression in the industrial Midwest. We had to devise a plan to deal with the escalating housing crisis in order to protect millions of families at risk of foreclosure. At a time when the federal deficit was soaring past $1 trillion for the first time, we would also have to send Congress a budget laying out our tax and spending priorities, and demonstrating how we intended to limit the red ink once the economy recovered.

At my farewell dinner at the Fed, Jeff Lacker had quipped that my colleagues had considered giving me one of our Maiden Lane vehicles as a going-away present, since they probably wouldn’t exceed the Fed’s $25 gift limit. At the time, those assets were distressed enough to make the joke funny. The markets had welcomed TARP, but they no longer believed that TARP was big enough to fill the system’s capital hole. The President had pledged to use at least $50 billion to address the housing crisis, so we now had about $300 billion left to repair the financial system. Fortunately, we wouldn’t need TARP money to recapitalize Fannie and Freddie, because the separate authority Hank had gotten to put capital into them was essentially unlimited; otherwise, they were hemorrhaging so badly they could have drained most of the cash we had left.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

From London to Sydney, residential property prices in the leading cities danced to the same monetary jig.3 As an executive at Savills, a property consultant, commented: ‘What happened was that, for the first time, the cost of money in most of the cities was similar – you might say quantitative easing [has] levelled the global playing field.’4 Real estate brokers referred to the favoured destinations of the world’s super-rich as ‘golden concrete’.5 In the United Kingdom, the country’s ‘housing crisis’ was generally ascribed to a lack of housebuilding. But the Bank of England’s decision to maintain interest rates at their lowest level in its three-hundred-year history had a more significant impact on affordability. While UK house prices were extremely expensive relative to household incomes, relative to mortgage costs they had never been cheaper.

Homeownership was fast becoming a preserve of the professional classes.100 The British government offered a subsidy to first-time buyers in 2013, but this subsidy pushed up house prices even further.101 Politicians promised to build more homes, but the number of new houses needed to make housing affordable again was inconceivably large. Economists at the University of Reading came up with an alternative, summarized in a Bloomberg headline: ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’.102 Britain’s housing affordability crisis had damaging economic consequences. A dynamic economy requires that workers move freely between jobs. But as house prices climbed, there was a steep drop in the number of Britons moving home to start a new job.103 Young homeowners who took out large mortgages to buy a house had less money to spend on other things.

The average first-time buyer in 2015 showed an income of £50,000 or more, putting him or her in the top 30 per cent of households, according to Savills. 101. Kate Allen and Jim Pickard, ‘Help to Buy Has Pushed Up House Prices, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 September 2015. Also, Kate Allen, ‘QE Feeding Europe House Price Bubble, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 July 2015. 102. Jill Ward, ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’, Bloomberg, 10 April 2017. 103. John Ashmore, ‘How Britain’s Housing Market Has Created a Mobility Crisis’, CapX, 6 June 2019. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people aged 25 to 34 moving home to start a new job fell by 40 per cent. This decline roughly coincides with the low interest-rate regime.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Thatcher and her successors have done all they can to sell off the nation’s bricks and mortar, only to be forced to rent it back, at inflated prices, from the people they sold it to. Before Right to Buy, the government spent a pound on building homes for every pound it spent on rent subsidies. Now, for every pound it spends on housing benefit, it puts five pence towards building. The response of the current government to the housing crisis is to try to make it worse. It is taking steps to increase house prices, without taking steps to increase supply. The coalition’s two most explicit interventions in the housing market have been to restrict supply and raise prices: the first when it cut, by two-thirds, the grant given to housing associations to build new homes, and the second with its mocking parody of Right to Buy, ‘Help to Buy’, offering already well-off people cheap loans to overbid for overpriced houses they couldn’t otherwise afford.

There is a substantive obstacle in the way of that descent back into squalor: there is no neat way to separate the shortage of social housing from the shortage of housing in general. The government is pulling back in the face of a market that is failing across the board. Matt Griffith, author of an incisive paper for the think tank IPPR about the housing crisis, We Must Fix It, points out that the interconnecting problems afflicting the private housebuilding industry do not reflect a deeper economic malaise; they are the deeper economic malaise. Britain’s established housebuilders, Griffith reckons, no longer have housebuilding as their primary function.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, analysts like Henry Blodget at Merrill Lynch were wildly bullish about Internet stocks, dressing up pigs with lipstick. Years later, the same thing happened at credit-rating agencies where analysts issued blindly positive ratings for the CMOs and CDOs that would ultimately lead to the housing crisis. As for me, my 18 gut-wrenching months at D. H. Blair had destroyed my clean copybook and brought my career to an absolute low. The résumé and reputation I had built for myself at Oxford and Harvard had been reduced to dust. And reputation in business—especially the investing world—is everything.

., 149, 157–60 Fabozzi, Frank, 18–19 Fairfax Financial Holdings, 35, 140 Fannie Mac, 53–5 Farmer Mac, 53–7 fee structures, hedge fund, 46–7, 67, 73–4, 79–80 Feldman, Andrew, 23 financial crisis of 2008–2009, 21, 57, 101 and addiction to Bloomberg, 118 and Aquamarine Fund, 86–99, 192 and behavioral finance, 107–9 and finding balance, 121–2 and inner scorecard, 80 and redemption policies, 47 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 136 Ford, Henry, 45 Fortescue Metals Group, 97 Fosha, Diana, 17 Freddie Mac, 53–5, 90 Gabelli, Mario, 73 Gage, Phineas, 102 Gates, Bill, 61, 78–9, 83, 124, 176 Gawande, Atul, 151–4 GEICO, 38, 164 Girard, Joe, 61 GLIDE Foundation, 69–70, 75–6, 175 Goldman Sachs, 7–8, 30–1 Gotham Partners, 54 Graham, Benjamin, 1, 18–19, 30, 36–7, 50, 79, 106, 146 greed, 3, 8, 16, 50, 112, 189, 193 Green, William, 85, 195 Greenblatt, Joel, 53, 106 Greene, Robert, 171 Guerin, Rick, 82, 93 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 5 Harvard Business School (HBS), 5–7, 9, 21–2, 28–9, 42, 49, 128, 130, 184 Hawkins, David, 66 Hemingway, Ernest, 17 heroes, modeling habits of, 39–40, 46, 67, 71, 96, 113, 115–16, 176–7 Hill, Napoleon, 35 Hindi, Orly, 180 Hohn, Chris, 49–50, 51, 144 Hölldobler, Bert, 104 housing crisis, 17, 90. See also financial crisis of 2008–2009 How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling (Bettger), 6 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 35 Hughes, Stephen, 167–9 Influence: Science and Practice (Cialdini), 148 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini), 60 inner growth and meaning, 187–94 Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 1, 19, 30, 79 investing checklist for, 151–70 as a game, 123–32 guideline for checking stock prices, 135–7 guideline for researching, 140 guideline for responding to sales pitches, 137–9 guideline for talking to management, 139–40 guidelines for buying and selling, 145–8 guidelines for discussing, 144–5, 148–50 rules and tools for, 133–50 use of the phrase “value investing,” 187 See also value investing IPOs (initial public offerings), 9–10, 129, 138–9 J.


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

In the same year, Fannie set itself the goal of doubling its profits in five years, and its employees were rewarded with stock options when that goal was achieved. In 1999, Steven Holmes noted in the New York Times that, by pushing through such projects, the administration could cause a repeat of the housing crisis of the 1980s: In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.24 But there was nothing tentative about the actions of Fannie Mae.

See also discrimination against minorities multiple purchases, 7, 9 second mortgages, 6-7 See also housing policy Hoover, Herbert, 101-5, 109 New Deal policies and policies of, 106 Hortlund, Per, 143 Housing and Urban Development (HUD), lending expansion under Cisneros, 29-36 housing bubble, 5-10, 17-18, 113 riding the bubble, 55-58, 134-35 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43, 70-75 housing crisis of 1980s, 33 housing policy Cisneros and, 23-25 Community Reinvestment Act and, 26-28 expanded homeownership, 23-28 exposure to risk, 24-25, 29-30, 40-43 geographic variations, 7-9 government homeownership projects, 25-28 lending community and, 25-28 monitoring of loans made, 34 ownership society and, 24, 36-40 stretching HUD rules and requirements, 29-36 subprime mortgages and, 24, 29-36 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43 housing prices, 8, 9-10 HUD.


pages: 200 words: 72,182

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

I decide there must be something I am doing wrong, some cue I am missing. Budgie's owners had been confident that Apartment Search would find me a place. When I call another friend of a friend, a professor at a college in St. Paul who has briefed me on the Twin Cities' industrial history, he concedes to being aware of an affordable-housing “crisis” but has no idea what I should do. Those rental agents who are kind enough to talk to me all recommend the same thing: find a motel that rents by the week and stay there until something opens up.[24] So, through multiple calls, I arrive at a list of eleven motels in the Twin Cities area, all of them of the non-brand-name variety, offering weekly rates.

But rents were also skyrocketing in the touristically challenged city of Minneapolis, where the last bits of near-affordable housing lie deep in the city, while job growth has occurred on the city's periphery, next to distinctly unaffordable suburbs. Insofar as the poor have to work near the dwellings of the rich—as in the case of so many service and retail jobs—they are stuck with lengthy commutes or dauntingly expensive housing. If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13 percent or so. The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and “poverty,” as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Of rules and their exceptions Thus, the student of market psychology finds himself at an awkward crossroads. He understands that market timing is typically ineffectual, but is also aware of times in history when broad market levels have become obviously and grossly disconnected from any measure of fundamental value. From the Roaring 20s and the Nifty Fifty to the Tech Bubble and the Housing Crisis, periods of mania have been relatively frequent, easy to spot with typical valuation metrics and have had dramatic wealth-destroying effects. If the rule is “don’t time the market,” is it possible that there are ever exceptions to the rule? I believe that there are and that consistent with our behavioral emphasis on contrarianism, they are infrequent, painful to implement and will run directly contrary to what feels right.

The 1973 oil crisis resulted in rumors that toilet paper would be in short supply. These rumors led to subsequent runs on the grocery story where fearful citizens stocked up. This led to, you guessed it, an actual shortage of toilet paper that was wholly a consequence of perception. More consequentially, this was evident in the housing crisis of the late 2000s. As housing prices began their precipitous decline, more and more homeowners found themselves underwater, meaning that the market value of the home was less than the mortgage. This provides ample reason for the homeowner to walk away from the home, declare bankruptcy and be free of the whole affair.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

A joint effort coordinated by the local Labour council and property developer Lendlease, its intention was to respond to the twin problems of the housing crisis and central government reducing local budgets as the result of austerity. In this respect it mirrors outsourcing. There the solution to unemployment is jobs whose wages increase poverty, while the HDV wanted to build homes that ordinary people could not afford. In a London borough where the average home was already fifteen times the median wage, the HDV wasn’t a solution to the housing crisis – it entrenched it. This feedback loop is no accident. Neoliberalism reduces the capacity of public bodies to spend money while simultaneously intensifying social problems like homelessness and poverty.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

And it was pretty clear to almost anyone who thought about it- including, it turns o ut, Robert Sh iller- that something was going badly wrong in US housing m arkets after 200 1 or so. But he saw it as exceptional rather than system ic.6 Shiller could well claim, of course, that all of the above other exam ­ ples were merely regional events. B u t then so, from t h e standpoint of the people of Brazil or China, was the housing crisis of 2007-09. The epi­ center was the US southwest and Florida ( with some spillover in G eorgia), along with a few other hot-spots (the grumbling foreclosure crises that began in the late 1 9 90s in poor areas in older cities like Balt imore and C leveland were too local and "unimportant" be cause those affected were African-A mericans and m inorities).

See also Eastern Europe, 140 Santiago China, xiv, 1 1 - 1 5 passim, 1 9 , 44, 46, 57-65, 1 24, 1 33; bill i onaires, 1 5 ; Ecologistes, Lx Egypt, 1 64. See also Cairo 7he Eigh teenth Bruma ire of Louis consumerism, 3 9 , 6 1 ; exception Napoleon (Marx) , 37 to global ant iwar protests, 1 1 6; El Alto, Bolivia, 79, 1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 3 1 , urbanization, xv, 1 1 - 1 2, 1 9; US housing crisis and, 3 1 ; World El Alto, Rebel City ( Lazar) , 144 -50 Bank and, 29. See also Beijing; Chongqing; Guangdong; Shanghai; Shenzen Chongqing, 64, 1 36 Christiania, Copenhagen, 78 City of God, 1 00 Class Struggles in France ( Marx) , 37 1 4 1 - 5 1 passim passim Elyachar, Jul ia, 20- 2 1 Engels, Friedrich, 4, 1 6- 1 8 passim, 5 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 1 60 Escobar, Arturo, 142 European Central Bank, 24 Cleveland, 1 3, 3 1 , 56, 83 European Union, 29 Clinton, Bill, 45, 53, 54, 56 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ( ETA) , 1 00 Cochabamba, Bolivia, 82-83, 1 1 6, 142, Excluded Workers Congress, 1 3 1 -32, 143, 149 1 37, 1 5 1 Cold War, 9, 1 24 Columbia University, 23-24 Commonwealth ( Hardt and Negri), 1 52 The Comm unis t Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 53 Copenhagen, 78 Fallujah, Iraq, 1 1 7 Fannie Mae, 39, 4 1 , 45, 47, 49, 5 1 Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA), 1 60 Federal Home Mortgage Corporation.


pages: 232 words: 71,965

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

Chapman has never been shy about criticizing the managers of businesses he invests in, but he was particularly pointed with the brass at BMHC. He took to publicly calling out Rob as “San Francisco’s own $6 Million Man” and urged the company to reduce “its bloated cost structure.”* Even as the housing crisis became a clear supercycle event, BMHC—again, a low-margin commodity and service provider with its roots in Boise, Idaho—kept its tony corporate headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront. That fact alone, even more than the firm’s increasingly gruesome finances, convinced me to short its stock.

There was no reason Rob and his fellow executives couldn’t conduct their business in a low-cost industrial park or even some modest mobile offices tucked into the corner of one of the dozens of lumber supply yards the company owned. That would have not only saved crucial overhead expenses during the housing crisis, it would have shown the world—and their own employees—that they were going to do everything it took to weather the downturn, even if it meant living and working (gasp!) outside of San Francisco. Eventually, in early 2009, BMHC did move its headquarters back to its original hometown of Boise, Idaho.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

., 2022, ‘Canary Wharf proposes £500mn lab project to reinvent financial hub’, Financial Times. 38 Cintu, A., 2021, ‘Record apartment conversions make 2021 most successful year in adaptive reuse’, RentCafe (rentcafe.com). 39 Feldman, E., 2022, ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. 40 Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion. 41 Reagor, C., 2017, ‘Downtown Phoenix’s rebirth has been decades in the making. Here’s how they did it’, The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com). 42 Kelly, H., Kramer, A. and Warren, A., 2020, Emerging Trends in Real Estate: United States and Canada 2020, PWC and Urban Land Institute. 43 Harmon, J. and Zim, E., 2021, ‘The rise and fall of the American mall’, Business Insider. 44 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data. 45 Paulas, R., 2017, ‘The death of the suburban office park and the rise of the suburban poor’, Pacific Standard Magazine. 46 DeVoe, J., 2021, ‘Leaders say Arlington has the ecosystem to be the next Austin or Miami’, ARL Now. 47 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data.

., 2020, ‘Cautious hopes for slum dwellers relocated in Egypt housing project’, Reuters. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2021, ‘The labor market for recent college graduates’ (newyorkfed.org). Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2019, ‘The US auto labor market since NAFTA’ (stlouisfed.org). Feldman, E., 2022 ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. Ferenczi, A., 2021, ‘A city without cars is already here, and it’s idyllic’, Vice (vice.com). Ferguson, N., 2017, The Square and the Tower (Penguin). Fessenden, M., 2015, ‘Making a sandwich from scratch took this man six months’, Smithsonian Magazine. Fischer, C., 1982, To Dwell Among Friends (University of Chicago Press). —, 2007, ‘Technology and society: historical complexities’, Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 67, No. 1.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

That’s nearly twice the rate among white borrowers. Among low-income black borrowers, 62 percent of refinance loans were subprime, more than twice the rate among low-income whites. “It actually started in communities like Atlanta,” says Nikitra Bailey, a Center for Responsible Lending researcher who has studied the Southeastern U.S. housing crisis. “A lot of our older African-Americans were house rich but cash poor. So lenders came up with these scams to siphon the wealth away.” It’s a loss black America can scarcely afford, because black wealth has long been enormously dependent on home equity. In 1967, the year before the Mitchells bought their house, homes accounted for 67 percent of black wealth, compared with 40 percent of white wealth.

They will reach fruition when politicians and other leaders swallow their bruised egos and rethink their supine posture, arm in arm with Wall Street. That looks improbable at the moment. But voters can help them change their minds. The Suicide Solution B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H July 28, 2008 Afew days beforeCongress passed its housing bill,Car-lene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Corporation—may its name live in infamy—was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband’s rifle. This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay titled “Why No Outrage?”


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Michael Boyajian, “The Death of the American Sunbelt,” Room Eight, July 19, 2010, http://www.r8ny.com/blog/judgeboyajian/the_death_of_the_american_sunbelt.html; Matthew O’Brien, “Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?” Atlantic, January 26, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313. 67. Jed Kolko, “Metros Clobbered by the Housing Crisis Are Growing Again,” CityLab, March 14, 2013, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/03/metros-clobbered-housing-crisis-are-growing-again/4991; Joel Kotkin, “Forget What the Pundits Tell You, Coastal Cities Are Old News—It’s the Sunbelt That’s Booming,” Daily Beast, March 1, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/01/forget-what-the-pundits-tell-you-coastal-cities-are-old-news-it-s-the-sunbelt-that-s-booming.html. 68.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

The super-rich do exacerbate and help sustain the severe housing crisis; they treat housing like financial assets and help incentivise companies to build luxury, cash-cow apartments which only the very few can afford to live in. But focusing on specific nationalities like this ‘others’ inequality; rich Britons who play this same property investment game disappear, making it seem like it’s primarily outside influence that is the cause of unaffordable house prices. But these people buying and selling homes like they’re a commodity aren’t the only reason for the housing crisis. Factors such as land values and how planning permission is designed – determined largely by policy decisions – have played a huge part in the lack of affordable homes in the UK.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the context of stagnating wages, the gap between income and expenditure would be covered by personal borrowing. 1988 was the first year ever that consumers’ expenditure exceeded their incomes.30 The Lawson boom — the economic boom named after the Chancellor who presided over it — saw tax cuts, a reduction in interest rates (once the union movement had been dealt with, of course), and an across-the-board increase in household borrowing and spending. Growth increased in the short-term, before collapsing in an equally large bust when interest rates had to be hiked again to keep the UK in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In a mini precursor to 2008, a housing crisis ensued. But it wasn’t long before stability was restored, and debt began to climb once again — and it didn’t stop climbing for nearly two decades. The genius of basing demand on private debt was that it allowed people to buy more, propelling economic growth, whilst also directing a greater portion of peoples’ income towards interest payments and fees that went to financiers.31 Under this system, individuals would use the tools provided to them by financial markets to weather the storms created by changes in the business cycle, making a tidy profit for the finance sector in the process.32 In this way, “privatised Keynesianism” replaced the Keynesian model of demand management that governed the post-war consensus.33 Had this model relied only on unsecured lending, like credit cards or student loans, it wouldn’t have lasted very long.

But at the beginning of 2007, refinancing became more difficult, and many consumers found themselves stuck with high interest payments that they couldn’t afford. House prices levelled off in 2006 and then began to fall. Defaults escalated, and banks began to worry. Had the trouble ended at US mortgages, we may have been left with a US, and perhaps a UK, housing crisis. But by 2007, mortgages were no longer just mortgages. The debt that had been created by the banks in the boom between the 1980s and 2007 had been transformed into the plumbing of the entire global financial system. Every day, millions of dollars’ worth of mortgages were packaged up into securities, traded on financial markets, insured, bet against, and repackaged into a seemingly endless train of financial intermediation.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

This move back into city centers also coincided with the Great Recession. Those big houses and multiple cars, it turns out, were beyond many of our means. And it’s no coincidence, Turner says, that Airbnb — a company founded around shared housing — was born in 2008, just as the United States was entering a recession built on a housing crisis. For many Airbnb hosts, the spare rooms they rented through the service helped them keep their homes. City living, for all its allure, is expensive, but the sharing economy makes it possible for more people, whether they’re sharing a car because they can’t afford to own one, or a bike because they’ve got nowhere to store it.


pages: 92

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

House building levels at one point fell to the lowest level since the Second World War. There are almost one million fewer social homes than in 1991 and the waiting list has rocketed to 1.8m families. Labour has let down low income families – the very people who hoped Labour would protect them. Both the housing bubble and the social housing crisis developed because of Labour’s reluctance to disperse economic and political power. Social housing is disappearing because of the nationally-imposed Right to Buy and Whitehall restrictions on councils’ ability to invest in building new homes to replace those sold off. Both were introduced by the Conservatives but Labour did almost nothing to reverse the trends, even imposing extra constraints on councils in relation to the Decent Homes investment.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

And many Americans through the mid-1990s through 2007 saw the value of their homes rise dramatically, in some cases more than 100 percent over that period, leading to many people thinking of homes as speculative investment vehicles instead of a place to live. But the most striking fact coming out of the housing crisis for this author is that despite the 25 to 35 percent drop in value for many homes in major metropolitan areas, the cost of replacing many existing homes is above the current market value—grim testament to the reality of the underlying rate of inflation in the United States. The Greenspan Legacy Contemporary observers writing accounts of the collapse of the subprime debt bubble blame Greenspan and the members of the Federal Open Market Committee for the crisis.

But as the growth potential of the U.S. economy wanes and the baby boomers reach retirement age, all the while refusing to rein in their insatiable desire for consumption, the ability of the American economy to fulfill the dreams of workers around the world is in doubt. How we deal with the uniquely American problem of a global fiat currency will define the destiny of America and the world in the next century and beyond. One of the issues raised by the subprime housing crisis of 2007–2009 that is not often discussed in the media or economic circles is how the increasingly hollow U.S. economy will look without the positive effect of a constantly buoyant housing market. Josh Rosner believes that the positive influence of the baby boom in the decades following WWII is now becoming a serious drag on future U.S. economic growth.

Stevenson, Adlai Stewart, John Fat Years and the Lean Stewart, William Silver Knight (pamphlet) Stillman, James Stock investment New Era theory perspective, change Stock markets human nature, impact purchases (financing), short-term loans (usage) Stocks, decline Strong, Benjamin Bankers Trust Company exit Delano/House meeting Morgan control replacement Strong, William Subprime debt bubble, blame Subprime Debt Crisis (2008) Subprime debt crisis, Fed/Treasury assistance Subprime financial crisis, perspective (Raynes) Subprime housing crisis (2007-2009), issues Suez Canal, closing (1956) Sugar Equalization Board Summers, Larry Swanberg, W.A. Sylla, Richard Systemic risk, moral dilemma Szymczak, M.S. Taft, William Howard government debt Taleb, Nassim Tammany Hall Roosevelt, impact Tansil, Charles Callan America Goes to War Tariffs competitiveness, FDR promise FDR maintenance imposition increase protection, increase reduction FDR endorsement Hoover opposition Republican party position Tariffs for revenue only Taxes FDR increase reduction, passage Tennessee Iron & Coal Company U.S.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Condo associations and residents in many cities, meanwhile, have protested the parade of transient visitors Airbnb has suddenly created in their buildings and the changes they have brought to their neighborhoods. Among other things, these opponents say that Airbnb is teeming with professional real estate operators who have hoarded housing units to turn them into full-time use on Airbnb. They claim this has kept housing off the market and worsened an affordable-housing crisis in many markets. In a handful of cities, including New York and San Francisco, they are legislating to curb the company’s growth. And the bigger Airbnb gets, the louder and tougher the fight. Over the years, Airbnb has also dealt with all the unintended consequences of putting strangers together, including ransackings, attacks, and lapses in responsibility on the part of its hosts that have led to tragic accidents of the worst possible kind.

It creates safety issues both by providing access to residential buildings to strangers and by failing to comply with traditional hotel-safety regulations. Perhaps most critically, they said the proliferation of units dedicated solely to renting out on Airbnb—so-called illegal hotels—removes housing from a market that is already in a serious affordable-housing crisis, driving prices up further for everyone. A much bigger blow came in the fall of 2013, when New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman served Airbnb with a subpoena, saying he was going after illegal hotels and seeking records of transactions for some fifteen thousand Airbnb hosts in New York City.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

There was widespread denunciation of the unemployment of millions of young people who had no prospects of finding a decent job. On April 7, 2011, thousands of youth had demonstrated in Madrid following the call of “Youth Without a Future,” an Internet-based campaign to defend their rights to education, work and housing. There had also been a protest against the housing crisis in general and against the shortage of affordable housing for young people in particular. One important contingent of the 15-M movement came from the youth involved in the “V as Vivienda (Housing)” campaign in the months preceding the movement. There were particularly virulent protests against mortgage foreclosures and evictions of elderly and families in need, who had been trapped by the banks in subprime loans that they would have to continue to pay for the rest of their lives, even after having lost their homes.

There were multiple proposals of various natures, voted on in the General Assemblies, but little effort to translate them into a policy campaign going beyond combating the effects of mortgage foreclosures or financial abuses on borrowers and consumers. The list of most frequently mentioned demands debated in various occupations hints at the extraordinary diversity of the movement’s targets: controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for co-optation in the political system (as happened with the Tea Party).


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Leicester’s stock of 38,000 council dwellings had fallen to 21,000 through the enforced sales; now there were 6,000 people on the city’s waiting list for a council tenancy. The only homes the council could afford to build were for private sale. Sir Peter Soulsby, the city’s Labour leader, said, ‘At the very least right to buy ought to be suspended in cities like Leicester until we have dealt with the housing crisis.’ Councils showed enterprise by creating arm’s-length companies that were able to borrow outside the usual restrictions. Eventually, the meagre numbers – only 1,900 new council dwellings completed in 2015–16 – proved unacceptable even to ministers. Their next move wasn’t so much a U-turn as a grudging acceptance that councils were irreplaceable as builders; sotto voce, ministers told councils they could borrow more, and the pace of construction quickened.

One example: it acquired 250 acres of a 605-acre site at Fairham in Nottinghamshire to develop as new homes and employment space, in collaboration with Rushcliffe council and private companies. The council’s target of 13,000 new dwellings by 2028 will contribute towards the 300,000 a year target as England’s minimum. A coalition of housing groups put a figure on what it would take to end the housing crisis: £14.6 billion a year for ten years to build 1.45 million dwellings for social rent or shared ownership. That is well within reach, since governments can borrow capital cheaply against property assets that stay on its books. Glories of the Garden Some signals are green/amber. ‘Declinism’ is a British tradition, and Ipsos’s Bobby Duffy and other surveyors of opinion deplore a tendency to overdo the gloom.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

The Verge, February 8, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16990730/tesla-earnings-2017-elon-musk 184straining the local road infrastructure and labor and housing markets: Benjamin Spillman. “Musk plunges Tesla into Nevada’s housing crisis.” Reno Gazette Journal, October 12, 2018. https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2018/10/12/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-nevada-housing-crisis/1619609002/ 184were already pointing the way to the trouble ahead: Jeff Cobb. “Model 3 ‘Bottleneck’ Blamed on Chaos and Incompetence at Tesla Gigafactory.” HybridCars.com, October 31, 2017. https://www.hybridcars.com/model-3-bottleneck-blamed-on-chaos-and-incompetence-at-tesla-gigafactory/ 186one of its trademark extravaganza events at the Fremont factory: Model 3 Owners Club.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

More credit, and not higher wages, would be enough to solve the problems of America’s cities. Toward that end, federal policy fashioned the financial innovation that made possible America’s debt explosion—the asset-backed security—that expanded well beyond its original purpose. Solving the urban crisis would require solving the housing crisis. But to fix the housing crisis, radical financial innovation would have to occur to maintain the capital flows into mortgages. As the urban riots became the urban crisis, however, mortgage markets had a crisis of their own. American mortgage markets had abruptly frozen—the so-called Credit Crunch of 1966—as investors rapidly withdrew their deposits from banks and put their money in the securities markets.

By 1970, withdrawals at savings and loan institutions exceeded deposits nearly every month.43 The president of the Mortgage Bankers of America, Robert Pease, declared at their annual convention that, “except for FNMA, there is almost no money available for residential housing. We are in a real honest-to-goodness housing crisis!”44 On average in 1971, $50 million worth of mortgages flowed from the capital markets through mortgage-backed securities into American housing each month. SECURING DEBT 233 In both the cities and suburbs, mortgage-backed securities provided new sources of mortgage funds. While direct mortgage assignment collapsed, mortgage-backed securities provided the financing to dramatically increase the new housing programs in America’s cities.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

—ELISEO GUARDADO, subprime borrower The banks are playing to brokers who specialize in driving people into loans that people don’t understand…. They take a product that was exotic and move it to the category of a weapon—seriously. These loans go from being an exotic product to a hand grenade…. —KATHRYN KELLER, mortgage broker WHEN YOU THINK OF THE HOUSING CRISIS and millions of Americans being foreclosed out of their homes, you don’t imagine a bright, successful thirty-year-old like Bre Heller. When I met her, Heller was still reeling from the forced sale of her home in Orlando, Florida, stuck with a mountain of debt and furious at her bank. She didn’t seem like a typical victim.

The terms of JPMorgan Chase’s buyout barred lawsuits against either WaMu or JPMorgan Chase. The same happened to several pension funds for police and teachers in Detroit, Ontario, and Pompano Beach, Florida, which had invested in WaMu and were stuck with millions of shares of worthless WaMu common stock and bonds. Fraud but Almost No Prosecution What is striking about the housing crisis is that unlike the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, where hundreds of bank officials and board members went to jail on felony charges, only relatively low-level officers have been criminally prosecuted in the housing bust. Only belatedly have a few high-level government officials even acknowledged massive deception.

Clinton spelled out the benefits nationwide for average Americans if $1 trillion spent on Iraq went instead to domestic programs. “That is enough,” Clinton declared, “to provide health care for all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable for every American student, and provide tax relief to tens of millions of middle-class families.” Increasingly, members of Congress have been pressing Obama to apply this economic logic to Afghanistan. Tea Party Republicans in the House have joined liberal Democrats in calling for defense cuts and faster withdrawal from Afghanistan.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As other buyers are pushed down the housing chain, inflation at the top of the market ripples down. This has contributed to the escalation of house prices and rents, making housing unaffordable for most wage-earners. Between 2010 and 2015, London house prices leapt by about 50 per cent. And while the housing crisis in London is most acute, prices have also risen steeply in the rest of the country. The previous trend towards more people owning their homes has gone into steep reverse. More are living in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation; more young adults are living with parents, unable to set up a household of their own; and homelessness is increasing, including among families with children.

In Britain and elsewhere, low interest rates and tax breaks have propelled property prices to levels that have put home ownership out of reach for many and, coupled with the abolition or erosion of rent controls, generated an increasingly expensive private rental market. Landlordism has become a feature of global rentier capitalism. It has not been resurrected by chance or by free markets. The UK’s present housing crisis has its origins in Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to give council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their homes at a substantial discount, a subsidy scheme that decimated the stock of social housing. Nearly 2 million tenants have since taken advantage of the scheme. Financial liberalisation also meant mortgages became easier to obtain.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Manuel Castells, a sympathetic observer, perused the online records of the Occupy sites’ general assemblies, and compiled a roster of changes the participants expected to work on the world. It made exhausting reading. …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for cooptation in the political system…[72] The action words used for these improvements of the status quo connoted negation and elimination: “reform,” “control,” “reverse,” “limit,” “combat,” “fine,” “critique.”

Ormerod’s endless list of parliamentary claims of competence can find a mirror image in the equally endless expectations of government culled by Manuel Castells from Occupier statements: …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet…[185] The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Indeed there are signs that progress is already being made in tackling some of the most thorny problems America faces—without explosive, fundamental change. Take housing. Falling house prices, excess supply, and the mortgage mess have been a millstone around the economy’s neck since 2007. The crisis has destroyed household wealth, ravaged banks’ balance sheets, and sapped consumers of their desire and ability to consume, borrow, and invest. The housing crisis turned out to be like Hanukkah: we were told it was going to last for a year, but it will probably last a good eight years. Residential investment morphed from a force that supercharged growth between 2001 and 2006 to one that sandbagged it. In its reports the Commerce Department points out how much each sector contributed to or detracted from growth.

., 14, 19, 23–24, 125, 146 deficits and, 221–22 economic decline and, 3, 10 health care reform and, 5–6 U.S. credit rating and, 1–2 Congressional Budget Office, 31 Connecticut, 50, 86, 105, 140, 146, 151, 161–62, 212 efficient consumers and, 187–88 Conservation and Recreation Department, Mass., 66 construction, 174 efficient consumers and, 190–91 housing crisis and, 219–20 infrastructure and, 205–6, 209, 211, 213 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155–56 Consumer Price Index, 187 consumers, consumerism, consumption, 2, 25, 28, 81, 101, 111, 216, 219 coal and, 102–3 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 64–65, 68, 73–75, 78, 223–24 exports and, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 110, 119, 128, 130–31, 147, 154, 164 FDI and, 83, 89–90, 92–93 indebtedness and, 9–10, 53–57 inports and, 131–32, 136–37, 141, 143, 147, 227 North Dakota and, 151, 153–54 and reshoring and insourcing, 169, 172, 175, 177 restructuring and, 44–45, 53–59 supersizing and, 202, 204, 209 see also efficient consumers Cooper, Bill, 105 Cooper, Stephen, 44 CoreLogic, 190 corporations, 1, 9–10, 60, 139–43, 163–67, 169–85, 192–206, 225 comparisons between consumers and, 181, 185, 189, 195 and costs of labor, 164–67 economic optimism and, 23–24 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 63–68, 71, 75–76, 80–81, 158, 172, 223 efficient consumers and, 181–85, 192–96 exports and, 98, 103, 108–10, 112–14, 116–17, 131, 177 FDI and, 82–96 global, 22, 24, 71, 95 inports and, 132, 135–37, 139–42, 144, 146–47, 202–3, 227 job growth and, 218–19 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155, 157–60 recoveries and, 17–18, 21, 215 and reshoring and insourcing, 167, 169–79 restructuring and, 44–45, 47–49, 52–53, 57–58, 81, 166 supersizing and, 199–206, 209–10 taxes on, 146–47, 163 timely policy decisions and, 28, 30, 34 U.S. economic importance and, 227–28 Costner, Kevin, 129–30 Coty, 71 Coulomb Technologies, 211 Council of Economic Advisers, 31 Cowan, Lynn, 203 Creation Technologies, 67 credit, 32–36, 94, 194 booms in, 21, 29, 56, 62 crisis in, 2, 4, 23, 26, 48, 53 exports and, 112–13 restructuring and, 49, 51, 53–56, 58 timely policy decisions and, 29, 32–33, 35–36, 42–43 credit cards, 34, 183–85 restructuring and, 54–56 credit ratings, 1–2, 11, 52 Credit Suisse, 137, 223 Davis, Fred, 90–91 debt, 1, 19–20, 23–24, 60, 185 CIT Group and, 48–49 consumers and, 9–10, 53–57 crises and, 6, 29, 216 efficiency economy and, 62–63, 72, 78 efficient consumers and, 181, 189, 193, 196 Erie Canal and, 205–6 FDI and, 82, 94 national, 2, 5, 11, 217 North Dakota and, 155–56 restructuring and, 45–59, 78 strengthening recovery and, 215–16 timely policy decisions and, 32–34, 36, 39, 42 see also loans, lending, lenders debt ceiling extensions, 2, 217 Dedrick, Jason, 140 Defense Department, U.S., 109 deficits: budget, 2, 6, 10, 64–65, 217, 221–22 efficiency economy and, 64–65 trade, 102, 107, 168, 221–22 Delphi, 46 demand, 18, 31, 45, 57, 101, 132, 178, 221 efficiency economy and, 60, 62, 72–74, 223 exports and, 99, 104, 107–10, 116, 119 North Dakota and, 153–54, 159 supersizing and, 206, 208 Deming, W.


pages: 311 words: 99,699

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

After all, Dimon was a hands-on manager with strong knowledge of the market, who had no qualms about disturbing his employees’ holidays if he considered a matter urgent. And by the autumn of 2006, Dimon thought the housing sector was becoming just that. In the spring of 2006, national house prices had started to slide. “A housing crisis approaches,” a column in Barron’s magazine boldly declared by August, pointing out that the median price of new homes had dropped almost 3 percent in the previous eight months, while sales of new homes had fallen 10 percent, leaving new home inventories at record levels. “The national median price of housing will probably fall by close to 30 percent in the next three years [based on] simple reversion to the mean,” it added, meaning that the fast-rising home prices of the past few years were the result of a bubble.

“In the world I operate in”: Interview with Blythe Masters, February 2007, on womenworking2000.com. No author cited. http://www.womenworking2000.com/feature/index.php?id=94. Ten: Tremors In October 2006, Bill King, the man: Tully, Shawn, “Jamie Dimon’s Swat Team,” Fortune (September 15, 2008). Supplemented with author interviews. “A housing crisis approaches”: Witter Lon, “The No-Money-Down Disaster,” Barron’s (August 21, 2006). “Builders that built speculative homes”: Editorial comment, “Pop! Goes the U.S. Real Estate Bubble,” Toronto Star (September 6, 2006). “When even Toll Brothers, the high-end builder”: Shilling, A. Gary, “Implosion: When Even Toll Brothers, the High-end Builder, Suffers Cancelations, You Know the Real Estate Boom Is Over,” Forbes (June 19, 2006).


pages: 333 words: 99,545

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

Unless the council’s environmental health department decided that the flat was uninhabitable, she wasn’t even near the start of getting a transfer to a bigger property. To qualify for a priority move, she would have to be severely disabled, with a mobility problem. The young woman obviously felt relieved that Buck had listened and promised to do what she could. But she still left looking utterly hopeless. For another couple with a housing crisis, something needed to be done immediately. The woman was due to give birth the following day and they had been evicted without warning by their private landlord. Buck was again very firm, explaining that as the pair had moved to Westminster North from another part of the country, the local council had no duty to house them.

But the fight was so bruising for those in government, especially Eric Pickles, who was then Communities Secretary, and Theresa May, who observed it from a distance in the Home Office before entering Number 10 herself in 2016, that they privately vowed never again to have a serious stand-off with an organisation that represented so many people likely to vote Conservative. Consequently, ministers have dodged seriously considering reforms that could help build more homes and solve Britain’s housing crisis, such as reviewing the protections for the Green Belt. Another green and pleasant policy scuppered by a different sort of lobbying group was a 2011 plan to part-privatise the Forestry Commission, which manages more than 150,000 hectares of Britain’s forests. Ministers insisted that protection for the forests would remain in place, but the plans to raise around £250 million from the sale caused a row that spread quicker than a forest fire.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He was occasionally accompanied by colleagues, but the entire arrangement was kept secret from the rest of the CA teams—and perhaps Palantir itself. I can’t speculate about why, but the Palantir staff received Cambridge Analytica database logins and emails with fairly obvious pseudonyms like “Dr. Freddie Mac” (after the mortgage company that was bailed out by the federal government in the 2008 housing crisis). I do know that after Palantir data scientists started building their own Facebook harvesting apps and scrapers, Nix asked them to stay after hours to keep working on applications that could replicate the Facebook data Kogan was getting—without the need for Kogan. It was no longer simply Facebook apps that were being used.

Like many of their fellow Canadians, they took pleasure in smugly shaking their heads at their backward neighbors. Canadians have a hard time understanding populism because, unlike America or Britain, it has never had any Rupert Murdoch–owned media. There is no Fox News or The Sun in Canada. Because of its more risk-conscious banking system, the country did not experience a housing crisis or financial crash. And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other. So I would find myself repeating the same conversation over and over to baffled Canadians who simply could not understand how Brexit or Trump were even possible.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”

., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

I feel as if I’ve been cut free from a sunken wreck and am starting the long swim back to the surface. 9 Courtrooms and Cheeseburgers In which Gary and I both get stuck in Wandsworth. We refuse to ride the bang-up, and wage admin warfare with the authorities. Things I learn: 1) The Offender Management Unit can’t count 2) How to conceive in prison 3) A novel way to solve the housing crisis We score a partial victory for Gary, but my prospects take a turn for the worse. 11 January I’m shortly due back in court for my confiscation hearing. I am desperate to know what’s going on, but can’t raise my lawyer on the phone. Danielle lets me nip out of the inductions to call, and I eventually speak to my lawyer’s assistant, who clearly learnt her bedside manner from Dr Harold Shipman.

I’d change the locks quick-smart and then put the address on Gumtree.’ He would only accept offers from foreigners, and insist they pay the first three months’ rent upfront in cash. He would hand over the keys, ditch his phone and then leave them to it. It’s a very twenty-first-century crime, and Carney is adamant that he was simply helping to solve London’s housing crisis. 20 January It’s finally time for my confiscation hearing at Southwark. I’m woken at 6 a.m. by an officer tapping on the door. I assume that it’s a Listener call-out, and stumble out of bed asking who the contact is. The screw tells me that I’m due in court, and I get ready in the dark to avoid waking Gary.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

* * * I had not started out writing with this story in mind. I had begun with a completely different question: who owns London today? Researching the housing crisis, I soon came to recognise how often the question of land is overlooked. When we think about the modern city we look at the buildings and the infrastructural flows of the urban environment: stones, bricks, stairs, windows and kerbs. It is often assumed that when we consider the current housing crisis the debate is concerned only with the supply and distribution of houses. We should build more; open more space; construct taller; increase density.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

That is how we achieve smaller, smarter government. Restore fiscal sanity. We cannot continue to borrow massively from the rest of the world. Our mounting debt is unfair to future generations, leaves the nation dangerously beholden to foreign creditors, and puts the financial system at risk. As we should have learned from our own housing crisis and the Greek debt crisis, when markets lose confidence, the plunge is fast and devastating. When will investors lose confidence in American debt? I have no idea—but we will be caught by surprise when it happens. There is never a memo announcing that a financial crisis will begin in six weeks.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

DECENT HOUSING The post-crisis recession had huge consequences on housing for many Europeans. High unemployment and cuts in salaries and state support meant many could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage. Between 2008 and 2013, more than four million Europeans were estimated to have faced evictions.13 The recession brought to a head a housing crisis that had been festering for years. Europe has become increasingly urbanized, and the availability and affordability of housing, especially for those with limited income, have become major problems in most large cities. In many urban areas, the price of residential housing has risen sharply since the 1980s.

See also public sector doctrines relating to (see economic doctrines) employment programs, 229, 274–80 globalization role of, 305 lending, 183–84 public banks, 116–18, 184–86; 183–184 role in research and development, 23, 100, 312 societal role of, 8 government bonds, 171–72, 182 Greece Austerity Doctrine and, 17 bond interest rates, 80 as crisis country, 35, 36 debt restructuring and, 57–58 depressed investment and, 108 ECB pressure on, 77 economic adjustment and, 55–56 Gini coefficient for, 47 health care in, 242 investment ratio of, 104 privatization in, 21–22 Troika policies and, 37 Troika structural reforms and, 70 unemployment levels of, 31 wage reduction in, 39–40 Growth Pact, Stability and. See Stability and Growth Pact Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), 64 headline inflation, 82 health care, 241–43 home mortgages affordability of, 231, 233–35 public option for, 183–84, 233–34 rising costs of, 230 housing crisis. See also home mortgages affordable housing, 235–37 land use and property taxes, 231–33 overview of, 229–31 Human Development Index, 126 Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner for, 247 Human Rights, Universal Declaration of (1948), 237 HypoVereinsbank, 164 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 36 incentives CEO and executive, 137–38 corporate governance and, 127 for excessive patenting, 146 proposals for reforming, 140 providing, for innovations, 147 worker-owned businesses and, 142 income, raising minimum wages, 265–68 restoring workers’ bargaining power, 262–65 universal basic income, 251–54 India, 131, 252, 253, 275 industrial policies, 273–74 inequality austerity related to, 49–50 corporation power leading to, 128 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 globalization mismanagement and, 303–4 large corporations and, 19–20 macroeconomic framework creating, 46–47 market power contributing to, 129 as socioeconomic characteristic, 2 unemployment and, 31, 49–50, 275 inequality, growing (post-mid 1970s) contributing factors, 219–21 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 decline in labor shares, 216, 217 economic background, 215–16 equitable society, achieving, 223–24 globalization, 219, 220–21, 221–23 income inequalities, 217–18, 218 rising poverty, 218–19, 219 welfare state and, 216–17 inflation Austerity Doctrine related to, 17 fears about, 44, 51–52, 58 -fighting mandate of ECB, 72–73, 75–76 low, or deflation proposals, 82–84 Price Stability Doctrine and, 18–19 informal workers, 247–48 information technology sector, 129 inheritance taxes, 188, 190–91 Initiative for Policy Dialogue, xv innovation -based economy, 128, 149 intellectual property rights and, 143–45, 147 in market economies, 135–36 insurance.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

At the time, we wondered what he had to look so pleased about. Now we know. Relieved (albeit briefly) of the burden of office and with time on his soft hands, he could now really make a killing as the most gallingly ubiquitous man on British television. But when I saw a trailer for Channel 5’s Our Housing Crisis – Who’s to Blame? presented by one Michael Portillo, my mixed feelings became a heady cocktail of annoyance and awe with perhaps a dash of admiration at his chutzpah. Of the many reasons, some sartorial, that I am loath to warm to Mr Portillo in the way softer hearts have, foremost is that I remember him for what he once was, one of the most viciously relishing of the young Thatcherites, the man who opined in 1993 that we should forensically examine health, education and social security (in other words, the heart of the welfare state) ‘from which the public sector could withdraw altogether’.

As this is a Christian notion, it is possibly enormously and embarrassingly unfashionable. But make no mistake, we need to get back to it. Not just in the sphere of housing, but across the span of our national life. To stay with social housing for now, the conclusions Danny Dorling put in his lecture to the LSE seem cogent and powerful to me. The answer to our housing crisis is in a massive programme of social housing building, the removal of all the financial incentives of Right to Buy, the removal of attractive financial incentives to become a private landlord, proper rent regulation, short-hold tenancies to be made illegal, and furthermore the compulsory purchase of buildings left unoccupied for more than a reasonable time.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

A normative corollary to this definition is also necessary: Progress is only real when we minimize the gap between what we can reasonably achieve and what we’ve actually achieved. As will be seen in Chapter Three the world is less poor than a century ago, and yet our capability to eradicate poverty has never been greater. Western problems such as the housing crisis are indicative of this growing gap between what governments could capably do to promote the well-being of their citizens, and what they purposely tie their own hands to avoid resolving. We may not know with exact certainty what we can reasonably achieve — this is a hypothetical after all — but we can definitely sense when we’re not doing enough.

According to one McKinsey study, for example, real healthcare costs in the US have risen 818% between 1960 and 2018.18 An older population suffering from more expensive chronic diseases is one reason, but there seems to be a dearth of explanations for this rise that don’t involve accepting the dysfunctionality of the US healthcare system, where the costs of delivering a baby add up to an average of $10,808 in 201519 compared to $30 in 1943 (just 1.5% of average annual household income then compared to 20% today).20 To this must be added the aforementioned rise in university fees, given that a higher education degree is now a necessity for holding most skilled jobs (increasingly, a post-grad degree too). And then there’s the housing crisis in major Western cities, which is where most of the good jobs for university graduates tend to be unless you want to be one of the nearly half of graduates who work in jobs that require no university skills.21 According to quarterly data by Nationwide (a UK building society), an average family in Britain buying an average dwelling will have had to pay 5.2 times their annual household earnings at the beginning of 2019, around twice that of 1983 when the series began.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

Notably, the tax reduction was funneled to taxpayers within days—a virtually instantaneous stimulus. The infrastructure spending, on the other hand, would take years to ramp up as projects needed to be scoped and planned for, so it mattered less in the short term. On February 18, the administration announced a plan worth up to $275 billion to address the housing crisis. With the goal of helping “as many as nine million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure,” the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan offered $75 billion in direct spending to keep at-risk homeowners in their homes. It also provided incentives to lenders to alter the terms of their loans to troubled borrowers to make them more affordable.

–New York Times December 3, 2007 Mortgage Relief Impact May Be Limited “The Bush administration’s effort to help at least some people in danger of defaulting on their subprime mortgages could affect only a small share of those who took out such loans during the final two years of the housing bubble, industry analysts said today.” –New York Times December 5, 2007 Wall Street Firms Subpoenaed in Subprime Inquiry -New York Times December 11, 2007 Mortgage Crisis Forces the Closing of a Fund “Losses on investments weakened by the deepening housing crisis have forced Bank of America to close a multibillion-dollar high-yield fund, the largest of its kind, after wealthy investors withdrew billions of dollars in assets.” –New York Times December 11, 2007 Fed Cuts Rate a Quarter Point; Stocks Dive -New York Times December 12, 2007 Fed Leads Drive to Strengthen Bank System “A day after the Federal Reserve disappointed investors with a modest cut in interest rates, central banks in North America and Europe announced on Wednesday the most aggressive infusion of capital into the banking system since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.“ –New York Times December 13, 2007 3 Big Banks See No Relief as Write-Offs Mount Up –Bloomberg December 14, 2007 Investors Shrug Off Global Cash Injection -New York Times December 19, 2007 E.C.B.

–New York Times February 10, 2009 Secretary Geithner Introduces Financial Stability Plan –Treasury Press Release February 10, 2009 Stocks Slide as New Bailout Disappoints -New York Times February 10, 2009 There wasn’t much of a surprise… “The key takeaway for the members and staff present at the briefing seems to have been that the Treasury’s plan was at its infancy and far from where members of Congress expected it to be.” –BDO February 13, 2009 Stimulus Plan Approved by Congress -New York Times February 17, 2009 Signing Stimulus, Obama Doesn’t Rule Out More -New York Times February 18, 2009 $275 Billion Plan Seeks to Address Housing Crisis “President Obama announced a plan on Wednesday to help as many as nine million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure.” –New York Times February 20, 2009 Markets Close Lower as Fears Over Banks Persist -New York Times February 20, 2009 The Eve of Nationalization?


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

In 1900 Sir Charles Cameron, the city’s Medical Officer, drew attention to the malnourishment of mothers and to the fact that infant mortality among the labouring classes was five times higher than those of the upper classes, and he recommended the clearing of certain slum areas. While Dublin Corporation had acquired powers in the late nineteenth century to regulate private housing in the context of sanitation, they had only tinkered at the margins of the housing crisis, as had the small Dublin Artisans Dwelling Company and the Iveagh Trust. In 1911, 22.9 per cent of Dublin’s population lived in one-room tenements with the only large centres of population getting near that figure being Finsbury in London (14.8) and Glasgow (13.2).57 In contrast, it has been suggested Ireland’s rural labourers were: among the best housed of their class in Western Europe … as late as 1921 it was reported that 48,000 cottages had been provided in rural Ireland since 1883, with a total expenditure of £8.5 million, whereas under the urban housing acts only £5 million had been spent and just 10,000 houses built.58 In 1903 the Mansion House Conference on housing had suggested the provision of new housing on the outskirts of the city, and Dublin Corporation was faced with the problem of a small rateable base because of the subsequent drift to the suburbs.

In 1911, 22.9 per cent of Dublin’s population lived in one-room tenements with the only large centres of population getting near that figure being Finsbury in London (14.8) and Glasgow (13.2).57 In contrast, it has been suggested Ireland’s rural labourers were: among the best housed of their class in Western Europe … as late as 1921 it was reported that 48,000 cottages had been provided in rural Ireland since 1883, with a total expenditure of £8.5 million, whereas under the urban housing acts only £5 million had been spent and just 10,000 houses built.58 In 1903 the Mansion House Conference on housing had suggested the provision of new housing on the outskirts of the city, and Dublin Corporation was faced with the problem of a small rateable base because of the subsequent drift to the suburbs. Reform of Dublin’s urban problems was hampered by the complexity of the relationship between the ownership of land and property and municipal politics, and the low rateable value of much of the property in the city.59 Undoubtedly, some members of the Corporation did well out of the housing crisis, though it has been argued that the role of the slum owners within nationalist politics has been exaggerated, given the links between the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Town Tenants League.60 The early years of the century saw the beginning of many debates about moving the population out to the suburbs and there were policy debates about the nature and location of housing.

Corcoran listed a catalogue of failure: no diminution in the problem of purely precarious employment, or in the abuse of strong drink; and he suggested the school attendance of Ireland in city and country ‘is a national scandal … here and in many other ways, there is room enough for trained social workers; a thousand could find ample scope for well-directed energy in Dublin alone’.136 The lack of appetite for confronting the housing crisis in the city was also noted, highlighting the divide between the rural and urban housing experiences. Labourers Acts had ensured that rural labourers made progress in the housing league during these years – indeed, it is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, in the sense that it was the first large-scale public-housing scheme in the country, with up to a quarter of a million housed under the Labourers Acts up to 1921.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

In late 1945, the Ku Klux Klan surged into the spotlight (or firelight) yet again with a rally atop Stone Mountain, featuring a three-hundred-foot-wide cross lit by fuel oil, visible from sixty miles away, “to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back,” as one attendee said. Dozens of Atlanta policemen joined. In White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, historian Kevin Kruse documents Atlanta’s postwar battle over housing. “The end of World War II brought a severe housing crisis to Atlanta, as thousands of veterans returned home to discover the city had not only failed to build new homes during their absence but actually started to destroy old ones.” In 1946, as more African Americans began to move west of Ashby Street (now renamed Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard), a neo-Nazi group, the Columbians, posted signs reading, “Zoned as a White Community,” featuring their lightning insignia.

“Instead of promoting redistribution toward equality, such a system perpetuates inequality.” Members of the black middle and upper classes have thrived, but the hapless and often hopeless poor, of any racial or ethnic group, have not. Although the BeltLine project alone cannot solve Atlanta’s affordable housing crisis, it does have a mandate to provide 5,600 affordable units along the loop over the twenty-five-year time span of the tax allocation district (TAD), and after ten years, it had funded only a tenth of those, largely because of the impact of the Great Recession. During my research, I took part in a sparsely attended meeting of the Atlanta BeltLine Affordable Housing Advisory Board (BAHAB), charged with advising BeltLine organizations on affordable housing issues.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Funds in the business of providing leveraged liquidity were in the thick of the storm. JWMP was no exception. The troubling signs began early in 2008. January and February are typically good for fixed-income relative-value funds, because banks window-dress their balance sheets near the fiscal year’s end in November and December.2 The housing crisis made 2008 an exception. JWMP started the year with its worst-ever monthly return: −4.14% in January 2008. February was even worse, at −5.25%. By the end of February, JWMP began to unwind some of its risk. The Bear and the Gorilla Attack Then came the institutional bank run on Bear Stearns in March 2008.

In the case of a defaulted home loan, if the loan was originally for $600,000 and the borrower defaulted with 0% down, then the bank presumably should value the loan at the home’s value, which in a declining real estate market might be much less than $600,000. These writeoffs will lower the bank’s capital ratio and if large enough, will wipe out their equity making the bank insolvent (that is, assets are worth less than liabilities). Simple Answer to Puzzles Some people have proposed that to solve the banking and housing crisis, the U.S. government should simply have all banks renegotiate every mortgage to the current value of housing and have the government reimburse them. How much might this cost? Take a home owner who took out a home loan of $600,000 at 6% interest rates and the monthly mortgage payment was $3,597.40.

“Consumer Confusion in the Mortgage Market: Evidence of Less than a Perfectly Transparent and Competitive Market.” American Economic Review, May 2010. Wuffli, Peter. “Salomon Global Banking Conference.” UBS Presentation by CFO, October 28, 1998. Young, Ashley N. “The Real Estate Agent’s Role in the Housing Crisis: A Proposal for Ethical Reform.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Summer 2011. Zingales, Luigi. “Overall Impact of TARP on Financial Stability.” Oral Testimony before the Congressional Oversight Panel, March 4, 2011. Zuckerman, G., J. Hagerty, and D. Gauthier-Villars. “Impact of Mortgage Crisis Spreads; Dow Tumbles 2.8% as Fallout Intensifies; Moves by Central Banks.”


pages: 149 words: 43,747

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest by Brian Portnoy, Joshua Brown

asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, buy and hold, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, housing crisis, index fund, John Bogle, low interest rates, mental accounting, passive investing, prediction markets, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, time value of money, underbanked, Vanguard fund

As an entrepreneur and business owner, I represent an equity investment with higher risk. In 2008, I chose a business model that wasn’t commonly adopted—providing financial advice on a fee-for-service basis for middle income clients who didn’t believe they could afford the service. To add more risk to the equation, I founded the firm during the start of the housing crisis, and we moved frequently, which resulted in constantly rebuilding my clientele. Now, trends have changed in my favor. I merged my fee-only financial planning practice with a like-minded female entrepreneur of color. Our firm, 2050 Wealth Partners, is a 100% virtually-based fee-only financial planning firm, operated from our home offices in New York and Maryland.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

Intergenerational transfer of housing and landed wealth has emerged as a main driver of continuing inequality. The Conservative government’s 2020 proposal to grant blanket planning permission over wide swathes of England to private landowners and developers is likely to further exacerbate these problems. The housing crisis has been building for years as rentier capital replaces industrial capital, and cannot be quickly or easily remedied. Indeed, it has become something of a zero-sum game: if prices come down to increase affordability, then existing homeowners — many of whom have drawn down equity on their houses in the expectation of repaying it later when the house is sold, or have used it as an investment vehicle in place of a pension — will lose out.


pages: 457 words: 125,224

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig

financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Ocado, pink-collar, Stephen Fry

It’s almost a year since it happened, and the police have got no further with what the papers called the Headless Corpse Mystery, but there are ever so many things I’d be wondering if I were investigating it, she thinks. Knowing how to use a maul to chop off the head must mean it was someone used to woodcutting, for instance. Of course the house had to be re-let. There are too many properties locked up and falling to pieces, and even if the housing crisis is less deep here, they should still be lived in. Tore is a good landlord, unlike old Sir Jerry; he grew up poor himself, and even if he’s rich now, he knows the importance of a home. Without people in them to see when the roof leaks or there’s a flood, a house can go to rot and ruin in months.

‘Marta’s living all on her own up in a vast six-bedroomed house in Hampstead worth millions while we’re slumming it here.’ ‘It’s her home. You can’t ask her to sell up just so we can have a better life.’ ‘That’s the problem with the property market in this country,’ Quentin says. ‘If it weren’t for old ladies rattling round enormous houses, there’d be no housing crisis.’ ‘We like Oma, don’t we, Xan?’ ‘Yes,’ says Xan, yawning, and glaring at his stepfather. I must send my UCAS form off, he thinks, hazily, but that life of study and lectures is increasingly remote to him. Whenever he starts to think of his future Katya’s image interrupts it. ‘You like this?


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

There was little sense of this in the media portrayal: it was as though his triumph was somehow illegitimate because it depended on the votes of trade-union members. Quite how intolerable the Establishment regarded any deviation from the political consensus was illustrated by the reaction to three commitments Ed Miliband made in September 2013 that went against the political grain. Responding to a housing crisis that had left 5 million people on waiting lists and house-building at a record low, Miliband pledged action against construction firms that hoarded land while waiting for it to increase in value. Next, in a reversal of New Labour and the Conservatives’ commitment to ever-lower corporation tax, he promised a tax hike on big companies, which would go to fund tax breaks for struggling small businesses.

While these non-government organizations could previously spend up to £989,000 a year before a general election, it was now to be slashed to £390,000, and would include everything from staff costs to public meetings. But the definition of ‘non-party campaigning’ was so vague that it covered pretty much any issue, ranging from calling for more resources for treating cancer to dealing with the affordable-housing crisis. Charity trustees, known to be fearful of anything with legal implications – they are, after all, saddled with strict legal obligations they have to abide by19 – would move to stop campaigns that scrutinize power. The Trades Union Congress suggested this could make organizing their 2014 annual congress or holding a demonstration in election year a criminal offence.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

He argued in 2000 at the Cato institute that “study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.” Mike Konczal, “No, Marco Rubio, Government Did Not Cause the Housing Crisis,” Washington Post: Wonkblog, February 13, 2003, accessed March 17, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/13/no-marco-rubio-government-did-not-cause-the-housing-crisis/. 76. Elizabeth Laderman and Carolina Reid, “CRA Lending during the Subprime Meltdown,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, February 2009, 115, accessed March 17, 2015, www.frbsf.org/community-development/files/cra_lending_during_subprime_meltdown.pdf. 77.


pages: 502 words: 125,785

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

She found the place filthy—garments on clotheslines freezing even in April, little kids roaming free and covered in ringworm. Cold medicines and aspirin were as rare and valuable as blocks of gold. “If there were any better place to go we’d certainly pull out,” she wrote in her diary, “but I don’t think you can find anything much different within driving distance of the plant.” Edsel realized that the housing crisis could throw a wrench into the bomber production process. If workers could not find an adequate place to live, or if they could not get to work, the bombers wouldn’t roll. He reached out to his contacts in Washington, pleading for help. His pleadings quickly reached the White House. The President imagined a government-financed “Bomber City” alongside Willow Run, an entire city freshly built with government money.

See also Bugas, John; FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Hopkins, Harry exhaustion, [>]–[>] on FDR’s belief in role of bombings to victory, [>] with FDR when learning of Pearl Harbor attack, [>] reports on delays in heavy bomber production, [>] Hotchkiss school, William Ford at, [>]–[>] housing crisis, Willow Run, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Hudson Motor Car Company, frames for the B-26 “Widowmaker” Marauder, [>] Hudson’s Department Store, [>] Hull, Cordell, [>], [>], [>]–[>] hydraulic brakes, [>]–[>] Ickes, Harold “Old Curmudgeon,” [>]–[>], [>] incendiary bombs, [>] The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, [>] iron ore, mining of, in Michigan, [>] Italy, declaration of war on the US, [>] Iwanowa, Elsa, [>] Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, on Detroit Race Riot of 1943, [>] Japan air attack on Pearl Harbor, [>] initial Allied victories against, [>] successes following US entry into war, [>] surrender to Allies, [>] US actions to thwart growing militarism of, [>]–[>] US declaration of war on, [>] war with, FDR’s early recognition of likelihood of, [>] JB-2 Loon, [>] Jeep (Willys-Overland) and hiring of Sorensen as chief executive, [>] production of at the Rouge plant, [>] Jeffries, Edward, [>]–[>], [>] Jeschonnek, Hans, [>] Jews.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In short, the exorbitant cost of housing is now one of the most important reasons for the stagnation of living standards across North America and Western Europe. If defeating populism hinges in part on making citizens more optimistic about the future, a radical reorientation of housing policy is urgently needed.38 One important way to address the housing crisis is, quite simply, to increase the stock of available homes. The process of obtaining permits should be made much easier, and disputes about them resolved much more quickly.39 Towns and villages should have less power to veto developments in their jurisdiction.40 States should do more to help in the construction of new apartments, whether directly through the addition of new units of public housing or indirectly through financial assistance to local municipalities.41 Finally, the introduction of land value taxes—which levy the same charge on a patch of land irrespective of whether its owner lets it lie barren or decides to erect a building on it—would provide a strong incentive to build new homes.42 A different tax system could also improve the distribution of housing.

See Olivia Rudgard, “One in Ten British Adults Now a Second-Home Owner,” Telegraph, August 18, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/18/one-ten-british-adults-now-second-home-owner/. 38. David Adler, “Why Housing Matters,” unpublished manuscript. 39. In the United Kingdom, where the housing crisis is especially acute, there have recently been some moves toward speeding up the planning process. See “Fast Track Applications to Speed Up Planning Process and Boost Housebuilding,” Gov.uk, February 18, 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fast-track-applications-to-speed-up-planning-process-and-boost-housebuilding; and Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason, “Osborne’s Proposals to Relax Planning System a ‘Retreat from Localism,’” Guardian, July 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/10/osbornes-proposals-relax-planning-system-retreat-localism. 40.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

Corbyn was the long-standing MP for Islington North, in a multicultural borough long associated with ‘champagne socialism’, but in reality scarred with huge injustices: nearly half of Islington’s children grow up in poverty.14 Corbyn did his politics out of the spotlight. One of his researchers remembers taking a call from Corbyn one night: he had got talking to a homeless man in his constituency and, learning the man had no accommodation that night, was trying to find him somewhere to sleep. Britain’s housing crisis – particularly acute in inner London constituencies such as Corbyn’s – would remain one of his greatest passions; so, too, were his constituents. Advice surgeries would begin at 2 p.m. on Saturdays in Islington’s Old Fire Station; they would end whenever the last person left, sometimes around midnight.

Given that this older demographic is also the most socially conservative on issues ranging from immigration to LGBTQ rights to Muslims, it’s equally unsurprising that Labour has not won a majority of pensioners since 1997. At every election since, the Conservative lead in this demographic has increased. Yet it is younger people who suffered an unprecedented squeeze in living standards, a growing housing crisis, student debt, decimated public services, slash-and-burn cuts to social security, as well as an assault on deeply held progressive social values – and who were most attracted to the Corbynite flame. Corbynism won the support of younger people in unprecedented numbers; but it also repelled older people to an unparalleled degree.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

William Tucker, “The Source of America’s Housing Problem: Look in Your Own Back Yard,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis 127 (February 6, 1990), www.cato.org. 49. Ibid. 50. Bernard J. Frieden, The Environmental Protection Hustle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 178. 51. Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Environmental Law Journal 24, no. 1 (2018): 21–71, www.hklaw.com. 52. “Cost of Living Index by State 2021,” World Population Review, accessed March 21, 2021, www.worldpopulationreview.com. 53. Douglas Schwartz, “California Dems Excited About Biden and Harris, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; 43% of Voters Say They Can’t Afford to Live Here,” Quinnipiac University, February 6, 2019, www.poll.qu.edu. 54.

California County Population Estimates and Components of Change by Year–July 1, 2010–2020,” California Department of Finance, December 2020, www.dof.ca.gov. 59. David Zahniser and Liam Dillon, “L.A. City Council Opposes State Bill That Would Lift Local Zoning Rules,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2019, www.latimes.com. 60. Michael Hiltzik, “Column: California’s Housing Crisis Reaches from the Homeless to the Middle Class—but It’s Still Almost Impossible to Fix,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2018, www.latimes.com. 61. Laura Foote, interview by the author, January 15, 2021. 62. YIMBY leader (name withheld), interview by the author, April 1, 2020. 63. Ibid. 64.


pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

For McClendon, the Statoil agreement was reassurance that all was well with his company. “Everything except macro events” was “really going our way,” according to McClendon.1 But Chesapeake shares kept falling, setting off alarm bells at the banks that had lent McClendon hundreds of millions of dollars. During the first week of October, as an intensifying housing crisis seemed likely to lead to a U.S. recession and pressure energy prices, Chesapeake tumbled to just twenty-two dollars a share. The lenders decided they needed to act. Late in the afternoon of October 8, a Goldman Sachs executive in the firm’s private wealth group called McClendon, reaching him in his Oklahoma City office.

That year, as she turned thirty-four years old, she had seven employees reporting to her and she seemed on the fast track at work. Liz and her husband, Matthew, a truck driver, bought a home in a nearby town for $365,000 dollars. It featured fruit and magnolia trees and was across the street from the elementary school their two daughters attended. Then the housing crisis hit. As the local real estate market crumbled, Irish’s income evaporated. She made less than $40,000 in 2009. By the summer of 2010, she had earned less than $5,000 that entire year. Liz and her husband had neglected to build much of a nest egg and ran into trouble paying their bills. Soon they lost their home and faced thousands of dollars of additional bills.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

See ILO, World Employment Social Outlook—Trends 2016, available at http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/2016/WCMS_443480/lang--en/index.htm. This situation, where there has been a deficiency of aggregate demand, has persisted for a long time. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Fed encouraged the reckless lending that led to the housing crisis was to make up for what would otherwise have been a weak aggregate demand within the United States. Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, referred to the situation as a “savings glut.” See “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit,” Remarks by Governor Ben S.

Though central banks are only supposed to lend to solvent but illiquid institutions, necessarily, in doing so, they are putting their judgment against that of the market. 27 In the United States, almost all of the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars went to help the banks and their bondholders and shareholders. A negligible amount went to help homeowners, even though the crisis had begun as a housing crisis. The administration and the Fed believed in trickle-down economics: throw enough money at the banks, and the whole economy will benefit. It would have been far better for the economy had they tried a larger dose of trickle-up economics: help the homeowners, and everyone will benefit. 28 The Troika, in effect, threatened to bankrupt Ireland if the government tried to make bondholders bear some of the costs of bank restructuring.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

Its shares dropped precipitously, by 42 percent, to $4.22, in a single day.48 Two Asian firms—the Korean Development Bank and an unnamed Chinese bank—together with London’s Barclays courted Lehman Brothers as potential suitors. They terminated discussions, however, on sensing the magnitude of its troubles, including exposure to the US housing crisis.49 Lehman 64 chapter 3 looked to Bank of America as a potential buyer, but on September 15 BOA agreed to purchase Merrill Lynch instead, for $50 billion. Lehman Brothers, without a white knight, collapsed into bankruptcy with $613 billion in debts, precipitating the largest US corporate bankruptcy ever.

See David Ellis, “Lehman Suffers Nearly $4 Billion Loss,” CNN Money, September 10, 2008, http://​money​.cnn​.com/​2008/​09/​10/​ news/​companies/​lehman. 49. The KDB deal fell apart because KDB and Lehman could not agree on specific terms and market conditions. The deal could have potentially exposed KDB to fallout from the US housing crisis. And KDB reportedly wanted to pay only one-third of Lehman’s asking price. See Tina Wang, “For Lehman, a Deal with KDB Appears Dead,” Forbes, September 10, 2008, http://​www​.forbes​.com/​2008/​09/​10/​lehman​-korean​-bank​-markets​ -equity​-cx​_tw​_0910markets3​.html. 50. On the chronology of the Lehman crisis, see “Timeline: Key Events in Financial Crisis,” USA Today, September 8, 2013, http://​www​.usatoday​.com/​story/​money/​ business/​2013/​09/​08/​chronology​-2008​-financial​-crisis​-lehman/​2779515/; and “The Fall of Lehman Brothers,” Market Watch, http://​projects​.marketwatch​.com/​fall​-of​-lehman​ -brothers​-timeline/​#0. 51.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Svante had spent time in a homeless shelter, he had watched his mom struggle to make rent, and he was a twenty-four-year-old with four roommates. So he had little patience for the NIMBYism (“Not In My Back Yard”) of homeowners who flooded community meetings to oppose building more affordable housing in their neighborhoods. NIMBYism, Svante thought, was the biggest reason for the affordable housing crisis in Ithaca and around the country. Otherwise progressive people—people who had Greenpeace stickers on their hybrid cars—would create “firestorms” to protect their property values, he said. Their demands sounded reasonable: they’d say things like “We don’t want to change the character of the neighborhood,” or “Quality of life is important to us,” or “It’s the traffic!”

to oppose building more: Jeff Stein, “Long-simmering Fight over Affordable Housing Plan Ends amid Mayor’s Emotional Plea,” Ithaca Voice, August 27, 2014, ithacavoice.com/2014/08/long-simmering-fight-affordable-housing-plan-ends-amid-ithaca-mayors-emotional-plea/. could have spent elsewhere: David Marchan, “Time for a New Vision,” Ithaca.com, March 13, 2019, ithaca.com/opinion/guest_opinions/time-for-a-new-vision/article_8dff857c-45ae-11e9-ba3b-57834ca9d289.html. $40 million affordable housing plan: Sarah Mervosh, “Minneapolis, Tackling Housing Crisis and Inequity, Votes to End Single-Family Zoning,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/minneapolis-single-family-zoning.html held by people under forty: Andrew Dunn, “Millennials Are About to Control the City Council. How will They Change Charlotte?” CharlotteAgenda.com, November 30, 2017, charlotteagenda.com/110521/millennials-control-city-council-will-change-charlotte/.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Neumann surprised his team when, days before the meeting, he invited his father, Doron, to fly from Israel and insisted he join him for the meeting in New Delhi. It wasn’t a terribly in depth-conversation. Modi, in addition to taking in Neumann’s pitch for WeWork’s expansion into India, asked Neumann for help solving his country’s housing crisis, Neumann recounted to others. Neumann pledged that WeWork would find ways to do so. Neumann would later tell his staff that WeWork would solve not only India’s housing crisis but the world’s. The next day, Neumann ascended the stage at the Vigyan Bhavan conference center. He wore a flowing white shirt and a high-collared navy-blue vest nicknamed the Modi vest because it was the prime minister’s attire of choice.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

By 2008 both institutions were sustaining massive losses that rapidly eroded their capital. Those losses came from two sources. For starters, the fee they received for guaranteeing the mortgages that they manufactured into mortgage-backed securities proved insufficient to cover their losses. In the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, even safe “prime” borrowers started to default, at rates far in excess of what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had anticipated. The insurance premiums no longer covered the losses, which now surfaced on the two institutions’ balance sheets. Far more significant was the fact that their investment portfolios were bursting with subprime mortgages and subprime securities.

By comparison, doomed Lehman Brothers was levered at a relatively modest 31 to 1, and Bank of America was even lower, at 11 to 1. Many European banks had avidly joined in the frenzy of financing and securitizing mortgages and other kinds of loans. This left them holding toxic mortgage-backed securities and CDOs that eroded in value when the housing crisis hit the United States. As markets for these securities dried up, many European banks saw their potential losses rise to frightening levels. By the end of 2009, the European Central Bank raised estimates of write-downs to €550 billion, topping earlier estimates. Not all these assets came from the United States.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias, “How Land Use Regulations are Zoning Out Low-Income Families,” Social Mobility Memos (blog), August 16, 2016 (www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/16/zoning-as-opportunity-hoarding/). 47. Amanda Kolson Hurley, “Will U.S. Cities Design Their Way Out of the Affordable Housing Crisis,” Next City, January 18, 2016 (https://nextcity.org/features/view/cities-affordable-housing-design-solution-missing-middle). 48. Lee Anne Fennell, “Homes Rule,” review of The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies, by William A.


pages: 190 words: 56,531

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

They grew from a subconscious sense that to build is to intrude on nature, and that the intrusion must always be apologized for. As the cities expanded so too did the apology, an attitude that led at last to the ‘garden city’ movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard. That movement is alive today, one force in the great controversy over land use precipitated by our housing crisis. And it illustrates a singular fact about the British people, which is that they are unhappy if they are not living on the ground.22 However poor they are, British people will avoid high-rise apartment blocks and strive to live where they can open a door onto their piece of territory. The building societies and friendly societies came about in order to satisfy this need to settle in a place of one’s own, and ultimately to retire there, growing flowers in front of the house and vegetables behind.


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

Congress was never enthusiastic about a dramatically more powerful housing strategy, and Tim and most of those in the Obama administration also believed that additional dollars spent on unemployment benefits, infrastructure projects, payroll tax cuts, and aid to states would have more economic bang for the buck—while raising fewer dilemmas about fairness—than a new wave of programs aimed narrowly at home owners. Solving the economic crisis was a necessary condition for solving the housing crisis, while the reverse was not necessarily true. In the end, a long and steady economic recovery might be the most successful housing program. Home prices stabilized after the Great Recession ended, gradually eliminating trillions of dollars of negative equity, lifting millions of underwater home owners above water.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

Alex had his own financial woes, due to taxes owed on estimated income that was never realized from his previous company, Araneum, which had folded and therefore never earned what he expected. Morten, caught up in the real estate bubble, also had monetary concerns. He had left a high-income job for one with no pay and at the same time was trying to pay a mortgage on an apartment that was under water thanks to the housing crisis. He talked with urgency about the importance of paying off this mortgage as fast as possible. It may have been self-imposed pressure, but to him it was very real and very pressing. We had initially agreed that we would forgo any sort of salary while we were building the product, but at a certain point Morten decided he couldn’t continue this way.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

Pockets of resistance at the Guardian and elsewhere were preaching almost pointlessly to the choir, while the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun and latterly Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail, inarguably the two most powerful and toxic propagandists of the last 30 years, were offering up generous portions of xenophobic fire and brimstone on a daily basis. It wasn’t just that immigration might be a factor in sundry perceived problems. Immigration was the problem. Take, for example, a few hardy perennials: immigrants undercut our wages, immigrants put a strain on public services and immigrants are responsible for the housing crisis. These are widely held and not particularly racist convictions, but even if you allow that they are partly true, which is not at all clear, immigration can never account for either the existence or the scale of the perceived problems. To be temporarily trite, substitute the three instances of the word ‘immigrants’ above for the word ‘people’ and you will see that exclusively blaming the former for the travails of the latter only helps to excuse the employers who aren’t paying decent wages, the politicians who are underfunding the public sector and the property developers who aren’t building houses.


pages: 200 words: 54,897

Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading by Peter Kovac

bank run, barriers to entry, bash_history, Bernie Madoff, compensation consultant, computerized markets, computerized trading, Flash crash, housing crisis, index fund, locking in a profit, London Whale, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, payment for order flow, prediction markets, price discovery process, proprietary trading, Sergey Aleynikov, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, zero day

When Lewis tells us “the price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006,” it’s not clear what data source he is using. But it is clear that these are cherry-picked statistics: Why 2004 to 2006? Why not include 2003? And why compare to 2010, 2011, and 2012, with the European debt crisis threatening to blow apart Europe in a way that the U.S. housing crisis couldn’t?[57] The answer is that the data fits his argument best when you slice it this way. The period from 2004 to 2006 comprises the quietest years on record – there were absolutely zero days where the market dropped by 2% or more, and only two days in those three years where the market rose by 2%.


End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

In many ways, some people refer to you as a price fixer, you know, because you fix interest rates. The market is powerful, and usually overwhelms and does come into play, but when the Fed fixes an interest rate at 1 percent, that is price-fixing. At the end of your testimony, you suggested that we should address this housing crisis, and we should have rules that would address deceptive lending practices. And I just think that is not the answer at all. The real deception is when we distort the value of money, when we create money out of thin air. We have no savings. Yet there’s so-called capital. There’s money available.


pages: 443 words: 51,804

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business process, buy and hold, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process

Second, looking at several years for which we have an idea of what the results should look like we notice that our hypotheses were confirmed. Specifically, in 2001 and partially in 2002, we expect to see high parameter values due to the end of the dot-com bubble. Again in 2008, we expect to see high values due to the housing crisis and the subsequent market crash in September 2008. Surprisingly, the most reliable confirmation is in the Levy Flight parameter values, they are all much smaller than 2.0 ‘‘the normal behavior’’ parameter value. 137 6.4 Results and Discussions 3.2 3 2.8 2.6 2.4 2.2 2 1.8 1.6 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 FIGURE 6.3 Hurst and DFA regression plots for a sample of three stocks.

See also Value at risk (VaR) High parameter values, 136 High trading activity, 42 Hilbert space, 387 Hillebrand, Eric, xiii, 75 HL estimator, 263. See also VaRHL Hölder constants, 358 Hölder continuous real-valued function, 350 Hölder continuous real-valued function with exponent δ, 351 Hölder’s inequality, 391, 395 Hölder spaces, 349, 355, 367, 388–390, 411 Homotopy perturbation method, 379–380 Housing crisis, 136 Hu–Kercheval method, 164 Hull–White process, 400 Hurst analysis, 130–131, 132 results of, 141 Hurst exponent, 125, 126, 132 values of, 138 Hurst index, 221. See also Implied Hurst index Hurst index estimation, Whittle-based approach for, 225–226 Hurst parameter(s), 121–122, 125, 135, 220, 221 Hurst parameter analysis, 136 Hurst parameter estimates, 132 Hurst parameter estimators, 229 Hurst regression plots, 137 Hyperbolic distributions, 171 IBM DFA and Hurst methods applied to, 147 Lévy flight parameter for, 343 IBM time series, 257 i.i.d. data, 172.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Smith, “Study Sees Record Industrial Space Vacancies,” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2004, p. B6. {49} Joel F. Brenner and Herbert M. Franklin, Rent Control in North America and Four European Countries (Washington: The Potomac Institute, 1977), p. 4. {50} Ibid., p. 69. {51} Thomas Hazlett, “Rent Controls and the Housing Crisis,” Resolving the Housing Crisis: Government Policy, Decontrol and the Public Interest, edited by M. Bruce Johnson (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982), pp. 282–283. {52} William Tucker, The Excluded Americans, p. 163. {53} Diana Geddes, “The Doors Have Closed on Furnished Accommodation,” The Times of London, January 24, 1975, p. 11

{57} Joseph Berger, “For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless,” New York Times, February 9, 2013, p. A15. {58} Laurie P. Cohen, “Home Free: Some Rich and Famous of New York City Bask in Shelter of Rent Law,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 1994, p. A1. {59} Nicole Gelinas, “Is There a New York Housing Crisis?” City Journal, Summer 2006, pp. 62, 64. {60} Joseph Berger, “For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless,” New York Times, February 9, 2013, p. A1. {61} Matt Smith, “Legends in Our Own Minds,” SF Weekly, January 30, 2002, p. 13. {62} William Tucker, “How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing,” Policy Analysis, number 274, May 21, 1997


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

On the other hand, workers on bicycles tend to work more erratically and are often topping up insufficient primary sources of income – be that a student loan or another job. They also tend to be younger UK nationals. Some workers are under so much pressure that they drop out of renting entirely and enter ‘property guardian’ arrangements in an effort to sidestep the escalating housing crisis. These two groups, when they cooperate, can form a strong coalition, despite their significant cultural, racial, linguistic, political, and economic differences. Women workers, however, are often excluded due to the internal culture of the workforce. The workers’ organization that emerges and reemerges out of this technical and social class composition is characterized by a collective class antagonism on the issues of wages and conditions.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Often vapid TED Talks are venerated, and counterculture imagery is used to obscure the fact that priority is given to policies that benefit the professional class, such as open borders and the abolition of tuition fees, rather than policies that would benefit the wider population, such as building dignity at work or tackling the housing crisis. Praiseworthy social progress, such as the legalisation of gay marriage, can’t obscure the fact that the politics of the pre-referendum period had been almost predominantly run in the interests of the professional middle class, and that working people have continued to fall further behind. Although politicians have courted the working class with appeals to ‘strivers’ or ‘alarm-clock Britain’, governments of all parties have consistently promoted finance over manufacturing and graduates over non-graduates.


100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

This is the clear Outsider among homebuilders. Murray Stahl at Horizon-Kinetics wrote about it late in 2013. He summed up its outstanding features: NVR is somewhat of an oddity within the homebuilding industry. It chose not to enter rapidly growing markets such as in California and Arizona, it remained solidly profitable throughout the housing crisis and currently has more cash than debt. This conservative management approach has led the company to also repurchase nearly half of its shares outstanding during the course of the last decade. If you ever want to own a homebuilder, you should start with this one. • Exxon Mobil (XOM). Thorndike cited a long, 35-year, track record.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

The subsequent state-sponsored or -supported discrimination and terrorism—I’m thinking environmental racism, police brutality, lynchings, separate and unequal schooling, neighborhood redlining, et cetera—have also cast a long shadow over the current black experience in the United States. One in fifteen black male adults is behind bars (compared to one in a hundred U.S. adults overall);* black household wealth averages just one-twentieth that of whites,* having fallen precipitously after the housing crisis; black people in Texas have a habit of finding themselves under the wheels of trucks driven by racists; and then there’s BET. There is no shortage of issues for which a black person in America can justifiably get mad. The Angry Negro is the personification of that Black Rage. As The Angry Negro, you are committing yourself to a life of hate.


pages: 319 words: 64,307

The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invention of the wheel, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, short selling, South Sea Bubble, the market place

The Greenspan Doctrine held that bubbles cannot be prevented, that the governments task is merely to clean up afterward. The Greenspan practice was to create one bubble after another, until finally one came along so vast that it destroyed the system on the way by. At its source, our crisis is a housing crisis, and not one of too little housing but of too much. It springs from a predatory attack on the safeguards that had for decades kept housing finance safe and stable. In the early 2000s the Bush administration sent clear signals that regulations on mortgages would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a press conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chain saw.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

In the 1980s and 1990s numerous restrictions on banks were removed, including prohibitions on banks having branches in multiple states (this change was key to the bank branch takeover of New York City). In 1999 a bill was signed into law that removed long-standing restrictions on the size and operations of banks that had been in place since the Great Depression. The deregulatory changes contributed to multiple financial crises (including Enron and the 2008 housing crisis) within a decade of their passing. These changes were made possible by the political donations and influence of the Maximizing Class. Financial maximization was the underlying motive behind all of these changes. The rational choice was whichever option made the most money. That was what mattered.


pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

This allocation targets investments that can deliver market-rate financial returns, which are generally higher than the average return yielded by PRI investments. Together, the grant program and the endowment can combine to help achieve the foundation’s philanthropic goals. How has Ford spent its $1 billion endowment allocation? Well, for example, $30 million has gone towards MRIs tackling the affordable housing crisis in the USA – including investing in a community-improvement development bond from Capital Impact Partners and funding housing developers, such as Jonathan Rose and Avanath, that create affordable and green housing.51 This approach makes so much sense, that Ford is now working towards doing the same but for financial services for the poor.52 As Darren Walker puts it, ‘If the last fifty years of philanthropy were defined by grant-making budgets, the next fifty must be about directing the other 95 per cent of our assets toward justice.’


Frommer's Paris 2013 by Kate van Der Boogert

Airbnb, airport security, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, eurozone crisis, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, Les Trente Glorieuses, music of the spheres, place-making, retail therapy, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal

© Markel Redondo Tackling the housing crisis is another one of the key points on Delanoë’s agenda for the next couple of years. Housing prices in Paris have been increasing for years and demand greatly outweighs supply. The new social housing initiatives that the mayor is experimenting with incorporate many of his ideas about sustainable development, but they might drastically change Paris’s beloved skyline. Challenging a 1977 by-law that limits the height of buildings within Paris to 37m (121 ft.), he is convinced that tower blocks offer the best solution to the housing crisis. Several sites, including Porte de la Chapelle in the 18e and the Masséna-Bruneseau district of the 13e, have been chosen as potential locations for 50m (164 ft.) and 200m (656 ft.) towers.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

most women in Russia: Mary Buckley, “Women in the Soviet Union,” Feminist Review, no. 8 (1981): 80. drove people to drink: Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic, 2013). council house tenants: Andy Beckett, “The right to buy: the housing crisis that Thatcher built,” Guardian, August 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis. allocated by the Communist Party: Nadezhda Kosareva and Raymond Struyk, “Housing Privatization in the Russian Federation,” Housing Policy Debate4, no. 1 (1993): 82, https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/hpd_0401_kosareva.pdf.


pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

Key to its effectiveness was the seemingly simple wall it erected between the commercial banks entrusted with depositors’ funds—and insured by the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the agency created by Glass-Steagall—and the wilder antics of basically unregulated Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs. In 1982, Reagan signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, easing regulation of savings and loans and, in the eyes of critics such as Paul Krugman, paving the way for the S&L collapse in the 1980s as well as the subprime housing crisis decades later. Nevertheless, Reagan made clear even then that this was not the biggest target on his list:Unfortunately, this legislation does not deal with the important question of delivery of other services, including securities activities by banks and other depository institutions. But I’m advised that many in the Congress want to put this question at the top of the banking deregulatory agendas next year, and I would strongly endorse such an initiative and hope that at the same time, the Congress will consider other proposals for more comprehensive deregulation which the administration advanced during the 97th Congress.


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

If we truly want to plan correctly for retirement, we need to address the mistakes we have made, and may still be making, with regard to how we think about money, how we feel about money, and how we behave with money. In developing this book, our research team conducted nearly a dozen focus group interviews with pre-retirees and retirees, ranging in ages from 25 to 70. Our researchers posed a number of questions on topics such as the housing crisis, family issues, overspending, investor behavior, and more. Some of the responses are included in relevant chapters throughout the book and specifically identified as findings from our focus group research. In other cases, hypothetical names, people, and situations have been used to illustrate points.


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The real curiosity is that the lender would be better off if the owner did the extension, but lenders often hesitate to make the compromises required to make the owner have the right incentives. The shadow of that preexisting commitment prevents the owner from doing the things he needs to do. This idea of debt overhang, in part, is why the housing crisis was so scary—with nearly one in five owners underwater in 2009, we might have seen many more neighborhoods with highly levered homes just continue to deteriorate because of these crazy incentives. What’s the answer? Well, the lender should accept a loss on its loan so that the homeowner will return to a setting where it’s possible to pursue projects that are in the homeowner’s own best interests.


pages: 218 words: 67,930

Me! Me! Me! by Daniel Ruiz Tizon

Bob Geldof, death of newspapers, gentrification, housing crisis, Live Aid, Stephen Hawking, young professional

Similarly, just this morning, I was in the café when a woman walked right past the au fresco seating dragging her trolley behind her in a straight line. You can't pull a shopping trolley in a straight line. Not in Lambeth. Not with the state of these pavements. I don’t understand how so many people fail to see that. These end of life shopping fears are made even bigger by the capital’s worsening housing crisis. Today’s private rentals market is full of studios that have now dispensed with providing the hallway they at least used to offer until the late noughties. If you want to be sure of getting that hallway, you’re really looking at paying more than a £1000 a month now. This means many private renters like me now have to make do without a space that once served as a valuable buffer zone between the entrance to your flat and the rest of your overpriced home.


pages: 261 words: 64,977

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Republican Party elections of 1994 and elections of 2008 and elections of 2010 and expectations of, in 2008 TARP and Tea Party and revival of Return of Depression Economics, The (Krugman) Rivera, David Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) Romer, Christina Romney, Mitt Roosevelt, Franklin Beck and “forgotten man” and Obama and RFC and Ryan and Rothenberg, Stu Rubin, Robert Rules for Radical Conservatives (“Kahane”) “ruling class” Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (Franken) Ryan, Paul same-sex marriage Samuelson, Robert Santelli, Rick Saving Freedom (DeMint) Schlesinger, Arthur Schwarzenegger, Arnold Schweikert, David Schweitzer, Mark Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Seldes, Gilbert Sex Pistols Shane, Scott Shlaes, Amity shock therapy Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Bork) “Small Business Bill of Rights” small business. See also entrepreneurship bailouts and Democrats failure to capture outrage of failure and as front for big business health reform and housing crisis and job creation and as ordinary Americans populist heroism and regulation and Small Business Week social classes. See also Country Class; “Ruling Class” class war and Depression and obfuscation of social insurance socialism socialist realism Social Security software industry Soros, George Soviet Union Spread This Wealth (Duke) “Star Spangled Banner” Steinbeck, John Stewart, Jon stimulus Strange Death of Republican America, The (Blumenthal) strikes Summers, Larry supply-side revolution Susman, Warren Swados, Harvey Sweden Taibbi, Matt TARP.


pages: 237 words: 66,545

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

He was determined to regroup on yet another failure in front of the team, and this time he had an idea—but it turned out that she had one, too. “Hey, Jake.” She stopped him before they split off to work on separate tasks. “There’s something I wanted to talk with you about on Friday. With your housing crisis and those loans coming due, I figured you’re in need of extra money.” He nodded. “Yeah, I was hoping for a money tree to sprout from the ground and solve all my problems, but . . .” “Ha. Well, you’re not the only one with money on your mind!” she said. Preena told him that she was learning to make and sell handcrafted jewelry and had already earned a few thousand dollars since starting.


Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

I identify four contributing forces: housing market dynamics, the new suburban demographic, labormarket restructuring, and metropolitan fragmentation. The housing stock in many aging inner-ring suburbs is outdated. The older houses are being left behind for newer, larger houses on the outer fringes. Development of pristine, greenfield sites is occurring, but redeveloping older inner-ring suburban communities takes much more time. With a housing crisis gripping many parts of the United States, the sustainability of consistent growth and development in the outer ring is called into question. This lack of capital investment in the housing stock is detrimental to many aging suburbs, and the high rates of housing foreclosures in poorer minority inner-ring suburbs are devastating.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

They define wisdom as “learning to focus, to truly connect, to empathize,” a hazy definition that anyone can, quite literally, buy into — through the distraction-providing sponsors. On the morning of Saturday 15 February 2014, at the start of a panel on “3 Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way,” a group of activists, called Heart of the City, took the stage. They unfurled a banner that read: “Eviction Free San Francisco,” alluding to the city’s housing crisis. The leader of the protest, Amanda Ream, distributed bright-yellow flyers to attendees, saying: “Thank you for your practice. We invite you to consider the truth behind Google and the tech industry’s impact on San Francisco.” Another protestor, Erin McElroy, used a bullhorn, chanting “Wisdom means stop displacement!


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

Social Exclusion Task Force, ‘Aspiration and Attainment amongst Young People in Deprived Communities’, Cabinet Office: short studies, published December 2008 4. Meek, J., ‘Where will we live?’, London Review of Books, vol. 6, no. 1, 9 January 2014, pp. 7–16 5. Dorling, D., All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Crisis (Penguin, 2014) 6. Baggini, J., Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (Granta Books, 2007), p. 50 7. Ware, V., ‘Towards a sociology of resentment: a debate on class and whiteness’, Sociological Research Online, 2008 8. Jones, O., Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Verso, 2011), p. 223 9.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global economy. But in the autumn of 2008, after I’d been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down. The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the world’s problems but also fueling many of them. The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas. What’s more, thanks to the extraordinary powers that I loved so much, math was able to combine with technology to multiply the chaos and misfortune, adding efficiency and scale to systems that I now recognized as flawed.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

It’s happening on Main Street. And it’s not scantily clad teens being slashed—it’s jobs and incomes and stability and quality of life.1 It’s our future. And we’re afraid—very afraid—that the worst may not be over, and that the real economy, as opposed to the one on Wall Street, is still melting down. The housing crisis is still raging. The first run of foreclosures was because of subprime loans; the second run is because of people thrown out of work. And the government’s loan modification programs won’t be of any help with this round of foreclosures. As Newsweek’s Nancy Cook pointed out, “If you’re unemployed, you don’t qualify for a loan modification.”


pages: 280 words: 73,420

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino by Jim McTague

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, computerized trading, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, housing crisis, index arbitrage, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market bubble, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, naked short selling, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, technology bubble, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K

The actual nature of a recovery was a matter of intense debate among bulls, bears, and super bears even before many recognized that the recession had ended. The most optimistic economists, and there were not many of them, predicted a V-shaped economic rebound, meaning that economic activity would pick up as quickly as it had come down in 2007 and 2008 during the credit and housing crisis. In their view, the market rally reflected this outcome and thus was behaving rationally by bouncing back up like a super ball. The conventional view was a pessimistic one. This broad camp argued that the recovery would be U-shaped, with slow gross domestic product (GDP) growth and high unemployment into the early years of the next decade.


pages: 236 words: 77,735

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game by Lee Munson

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, call centre, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, follow your passion, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, High speed trading, housing crisis, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, off-the-grid, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, power law, price discovery process, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, short squeeze, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, too big to fail, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money

Instead of the realization as in 1994 that there were simply not enough people who could put 5 percent down, we just started doing cash out loans for 125 percent of the already over-inflated value of houses. It was so far removed from the days I worked at the mortgage company that year that the news describing the housing crisis was simply unrecognizable from that awesome year driving around California in a yellow moving truck. As a postscript, the credit card I still have from that company was sold this year to another firm. Clearly, my old place didn’t want anything to do with credit cards in the end. What can we learn from this and how do we play it?


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

In her work about Soviet Russia in the 1930s entitled Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick countered the old conventional view held by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw that the Soviet system during the 1930s was a glorious "new civilization." On the contrary, Fitzpatrick wrote, "With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collective villages, major cities were soon in the grip of an acute housing crisis, with families jammed for decades in tiny single rooms in communal apartments. ... It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow. . . . Government bureaucracy often turned everyday life into a nightmare" (Fitzpatrick 1999, dustjacket).


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Banks offering such loans collapsed at twice the rate of banks that did not.28 Locales with the highest proportion of lending—in Texas, for instance, mortgage bonds backed 53 percent of all loans—were hardest hit.29 Luckily for banks, the bulk of that lending was insured, which, even if it doomed the insurance companies, saved the banks. President Herbert Hoover launched a group to study the housing crisis in 1931, the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, whose ideas would provide the seedbed for many ideas we usually attribute to the New Deal. Hoover inaugurated the conference by reminding the attendees about the meaning of housing: “Those immortal ballads, Home, Sweet Home; My Old Kentucky Home; and the Little Gray Home in the West, were not written about tenements or apartments.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

When houses are completely unoccupied and can be broken into, they are an immediate magnet for vandals, crack smokers, firebugs, you name it; sometimes the power is cut off, sometimes the water, and sometimes one but not the other, leading to a simple and easy and devastating form of havoc for happy vandals—just turn on a tap and walk away. I came to Baltimore because it is the subject of the only sustained work of art I’ve seen attempting to describe the lives lead in this urban desolation: David Simon’s HBO series The Wire. From the point of view of writing about the housing crisis, it was almost an arbitrary choice. All across America a boom turned into a bust; foreclosures on housing loans are a pandemic. (The difference between a pandemic and an epidemic: a pandemic is everywhere at the same time.) This is one form of “deleveraging”: the withdrawal of credit from people who often weren’t in a position to repay it in the first place.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

The rich will still pay their way in this sort of environment, thanks to larger account balances and the prospect of higher-margin activities such as investment advice. But the economics of banking the poor is far less attractive than it was. And, of course, there is the hangover from the housing crisis. Just as entrepreneurs could use their houses as collateral to fund their businesses, the poor could use housing to gain access to credit. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, between 1999 and the end of the third quarter of 2008, when Lehman Brothers imploded, American consumers went from owing their creditors $4.6 trillion to owing them $12.7 trillion.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

This was one of the best cycles in terms of earnings growth for all the major equity markets but it offered some of the lowest returns for investors. The problem was that much of the strong profit growth in this cycle was partly driven by very strong earnings in the financial sector, which, driven by increased leverage, became illusory in the aftermath of the US sub-prime housing crisis. 2008–now. This is the post-financial crisis cycle and the longest so far (discussed in more detail in chapter 9), but it is rather different from other cycles for several reasons. First, the phases of the cycle, particularly outside of the US, were heavily distorted by the rolling nature of the global financial crisis and its subsequent waves following the initial problems in the US housing market in 2007/2008.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

U-TT devised a series of densely programmed buildings, housing gyms and other facilities alongside offices connected directly to key metro stations. But when U-TT refused to join the official United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the government kicked them off the project and handed the plans over to their own contractor. In the end most of the buildings were turned into apartment blocks, appropriated to ease the housing crisis. The community facilities were ditched and the buildings now have a cheap, shoddy feel. But Brillembourg is phlegmatic. Laughing, he calls them ‘exquisite corpses’ – one part U-TT and one part standard-issue contractor, the kind that siphons the cream of the budget into an offshore account. That’s how things work here.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

The agents pitched proximity to the freeways, and inserted maps of the tech shuttle routes, color-coded by company. Coveted location, the brochures read. Fabulous investment property with no rent control. I stood on the steps of my apartment building, looking at the agents’ headshots and thinking about bleaching my teeth. San Francisco had tipped into a full-blown housing crisis. Whenever the media reported that a new tech company had filed an S-1 with the SEC, people started comparing notes on tenants’ rights. Buy a house before the next IPO, my coworkers joked. It wasn’t a joke because it was funny; it was a joke because the overnight-wealthy were bidding 60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in cash.


Molly's Game: The True Story of the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World by Molly Bloom

housing crisis, Ponzi scheme, Steve Jobs

I shook their hands and sauntered off. I could feel them watching me walk away. Chapter 11 Christmas rolled around, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been home in two years. My schedule was incredibly demanding, between Reardon’s ever-increasing needs and the game. I sensed that the looming housing crisis was taking a toll on the real-estate business. Reardon was even more stressed out and difficult than usual. I was at his side every day, and I often felt like his punching bag. I had become accustomed to the constant stress, minimal sleep, and basically living in a constant state of fear that I would lose everything.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

What always strikes me, from the runway, is how the Strip looks like little miniature replicas, a bunch of little Legos. It’s a good reminder that it’s all fake, just another Disney—you know, back to the original Disney dream, make it better than real, make their dreams come true. People will pay for that. But even Vegas was brought to Earth. First the GFC and the housing crisis kicked it on its ass, and then there was the mass shooting in 2019. At least they have a hockey team to help calm their nerves, and the Raiders will be here soon. As I drive down the Strip, Vegas looks like it’s back in top form. I figured the team could use a break. Trading macro for a living is physically and mentally demanding.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

While well-paid tech workers get gleaming white buses to shuttle them to their jobs and home again and all-inclusive campuses with bowling allies, free food, dry-cleaning, and hair salons, working-class Valley residents get unaffordable housing, deteriorating schools, and mushrooming homeless encampments.33 These companies aren’t solely responsible for painful swings in the real estate market, but they do have a significant impact, which they have not acknowledged in a meaningful way. Facebook, Google, Apple, and the dozens of other tech companies operating in the Valley are extremely profitable. Tech companies could plow some of these profits back into the communities they are “disrupting” or use their clout to help develop serious solutions to the region’s housing crisis. But the overwhelming trend is not to put profits or influence to work for ordinary people. Instead, these tech titans use a variety of accounting tricks—such as creating “sock-puppet subsidiaries” to shift profits to low-tax locations outside the United States—to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.34 The issue of corporate tax evasion is not a new problem.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In the morning, the construction panels are ready for assembly. In Mexico, a whole village of 3D-printed houses is being aimed at poor people living on $3 a day. These aren’t slums. They are insulated, water-conserving, decent homes. They are environmentally friendly. 3D printing doesn’t use hugely polluting concrete blocks. We can solve our housing crisis with the help of this computer tech. * * * We are solving the deepest mysteries of the human organism too. In 2020, it was announced that IBM’s supercomputer, Blue Gene, had cracked one of the most intractable problems in biology: protein folds. Proteins are chains of amino acids. Most biological processes revolve around protein structure.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Contrary to the assertions they made before Congress, the problem was not that the ratings agencies failed to see the housing bubble. Instead, their forecasting models were full of faulty assumptions and false confidence about the risk that a collapse in housing prices might present. There was a widespread failure to anticipate how a housing crisis could trigger a global financial crisis. It had resulted from the high degree of leverage in the market, with $50 in side bets staked on every $1 that an American was willing to invest in a new home. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, there was a failure to predict the scope of the economic problems that it might create.

The confidence that the banks had in Moody’s and S&P’s ability to rate mortgage-backed securities may have been based on the fact that the agencies had generally performed competently in rating other types of financial assets. However, the ratings agencies had never before rated securities as novel and complex as credit default options. The confidence that economists had in the ability of the financial system to withstand a housing crisis may have arisen because housing price fluctuations had generally not had large effects on the financial system in the past. However, the financial system had probably never been so highly leveraged, and it had certainly never made so many side bets on housing before. The confidence that policy makers had in the ability of the economy to recuperate quickly from the financial crisis may have come from their experience of recent recessions, most of which had been associated with rapid, “V-shaped” recoveries.


pages: 252 words: 85,441

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

It’s like him tweeting a photo of himself next to Denzel Washington with the words, ‘And finally, through the talent of a good ethnic actor, teenage, racist me is slain.’ I’m being hard on Russell. He’s not one of the seriously bad guys. He does some good stuff, such as raising awareness and media interest for the Focus E15 mothers, whose passionate campaign for social housing came to symbolise the London housing crisis.fn3 And I agree with him on many issues – capitalism, tax evasion, skinny jeans – but Russell’s type of sexism, which he once described as being ‘a bit like his granny’s racism; a bit 1970s and harmless’ is still sexism. Even if he tried to distract us by coating his sexism in flowery language and calling it ‘a cascading dichotomy of highly nuanced empiricism and the indefatigable needs of me old working-class winky’, it would still be sexism.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Now, area differences in rents and house prices are much greater, rents in the private sector have soared, and the sale at a discount of council and social housing has resulted in a massive shortage of affordable homes. The cost of means-tested housing benefit has ballooned to some £25 billion a year. While Britain’s housing crisis needs to be tackled through urgent measures to boost affordable supply, it poses a difficulty here and now for the design of social protection systems. The basic income costings summarized above all assume continuation of the current means-tested housing benefit in broadly its present form, at least for the time being.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

We looked wistfully over a stranger’s shoulder and into the road, imagining the soot-stained chimney sweep who would soon come whistling up the path. We convinced ourselves that crumbling sash windows wouldn’t be cold and that plastic ones would be worth the energy savings and eco-righteousness. In the London of my time, I could be someone’s child or a mortgage-holder, but not both. In the midst of a disgraceful housing crisis, even this dilemma was a privilege. Once in the new flat, I began the work of assembling a post-parental world. After an adult life lived in temporary accommodation, I had fun buying bedside tables from markets, stocking up on towels and pillows, climbing a rung on the duck-down ladder. I walked to the flat carrying shopping bags with a blasphemous spring in my step.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

San Francisco, once a city full of artists and hippies, with a vibrant gay community, has become overrun with dipshit tech bros zipping around on electric scooters, complaining about the growing ranks of homeless people, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they—the tech bros—are the ones who created the housing crisis that has pushed so many people onto the streets. “San Francisco has become unrecognizable,” a sixty-something techie told me, explaining why she had sold her home and fled the city. What didn’t she like? “The greed,” she said. Now those same mercenary, clueless tech bros who have ruined San Francisco are gaining ever more power and wielding influence that reaches beyond the tech industry into the culture at large.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

But there are equally compelling, and strikingly different, results on the other side. A competing study by the consulting firm RCLCO, in 2008, revealed an almost precisely opposite result: 77 percent of Generation Y wanted to live some variant of the urban life. “Generation Y’s attitudes toward home ownership have been changed by the housing crisis and the recession,” the Urban Land Institute found in commenting on the RCLCO study. “The number of people trapped by underwater homes that cannot be sold and the millions of foreclosures are tempering their interest in buying their own homes and they will be renters by necessity rather than by choice for years ahead.”


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And since it often comes at the cost of endangering our own survival, there are other standards we should take into account. The surprising thing is that if we look at it through a different lens, the end of growth will leave us all richer than we ever may have thought. [ SOURCE NOTES ] INTRODUCTION this page: A copious amount of ink has been spilled dissecting the US housing crisis and subsequent stock market crash in 2008. For a particularly lively account of the bubble that developed for collateralized debt obligations and the emergence of the credit default swap market, see The Big Short (2010) by Michael Lewis. CHAPTER 1: CHANGING THE ECONOMIC SPEED LIMIT this page: For a broader take on how Reaganomics fostered the culture of deregulation that still persists in the United States, see The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics After the Fall (2011) by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Colombia University.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

., “Temperature, Humidity, and Wind Speed Are Associated with Lower COVID-19 Incidence,” 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.27.20045658, cited in: Rapid Expert Consultation on SARS-CoV-2 Survival in Relation to Temperature and Humidity and Potential for Seasonality for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 7, 2020), National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, https://www.nap.edu/read/25771/chapter/1. 152 170 million in 2019: “Chinese Tourists Made 169 Million Outbound Trips in 2019: Report,” China Global Television Network, February 29, 2020, citing China’s National Bureau of Statistics, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020–02–29/Chinese-tourists-made-169-million-outbound-trips-in-2019-report-OtIYWsZmOQ/index.html. 152 thirty times: “Dharavi slum has a population density almost 30 times greater than New York—about 280,000 people per square kilometer”: Vedika Sud, Helen Regen, and Esha Mitra, Mercury News, citing CNN, April 4, 2020, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/03/doctors-india-must-prepare-for-onslaught-of-coronavirus/. 152 two-thirds of people live in congested slums: According to Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing, as of 2019: Paul Wallace and Tope Alake, “Lagos Building Luxury Homes in Face of Affordable Housing Crisis,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2019. 152 eight hospital beds for every 10,000 people: World Bank DataBank, “Hospital Beds (Per 1,000 People)—Bangladesh, European Union, United States,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=BD-EU-us. 152 fewer than 2,000 ventilators: Ruth Maclean and Simon Marks, “10 African Countries Have No Ventilators.


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Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Centre for Local Economic Strategies. 2019. “Community Wealth Building 2019: Theory, Practice and Next Steps.” September. https://cles.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/CWB2019FINAL-web.pdf. Cheshire, Paul, and Boyana Buyuklieva. 2019. “Homes on the Right Tracks: Greening the Green Belt to Solve the Housing Crisis.” Centre for Cities, September. https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Homes-on-the-Right-Tracks-Greening-the-Green-Belt.pdf. Clancy, Matt. 2019. “Innovation and the City: Are Local Knowledge Spillovers Getting Weaker?” New Things under the Sun, December 19. https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/innovation-and-the-city.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available eISBN 9781780322209 CONTENTS Tables, figures and boxes Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition 1 Predicting the ‘unpredictable’ 2 No more Mr Nice Guy Part 1 Foundations: the logical flaws in the key concepts of conventional economics 3 The calculus of hedonism 4 Size does matter 5 The price of everything and the value of nothing 6 To each according to his contribution Part 2 Complexities: issues omitted from standard courses that should be part of an education in economics 7 The holy war over capital 8 There is madness in their method 9 Let’s do the Time Warp again 10 Why they didn’t see it coming 11 The price is not right 12 Misunderstanding the Great Depression and the Great Recession Part 3 Alternatives: different ways to think about economics 13 Why I did see ‘It’ coming 14 A monetary model of capitalism 15 Why stock markets crash 16 Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano 17 Nothing to lose but their minds 18 There are alternatives Bibliography Index TABLES, FIGURES AND BOXES Tables 2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession 3.1 ‘Utils’ and change in utils from consuming bananas 3.2 Utils arising from the consumption of two commodities 3.3 The commodities in Sippel’s ‘Revealed Preference’ experiment 4.1 Demand schedule for a hypothetical monopoly 4.2 Costs for a hypothetical monopoly 4.3 Sales and costs determine the level of output that maximizes profit 4.4 Cost and revenue for a ‘perfectly competitive’ industry identical in scale to hypothetical monopoly 5.1 Input and output data for a hypothetical firm 5.2 Cost drawings for the survey by Eiteman and Guthrie 5.3 Empirical research on the nature of cost curves 7.1 Sraffa’s hypothetical subsistence economy 7.2 Production with a surplus 7.3 Relationship between maximum and actual rate of profit and the wage share of surplus 7.4 The impact of the rate of profit on the measurement of capital 10.1 Anderson’s ranking of sciences 12.1 The alleged Money Multiplier process 13.1 A hypothetical example of the impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 13.2 The actual impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 14.1 A pure credit economy with paper money 14.2 The dynamics of a pure credit economy with no growth 14.3 Net incomes 14.4 A growing pure credit economy with electronic money 15.1 Von Neumann’s procedure for working out a numerical value for utility 15.2 The Allais ‘Paradox’ 15.3 The Allais ‘Paradox’ Part 2 16.1 The solvability of mathematical models 17.1 Marx’s unadjusted value creation table, with the rate of profit dependent upon the variable-to-constant ratio in each sector 17.2 Marx’s profit distribution table, with the rate of profit now uniform across sectors 17.3 Steedman’s hypothetical economy 17.4 Steedman’s physical table in Marx’s value terms 17.5 Steedman’s prices table in Marx’s terms 17.6 Profit rate and prices calculated directly from output/wage data 17.7 Marx’s example where the use-value of machinery exceeds its depreciation Figures 2.1 US inflation and unemployment from 1955 2.2 Bernanke doubles base money in five months 2.3 Private debt peaked at 1.7 times the 1930 level in 2009 3.1 Rising total utils and falling marginal utils from consuming one commodity 3.2 Total utils from the consumption of two commodities; 3.3 Total ‘utils’ represented as a ‘utility hill’ 3.4 The contours of the ‘utility hill’ 3.5 Indifference curves: the contours of the ‘utility hill’ shown in two dimensions 3.6 A rational consumer’s indifference map 3.7 Indifference curves, the budget constraint, and consumption 3.8 Deriving the demand curve 3.9 Upward-sloping demand curve 3.10 Separating out the substitution effect from the income effect 3.11 Engel curves show how spending patterns change with increases in income 3.12 A valid market demand curve 3.13 Straight-line Engel ‘curves’ 3.14 Economic theory cannot rule out the possibility that a market demand curve may have a shape like this, rather than a smooth, downward-sloping curve 4.1 Leijonhufvud’s ‘Totems’ of the Econ tribe 4.2 Stigler’s proof that the horizontal firm demand curve is a fallacy 4.3 Profit maximization for a monopolist: marginal cost equals marginal revenue, while price exceeds marginal cost 4.4 Profit maximization for a perfectly competitive firm: marginal cost equals marginal revenue, which also equals price 4.5 A supply curve can be derived for a competitive firm, but not for a monopoly 4.6 A competitive industry produces a higher output at a lower cost than a monopoly 4.7 The standard ‘supply and demand’ explanation for price determination is valid only in perfect competition 4.8 Double the size, double the costs, but four times the output 4.9 Predictions of the models and results at the market level 4.10 Output behavior of three randomly selected firms 4.11 Profit outcomes for three randomly selected firms 4.12 Output levels for between 1- and 100-firm industries 5.1 Product per additional worker falls as the number of workers hired rises 5.2 Swap the axes to graph labor input against quantity 5.3 Multiply labor input by the wage to convert Y-axis into monetary terms, and add the sales revenue 5.4 Maximum profit occurs where the gap between total cost and total revenue is at a maximum 5.5 Deriving marginal cost from total cost 5.6 The whole caboodle: average and marginal costs, and marginal revenue 5.7 The upward-sloping supply curve is derived by aggregating the marginal cost curves of numerous competitive firms 5.8 Economic theory doesn’t work if Sraffa is right 5.9 Multiple demand curves with a broad definition of an industry 5.10 A farmer who behaved as economists advise would forgo the output shown in the gap between the two curves 5.11 Capacity utilization over time in the USA 5.12 Capacity utilization and employment move together 5.13 Costs determine price and demand determines quantity 5.14 A graphical representation of Sraffa’s (1926) preferred model of the normal firm 5.15 The economic theory of income distribution argues that the wage equals the marginal product of labor 5.16 Economics has no explanation of wage determination or anything else with constant returns 5.17 Varian’s drawing of cost curves in his ‘advanced’ microeconomics textbook 6.1 The demand for labor curve is the marginal revenue product of labor 6.2 The individual’s income–leisure trade-off determines how many hours of labor he supplies 6.3 An upward-sloping individual labor supply curve 6.4 Supply and demand determine the equilibrium wage in the labor market 6.5 Minimum wage laws cause unemployment 6.6 Demand management policies can’t shift the supply of or demand for labor 6.7 Indifference curves that result in less work as the wage rises 6.8 Labor supply falls as the wage rises 6.9 An individual labor supply curve derived from extreme and midrange wage levels 6.10 An unstable labor market stabilized by minimum wage legislation 6.11 Interdependence of labor supply and demand via the income distributional effects of wage changes 7.1 The standard economic ‘circular flow’ diagram 7.2 The rate of profit equals the marginal product of capital 7.3 Supply and demand determine the rate of profit 7.4 The wage/profit frontier measured using the standard commodity 9.1 Standard neoclassical comparative statics 9.2 The time path of one variable in the Lorenz model 9.3 Structure behind the chaos 9.4 Sensitive dependence on initial conditions 9.5 Unstable equilibria 9.6 Cycles in employment and income shares 9.7 A closed loop in employment and wages share of output 9.8 Phillips’s functional flow block diagram model of the economy 9.9 The component of Phillips’s Figure 12 including the role of expectations in price setting 9.10 Phillips’s hand drawing of the output–price-change relationship 9.11 A modern flow-chart simulation program generating cycles, not equilibrium 9.12 Phillips’s empirically derived unemployment–money-wage-change relation 10.1 Hicks’s model of Keynes 10.2 Derivation of the downward-sloping IS curve 10.3 Derivation of the upward-sloping LM curve 10.4 ‘Reconciling’ Keynes with ‘the Classics’ 10.5 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1960–70 10.6 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1950–72 10.7 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1960–80 10.8 The hog cycle 11.1 Supply and demand in the market for money 11.2 The capital market line 11.3 Investor preferences and the investment opportunity cloud 11.4 Multiple investors (with identical expectations) 11.5 Flattening the IOC 11.6 How the EMH imagines that investors behave 11.7 How speculators actually behave 12.1 Inflation and base money in the 1920s 12.2 Inflation and base money in the post-war period 12.3 Bernanke’s massive injection of base money in QE1 12.4 Change in M0 and unemployment, 1920–40 12.5 Change in M1 and unemployment, 1920–40 12.6 Change in M0 and M1, 1920–40 12.7 M0–M1 correlation during the Roaring Twenties 12.8 M0–M1 correlation during the Great Depression 12.9 Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective 12.10 The volume of base money in Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective 12.11 Change in M1 and inflation before and during the Great Recession 12.12 The money supply goes haywire 12.13 Lindsey, Orphanides, Rasche 2005, p. 213 12.14 The empirical ‘Money Multiplier’, 1920–40 12.15 The empirical ‘Money Multiplier’, 1960–2012 12.16 The disconnect between private and fiat money during the Great Recession 13.1 Goodwin’s growth cycle model 13.2 My 1995 Minsky model 13.3 The vortex of debt in my 1995 Minsky model 13.4 Cyclical stability with a counter-cyclical government sector 13.5 Australia’s private debt-to-GDP ratio, 1975–2005 13.6 US private debt to GDP, 1955–2005 13.7 Aggregate demand in the USA, 1965–2015 13.8 US private debt 13.9 The change in debt collapses as the Great Recession begins 13.10 The Dow Jones nosedives 13.11 The correlation of debt-financed demand and unemployment 13.12 The housing bubble bursts 13.13 The Credit Impulse and change in employment 13.14 Correlation of Credit Impulse and change in employment and GDP 13.15 Relatively constant growth in debt 13.16 The biggest collapse in the Credit Impulse ever recorded 13.17 Growing level of debt-financed demand as debt grew faster than GDP 13.18 The two great debt bubbles 13.19 Change in nominal GDP growth then and now 13.20 Real GDP growth then and now 13.21 Inflation then and now 13.22 Unemployment then and now 13.23 Nominal private debt then and now 13.24 Real debt then and now 13.25 Debt to GDP then and now 13.26 Real debt growth then and now 13.27 The collapse of debt-financed demand then and now 13.28 Debt by sector – business debt then, household debt now 13.29 The Credit Impulse then and now 13.30 Debt-financed demand and unemployment, 1920–40 13.31 Debt-financed demand and unemployment, 1990–2011 13.32 Credit Impulse and change in unemployment, 1920–40 13.33 Credit Impulse and change in unemployment, 1990–2010 13.34 The Credit Impulse leads change in unemployment 14.1 The neoclassical model of exchange as barter 14.2 The nature of exchange in the real world 14.3 A nineteenth-century private banknote 14.4 Bank accounts 14.5 A credit crunch causes a fall in deposits and a rise in reserves in the bank’s vault 14.6 A bank bailout’s impact on loans 14.7 A bank bailout’s impact on incomes 14.8 A bank bailout’s impact on bank income 14.9 Bank income grows if debt grows more rapidly 14.10 Unemployment is better with a debtor bailout 14.11 Loans grow more with a debtor bailout 14.12 Profits do better with a debtor bailout 14.13 Bank income does better with a bank bailout 14.14 Modeling the Great Moderation and the Great Recession – inflation, unemployment and debt 14.15 The Great Moderation and the Great Recession – actual inflation, unemployment and debt 14.16 Modeling the Great Moderation and the Great Recession – output 14.17 Income distribution – workers pay for the debt 14.18 Actual income distribution matches the model 14.19 Debt and GDP in the model 14.20 Debt and GDP during the Great Depression 15.1 Lemming population as a constant subject to exogenous shocks 15.2 Lemming population as a variable with unstable dynamics 17.1 A graphical representation of Marx’s dialectics Boxes 10.1 The Taylor Rule 13.1 Definitions of unemployment PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Debunking Economics was far from the first book to argue that neoclassical economics was fundamentally unsound.

He also identified four common aspects of our work: 1 a concern with financial assets as distinct from real-sector assets, 2 with the credit flows that finance both forms of wealth, 3 with the debt growth accompanying growth in financial wealth, and 4 with the accounting relation between the financial and real economy. (Ibid.: 8) TABLE 2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession If you have never studied economics before, this list may surprise you: don’t all economists consider these obviously important economic issues? As you will learn in this book, the answer is no. Neoclassical economic theory ignores all these aspects of reality – even when, on the surface, they might appear to include them.


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The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

Her Labour colleague Chuka Umunna, in a New Statesman article on 6 March 2017, argued for devolving greater power to the regions: Wherever there is a case to devolve power and resources, we should be required to have a very good reason to say ‘no’. Labour can use the authority of government to help enable people’s participation in reform. For example, the land market needs reforming to give communities the power to tackle our acute housing crisis. Immigration needs to be brought under democratic control with decision making devolved to regions. The decentralization of power to take decision making closer to people’s lives requires a more democratic model of the state and a genuine redistribution of capital and funding. Whitehall departments need joining up and the Treasury needs a collaborative not autocratic approach to local government.6 There are dangers in focusing too heavily on the devolution of power as a solution to the sense of powerlessness felt by many voters.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Similarly, recent anti-fracking movements have been able to stop test drilling in various localities – but governments nevertheless continue to search for shale gas resources and provide support for companies to do so.7 In the United States, various movements to stop evictions in the wake of the housing crisis have made real gains in terms of keeping people in their homes.8 Yet the perpetrators of the subprime mortgage debacle continue to reap the profits, waves of foreclosures continue to sweep across the country, and rents continue to surge across the urban world. Small successes – useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope – nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses.


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Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

Says Lawrence Lau, professor of economic development, emeritus, Stanford University, and chairman, CIC International (Hong Kong): “The overwhelming majority of foreign exchange transactions are thus purely speculative, in effect, pure gambles, and serve no useful social purposes.”3 This disconnect between the financial and the real economy produces the financial bubbles that keep plaguing the global economy: the Latin American debt crisis (1980s); the Asian financial crisis (1997); the dot-com bubble (2000); and the US housing crisis (2006–07), which was followed by the world financial crisis (2007–09) and the euro crisis (2010–). Such financial bubbles destabilize the real economy instead of serving it. 2. A disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of Planet Earth. The disconnect between the infinite growth that current economic logic demands and the finite resources of Planet Earth has produced a massive bubble: The overuse of scarce resources such as water and soil has led to the loss of a third of our agricultural land globally in roughly one generation’s time. 3.


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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Back in July 2003, he'd written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: "Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles--or major deflations--on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course.... In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%." He harped on the same theme again in January 2004, then again in January 2005: "Want to borrow $1,000,000 for just $25 a month?


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Dutch Land Use Planning. Abingdon: Routledge. New Economics Foundation. 2014. Inequality and Financialisation: A Dangerous Mix. London: New Economics Foundation. http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/005f-379c2df9c812f1_gqm6ivky0.pdf. New Economics Foundation. 2016. The Financialisation of UK Homes: The Housing Crisis, Land and the Banks. London: New Economics Foundation. http://neweconomics.org/the-financialisation-of-uk-homes/?lost=true&_sf_s=+publications+++the+financialisation+of+uk+homes. New Economics Foundation, CDS Co-operatives, Pat Conaty, Johnston Birchall, Steve Bendle, and Rosemary Foggitt. 2013.


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

You might have lived in a house that didn’t look poor, but trailers would have been closeby. In coming years, the deregulated banking industry would remain largely unchecked by the government. In a speech touting a supposedly rebounded housing market, President Barack Obama would reflect on what the defining economic event of several generations had meant to our country: “This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes,” Obama said. “The place where we invest our nest egg. The place where we raise our family. The place where we plant roots in a community. The place where we build memories.” What we lost in stability, by way of our economic lot, we gained in adaptability, in hard clarity about what does and doesn’t last.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Second, Freddie and Fannie were huge contributors to both political parties. Between 1998 and 2008, Freddie Mac spent $94.9 million and Fannie Mae spent $79.5 million to lobby Congress.5 They also provided many intangible benefits to various members of Congress. The individuals who are most responsible for the collapse of Freddie and Fannie and the related housing crisis are Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. They both had the information to know that something needed to be done and refused to do it. I particularly blame Barney Frank. Most of the members of Congress involved simply were not intellectual enough to understand the fundamental issue.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Others were concerned that Airbnb rentals might further restrict an already constrained residential rental environment if landlords or enterprising New Yorkers started renting out units on Airbnb instead of allowing them to be rented by long-term residents.3 A coalition of legislators and homeowner associations called “Share Better” launched in 2014 to generate grassroots opposition to Airbnb. The organization’s website proclaims: “Far from being a harmless service where New York City residents can share their homes with guests to the City, Airbnb enables New York City tenants to break the law and potentially violate their leases, it exacerbates the affordable housing crisis in our neighborhoods, and it poses serious public safety concerns for Airbnb guests, hosts and their neighbors.”4 In May 2014, Airbnb agreed to hand over anonymized data on its New York City users, but only after a judge ruled that Schneiderman’s initial subpoena to access information on hosts across the state was too broad.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

He could have risked attacking the neo-liberal project. Instead he backed the International Monetary Fund, which had been a primary culprit in its hubris, bailed out the banks and appointed Larry Summers as his principal economic adviser, the man who devised the policy responsible for the sub-prime housing crisis. Obama never tried to reach out to the precariat, even though many in it had been hopeful that he would do so. The social democratic imagination could not empathise with real predicaments. In the United States and elsewhere, anger grew at some of the corrupt aspects of the globalisation era. Recall the systemic use of subsidies.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, One-Third of a Nation, Spirochete, were researched by journalists, written by dramatists, acted by huge casts with full orchestras and explored the struggle of farmers, the debate over the Tennessee Valley Association’s plan to bring subsidized electricity to the rural South; the reasons behind the housing crisis—“One-third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-fed,” President Roosevelt had said—the race for the cure for syphilis. Labor intensive, provocative, using and inventing all sorts of non-realistic acting and staging techniques, the Living Newspapers, a new form of theater, were precursors of American 1960s experimentalism, documentary and collectively created political theater.32 The Living Newspapers were wildly popular.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Le Corbusier chose to carefully render his walls, painting them white to achieve the appearance of concrete. He said he wanted houses to be made ‘on the same principles as the Ford car’, and proposed a mass-produced system of reinforced concrete construction. War-ravaged Europe was suffering an unprecedented housing crisis, and industrial prefabrication offered hope of homes for all. This hope turned out to be unjustified, but if houses couldn’t yet be made that way, they could at least be made to look that way. Real and illusory high-tech Americanismus: a Mercedes advertisement shot outside Le Corbusier’s brick and stucco house for the Werkbund exhibition, Stuttgart (1927) Albert Kahn, however, did not share the modernists’ enthusiasm for the industrial look: I can see a very close analogy between the modern industrial building and the modern box-like, flat-roofed house, so many of which are erected today.


pages: 278 words: 91,332

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

To tackle climate change we need to change our economies to produce more wealth with fewer natural resources. And it goes beyond climate change. We live in a world where the biggest cities are where the best jobs are. But the biggest, most successful cities are also expensive, crowded, and unequal places to live. To tackle the housing crisis we need to make those cities more livable. That means we need more space for humans, and less for cars. The car industry also wants you to think it has the solution to some of these problems. Electric cars will supposedly solve the problem of climate change emissions. Self-driving cars will solve the problem of traffic and make trains redundant.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

On average, 1.7 million people will be displaced for each centimetre of global sea-level rise, so hundreds of millions of people would have to move by 2100. The whole of southern Vietnam is expected to be below sea level by 2050, as well as much of the central and northern parts of the country.30 Coastal Florida is already seeing the signs of a climate-driven housing crisis, with first sales tumbling and then prices, as luxurious waterfront homes become too risky to purchase. Sales in vulnerable areas were down 20 per cent on safe areas in 2018, after Hurricane Sandy, which damaged some 650,000 homes and left 8.5 million people without power (some for months), made buyers more wary.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

Eerily echoing the reviled Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s morality tale Wall Street, Ray Diallo, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, noted, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.” 2007 was the year many first learned 124 Carjacked the terms “predatory lending” and “hedge fund,” both of which have come to hit American car owners, not just home owners, with a vengeance. The housing crisis grabbed the headlines beginning in 2007, but auto loans played a meaningful role in the CDO market that helped precipitate the crisis. CDOs are collateralized debt obligations, also known as credit derivatives, a financial instrument dating back to the early 1990s that is essentially the securitization of risk.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

WHEN PRICES GO OFF THE RAILS The housing bubble might be the most painful case of financial excess in recent memory, but it surely isn’t the only one. Through the ages, virtually every potentially profitable new frontier opened up to investment has led to a speculative bubble, as investors have scrambled to tap into its promise only to stampede in retreat a few years later. A decade before the housing crisis we experienced the dot-com bubble. The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, quadrupled between 1996 and March of 2000. Drunk on information technology’s promise, people poured retirement savings into companies like Pets.com, which achieved fame, though never profit, on the strength of a cute ad with a sock puppet.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Of course not. That’s why he had begun to feel a need to talk about systems. “Why do we live in a society where that can happen?” he asked. “And what do we need to fix that? And we who are privileged ought to be engaged in that, because we can’t say, on the one hand, ‘Isn’t it horrible, this affordable-housing crisis we have in New York?,’ and then, by the same token, accept a system that is essentially corrupt.” He mused, “I really wonder about my own privilege, and am I too comfortable in it?” He said his guilt “definitely nags at me on a daily basis.” Social scientists speak of “idiosyncrasy credits,” a kind of resource that a leader earns, which allows him or her from time to time to innovate on, or even defy, group norms.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Just as families sometimes cohere and at other times argue, are sometimes happy and at other times depressed, are sometimes successful and at other times in disarray, so too do whole economies go through good and bad times. The social fabric changes. Our level of trust in one another varies. And our willingness to undertake effort and engage in self-sacrifice is by no means constant. The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking. But the current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions—and especially by changing stories about the nature of the economy.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

What dried up was a path to the middle class and all the familiar landmarks that went along with it. I visited Alexander City in the aftermath, when the town was still trying to make sense of what had happened. The town was in the same situation as any number of American suburbs near Las Vegas or Houston or Fort Lauderdale, where the recession and the housing crisis had ripped the roots out of the middle class. But here the effect was concentrated and stark, and you could see more clearly what had been lost, and also what was rising up in its place. In the last decade or so, the broad middle swath of America has become unrecognizable, with a rapid decline in marriage and a rapid increase in divorce and single motherhood.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

As a philosophy of personal responsibility took hold in the 1980s, President Reagan cut the federal housing budget in half, and housing subsidies have never recovered. The Great Recession of 2008–09 also meant that millions of homeowners lost their jobs and then their homes when they couldn’t make mortgage payments. “We have an affordable housing crisis and, in fact, it’s reached historic heights,” Diane Yentel, chief executive officer of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told us. “Today we have a shortage of over seven million homes affordable and available to the lowest-income people.” Research suggests that when families are decently housed, children do better in school and, probably as a result, earn more as adults and even live longer.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

He has pledged to end austerity, and in its stead implement a People’s Quantitative Easing programme with money invested in infrastructural development, job-creation and high-technology industries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won office on an agenda like this. Even the OECD is anti-austerity these days.16 He promises to address the housing crisis through extensive home-building, to fully nationalise the railways, and to bring all academies back under local democratic control. These objectives are to be funded, not so much by squeezing the rich like a sponge to water the gardens of the poor, as by closing tax loopholes, stimulating growth, and spending less on controversial programmes such as Trident.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Adam and Miguel had friends scouting potential spots in Toronto and San Francisco, and Joel Schreiber sent them to a building in Midtown, across from the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue. It had been previously occupied by a branch of JPMorgan Chase’s lending and mortgage division, which didn’t have much work in a post–housing crisis world. The space had been on the market for months, and Schreiber knew the owners; the Zars were an Iranian-American family who ran a conservative business averse to speculative risks. Schreiber told Adam that if he could charm David Zar, the youngest family member, a deal might happen. Adam met Zar at 349 Fifth Avenue wearing a bomber jacket over a white T-shirt.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

“But many of these workers do not earn enough to adequately support their families, even at a subsistence level.”6 Meanwhile, mid-wage jobs were hollowed out while high-paying ones took much longer to bounce back.7 The recession especially affected heavily unionized sectors like the building trades because home and large office construction stalled after the housing crisis. In the wake of the recession’s economic fallout, Americans scrambled to find work, creating an opening for new start-ups to sell low-wage workers and the unemployed on the concept of a “gig” or “side hustle.”8 Once viewed as temporary, these types of jobs quickly became a permanent feature of the economy.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

He revealed he was formerly an auditor for a large bank, but he left his job during the 2008 recession and made a career switch to law enforcement. But the subprime crisis wasn’t done with him. It followed Gelan to his new job. For years, he explained, the courts were full with lawsuits between banks and customers—the combined wreckage of a generational housing crisis slowly moving its way through the legal system. Why did I get the feeling a similar wave of litigation was brewing as some $2 trillion of crypto wealth had vanished overnight? Then an even more chilling thought ran through me: Because crypto had been purposefully set up to avoid regulation, would everyday victims have any shot at justice?


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

He was not unaware, moreover, of the fact that any major public works projects which were not started almost at once would not be finished when he ran for re-election in 1949. His city, his grasp for party power, his personal career—all these required money. And he didn't have any. Action in the housing crisis was conceived of by press and public as construction of new housing. New housing projects had been planned with the state money Moses had obtained, but the very crisis that made construction imperative—the lack of vacant livable apartments in the city—made construction difficult, because there were no apartments into which to relocate families living on the sites on which planned housing was to be built.

Moses was building under a system in which permission to build could be granted only by officials who derived their power from the people. And, in that light, what was most significant about the Cross-Bronx Expressway was not that seven miles of brick and mortar and steel and iron had to be removed from its path but that seven miles of people had to be removed, removed from homes which in a time of terrible housing crisis in New York were simply irreplaceable. "People said that [the route] was so built up that you'd never get the politicians to say okay," Ernie Clark would later recall, and engineers who had built bigger roads even than Ernie Clark agreed. Farrell and Chapin's legendary Burma Road would symbolize to history the epitome of difficulty in construction.

Sherman. "And Mrs. Aronofsky—her husband died. Same thing. One thing could do it, and so fast. Boom, and you were gone. Your friends never saw you again." Happy therefore to have those apartments, the people of East Tremont were made desperate to keep them by the harsh realities of New York's housing crisis. Finding an apartment at any price was difficult in a city whose postwar vacancy rate was an habitual 1 percent. Finding an apartment at a rent they could afford to pay, in a neighborhood they felt they could live in, was all but impossible. They knew how difficult it was to obtain an apartment in East Tremont; one could wait for years even after one had promised a "schmear" to any super who let you know about an upcoming vacancy.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

The remaining regulated banks used the new-found flexibility to expand and make their commercial banking operations more efficient. Rather than diversifying into investment banking, they sold increasing amounts of loans to shadow banks. The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999 has often been seen as a key moment in a deregulatory process that led to banking excesses and the housing crisis.12 However, by then the important transformation of the US banking system had already taken place, as the relatively heavily capitalized US regulated banks sold standardized loans such as mortgages to the less capitalized investment banks and other parts of the shadow banking system, thereby undermining the capital buffers behind bank loans.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

If you're selling power during an energy crunch, you might be tempted to manipulate the energy market and artificially drive up electricity prices in order to make a killing. Why? Because you can—because deregulated energy markets and unsophisticated enforcers allow you to get away with profiteering. If you're a landlord in New York City, with its perpetual housing crisis, you'll be tempted to cut all sorts of corners because you know that these days the city has the resources to send out investigators only if there's a flood or a collapse, leaving much illegal behavior unpunished. If you're Wal-Mart, America's biggest company, you'll be tempted to continue the pervasive practice of forcing workers in your stores to put in overtime without paying them for it or using illegal immigrants.


pages: 383 words: 108,266

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

In the absence of such an understanding, however, the banks tempted individuals to borrow more than they could possibly afford. Sure, the banks could threaten borrowers with the financial equivalent of breaking legs, but they didn’t help borrowers do what’s best for the banks—or themselves. It’s no wonder that, when the housing crisis finally hit, both banks and their customers wound up with broken legs. Now, let’s say that after all is said and done, the banks finally wise up and decide to conduct empirical studies that examine how people might go about computing the ideal loan amount. Assuming their data reveal the same results as my small study (that people simply borrow to the maximum), the bankers might then realize that it is in their best interest to help borrowers make better decisions.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

[14] See for example Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York, Random House, 1986). [15] Evidence for the link with fair pay scales is in D. Cowherd and D. Levie (1992), ‘Product quality and pay equity between low level employees and top management’, Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 37. [16] See Ross Clark, A Broom Cupboard of One’s Own: The housing crisis and how to solve it (Petersfield, Harriman House, 2012). [17] See Josh Ryan-Collins et al, Where Does Money Come From? A guide to the UK monetary and banking system, second edn (London, New Economics Foundation, 2012). [18] Quoted in Lewis and Maude, 47. [19] Quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (London, Bloomsbury, 2008), 503.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

Now, two years later, the hangover from the Greenspan years was giving his successors a massive and growing headache. The formal topic was timely and reinforced the pain: housing and housing finance. This year, a revisionist account of the Greenspan years began to take hold inside the fraternity. John Taylor, the noted Stanford monetary expert, indicted Greenspan for having created the current housing crisis by keeping interest rates too low too long earlier in the decade. Taylor believed that government economic policy worked best when the people who made policies publicly described the rules that governed their decision making. He was famous among central bankers around the world for “the Taylor rule,” a simple formula for setting interest rates that depended on where inflation was versus the Fed’s goal for it, how far from full employment the economy was, and what the short-term interest rate should be when the economy was perking along.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Goizueta, Coca-Cola Chairman Noted for Company Turnaround, Dies at 65,” New York Times, October 19, 1997, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/us/ roberto-c-goizueta-coca-cola-chairman-noted-for-company-turnaround-dies-at-65.html. 231 After talking to Wall Street: interview with Professor Ho at a copresentation she gave with Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, March 10, 2010, at Columbia University; Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 231 The value of millions of houses remains: Binyamin Appelbaum, “Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama,” New York Times, August 19, 2012, accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/business/economy/ slow-response-to-housing-crisis-now-weighs-on-obama.html; Les Christie, “Troubled Homeowners Get a Lifeline,” CNN Money, October 24, 2011, accessed September 14, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/24/real_estate/ housing_refinance/index.htm. 231 Interest rates, zero for many: David Shulman, “The Downside of the Fed’s Zero Rate Policy,” US News and World Report, April 30, 2012, accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/ economic-intelligence/2012/04/30/the-downside-of-the-feds-zero-interest-rate-policy. 231 the volatility of the markets: Tami Luhby, “Credit Freeze and Your Paycheck,” CNN Money, September 28, 2008, accessed September 14, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/28/news/economy/ main_street_impact/index.htm?


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Day after day the message was hammered home in giant, shouty slabs of text: ‘THERE ARE TOO MANY MIGRANTS’. ‘BRITAIN’S WIDE OPEN BORDERS’. ‘MIGRANTS PAY JUST £100 TO INVADE BRITAIN’. ‘THE INVADERS’. ‘MIGRANT SEIZED EVERY SIX MINUTES’. ‘MIGRANT MOTHERS COST NHS £1.3bn’. ‘WE CAN’T STOP MIGRANT SURGE’. ‘MIGRANTS SPARK HOUSING CRISIS’. ‘FURY OVER PLOT TO LET 1.5m TURKS INTO BRITAIN’. ‘WE’RE FROM EUROPE – LET US IN’. And on and on and on. Enemies came in a number of forms. ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’ was the Mail’s notorious denunciation of the UK’s ‘“out of touch” judges’ for insisting that Parliament should be given a say in any plans for implementing the result of the referendum.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It was following the historically seismic candidacy of Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States, and that summer it was set to crash into Denver, Colorado, at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama was going to speak and accept the Democratic nomination for president. This presented a unique opportunity. “A hundred thousand people were anticipated to see Obama speak, and there were less than 30,000 hotel rooms, most of which were picked up by delegates,” Joe remembered. It was a legitimate housing crisis. At one point, Denver’s mayor even considered opening the city’s parks to campers. Suddenly, there was a real need for the service that Joe, Brian, and Nate were trying to bring into being. They just had to get the word out. “We thought what if we timed the relaunch of our service during the DNC?


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Many of the best American colleges until today have so-called legacy preferences, giving preferred admission to children of parents who also studied at the institution or, in some cases, gave money to it. And while US governments for decades promoted homeownership, opaque financial innovation with mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations led to a housing crisis in 2008, pushing millions of Americans out of their houses and out of their jobs. To this day, some people have not recovered financially from that crisis. Finally, some 28 million Americans, almost 10 percent of the total, did not have health insurance in 201819 (the last year for which data were available at the time of writing).


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Many of the best American colleges until today have so-called legacy preferences, giving preferred admission to children of parents who also studied at the institution or, in some cases, gave money to it. And while US governments for decades promoted homeownership, opaque financial innovation with mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations led to a housing crisis in 2008, pushing millions of Americans out of their houses and out of their jobs. To this day, some people have not recovered financially from that crisis. Finally, some 28 million Americans, almost 10 percent of the total, did not have health insurance in 201819 (the last year for which data were available at the time of writing).


pages: 367 words: 110,161

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, break the buck, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, index card, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, skunkworks, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Still, the fire was less severe than for its peers, as dire housing forecasts and visions of shadow banking had helped Pimco avoid the nastiest stuff. And externally, Pimco continued to look brilliant. Charlie Rose interviewed Mohamed El-Erian in July 2008. Rose lurched forward in his creepy-grandfather tilt, wanting to know how, how had Pimco seen the housing crisis coming? Simple, El-Erian said. Stocks and bonds had been living in different worlds: In “2005, 2006, into 2007, the bond market, for example, was telling you, ‘There’s a major dislocation coming, be careful.’ The equity market was telling you, ‘It’s Goldilocks; everything’s perfect; the great moderation, nothing to worry about.’


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Every American family wanted to buy a home, he figured; the only things stopping them were that they didn’t have enough money and there weren’t enough houses. Home loans were high-interest and short-term, and they only covered around half the purchase price. That suppressed building, and when the Depression hit and prices fell, home construction nearly ceased, exacerbating the housing crisis. In 1931, with radicals breathing down his neck, Hoover assembled hundreds of real estate and construction professionals at the President’s National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, one of his classic associative state meetups. There they brainstormed how to fight their common enemy: the menace of public housing.

The Y2K bubble looks like a great cautionary tale, but any capitalist who kept taking their investment cues from the collapse of Pets.com missed out on a lot of money. The growth that leading firms have accomplished since then has almost fully obscured the Y2K bubble on the stock chart, reducing it to mere first-night jitters. The 2008 housing crisis demonstrated the perils of confusing advertising with innovation, and blending up risky subprime home loans didn’t actually improve the quality of the underlying assets. When the house of cards fell, it took down a few storied financial institutions and a lot more homeowners with it. But as they do in the aftermath of every bubble, the winners bought up the losers: Bank of America took Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase got Bear Stearns.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 172, 184–85, 187, 190–91. 30. Ibid., p. 192. 31. Levy and Cybriwsky, “Hidden Dimensions of Culture and Class,” p. 150. 32. Hodge, “Inner-City Revitalization,” p. 198. 33. Washington Post, 22 October 1990, p. D5. 34. Revitalization, Gentrification, and the Low-Income Housing Crisis: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), p. 100. 35. Ibid., pp. 3, 7. 36. John King, “Protecting Industry from Yuppies and Other Invaders,” Planning, June 1988, p. 4. See also Robert Giloth and John Betancur, “Where Downtown Meets Neighborhood: Industrial Displacement in Chicago, 1978–1987,” Journal of the American Planning Association 54 (1988): 287. 37.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Peter Kwan and his fellow hosts mobilized against Prop F. They started a separate group, called the Home Sharers Democratic Club, to give hosts a political voice in the fray, convened press conferences, and organized phone campaigns to educate the citizenry on the folly of the initiative. “We were made a scapegoat for the housing crisis,” Kwan told me over home-cooked Singapore-style noodles in his dining room that year, which I ate while Haley nipped at my ankles. “Yes, we do have a severe housing shortage and affordability problem, and yes, home sharing probably does play some part in contributing to the severity, but I don’t think anybody really knows the degree of the contribution.”


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

These include: • Developing Country Debt Crisis (1983) • US Savings and Loan Crisis (1980s) • Resolution Trust Company, which created REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts) (late 1980s) • The 1988 Basel Capital Accord (1988) • The beginning of derivatives (early 1990s) • Proliferation of derivatives and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) (1990s) • Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998) • Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) (1998) • The repeal of Glass-Steagall (1999) and the adoption of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act (GLBA) (1998) • The failure of dot-coms (2000) Causes of the Global Financial Crisis after SOX and Prior to September 18, 2008 It is also important to understand the events and economic climate after the July 31, 2002, passage of SOX and prior to September 18, 2008. These events include: • The increasing complexity of derivative products, including CDSs (Credit Default Swaps) and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations)4 • The ascendancy of rating agencies • Alt-A subprime lending • Basel II (2005–2006) • The subprime housing crisis in the United States, including the rise of “NINJA” (no income, no jobs, no assets) financing • The rise of hedge funds • The oil crisis (2008) • The collapse of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers (2008) Understanding the causes of the global financial crisis will go hand in hand with regulatory reform and increasing targeted global compliance and ethics programs.5 Why SOX Failed SOX was supposed to remedy the financial improprieties and excesses that existed prior to July 31, 2002.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The new owners were then given a passport as proof of ownership and left to their own devices; Tellinga hopes that ‘self-build leads to more socially cohesive cities whose inhabitants have a much stronger attachment to their surroundings’.23 Many cities are watching to see how Homeruskwartier grows and develops as a potential solution to the current housing crisis. While it might be common sense to offer people more say in the way they build their own homes, do the same rules apply when thinking about public spaces? For so long our streets and public squares were barren places, to be traversed without hesitation, reminders of our anonymous smallness. We have lost touch with the city, as proven in a report conducted by Transport for London in 2006, which revealed that most people only understood London’s geography by the underground railway map, which presents a spacially distorted picture of the city; as a result one in twenty people exiting Leicester Square station on the Piccadilly Line had hopped on to the train at one of the two nearest stations, both of which are only 800 metres away.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Deep in our soul we know this, yet we continue to faithfully pledge obedience to a financial roadmap that promises wealth after four or five decades. And the bigger concern you should have is, does it even work? The global recession has exposed the Slowlane for the fraud it is. With no job, the plan fails. When the stock market loses 50% of your savings, the plan fails. When a housing crisis erases 40% of your illiquid net worth in one year, the plan fails. The plan is a failure because the plan is based on time and factors you can't control. Unfortunately, millions of people have faithfully invested decades into the plan only to discover the ugly truth: The Slowlane is risky and insufferably impotent.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

After all, an Airbnb transaction on one side calls for letting a stranger sleep in your home, and on the other side involves sleeping in a stranger’s home. Of course, the investors who passed were wrong; plenty of people were happy to bear those risks once Airbnb set up a marketplace to do so. The opposite can be true as well, in that people can substantially underestimate risks, such as in the 2007/2008 U.S. housing crisis, which led to a global financial crisis. The few people who correctly assessed this risk and bet on their secret knowledge made a lot of money, as depicted in the 2015 film The Big Short, based on a 2010 book of the same name by author Michael Lewis. A secret can also be how to turn someone else’s good idea into a great idea.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

The last thing we wanted to do was to sell. It was mortifying.” Hsieh wanted to keep going but even he came to acknowledge that Amazon could be a good home for Zappos. One of the factors he considered was that Zappos employees in Las Vegas and near its distribution center in Kentucky lived at ground zero of the housing crisis. Many had seen the value of their homes plummet, and the only valuable thing they owned was Zappos stock. Hsieh saw that the acquisition could offer a sizable payout for employees at a moment when many desperately needed it. The Zappos board ultimately decided to sell to Amazon; the vote was bittersweet but unanimous.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Italy and Japan share membership in the small and undesirable club of rich nations with a ratio of public debt to GDP in the triple digits, and the politics of both Rome and Tokyo have been shaped by a recent succession of leaders who make vague noises about change and then leave only a vague impression on the system. Spain, on the other hand, has suffered real drama and pain, with a deep housing crisis, but it is now moving more aggressively in the right direction, including serious labor market reform to deal with its high unemployment rate. Between these two southern rivals, Spain is more likely to bounce high off a hard landing, with a chance to become a breakout nation in the coming decade.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

They’d go into houses and strip out the wire, pull it out through the ceilings. They take every last single thing you could think of. Leaving the houses with holes, basically nothing inside there. Every last thing down to the light bulbs. We’re talking toilets, every fixture you can think of, the lamps, the microwaves. In Tucson, Arizona, the housing crisis was taking down owners and renters alike. Homeowners unable to pay the monthly bills were losing their homes; renters in foreclosed homes were being evicted. And others, not in foreclosed homes, were losing their jobs, falling behind on their monthly payments and also ending up without roofs over their heads.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

But that same grassroots America will be even more aroused should the values of their homes drop by 8-10 percent or even 15-20 percent over a year or two. This could occur if Alan Greenspan’s prophecy about malfunctioning CDOs quoted at the beginning of this chapter proves correct, and the connections to unworkable securitization deepen and prolong the mortgage and housing crisis. Then the Wall Street financial architects who packaged mortgage-backed securities or structured CDOs to include subprime exposure might come to realize that they should have thought more broadly: not just about the difficulty of tracing where the original mortgage made in Cleveland or San Diego eventually wound up, or anticipating blowback over the subprime content of the CDOs sold to dummkopf provincial bankers in Germany, but also about domestic political backlash—the prospect that aroused homeowners in Hackerville or Warrentown might begin to take their first serious look at the new U.S. financial sector and what it has become.


pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

., 195 Deutsche Bank money laundering, 344–45 Deutsche Bank penalty, 339–40 Libor investigation, 291 Trump presidency and, 344–45 Val and father’s files, 320–21, 357–59 Kavanaugh, Brett, 338 Kebede, Kassy Mitchell and Estelle, 60–61 Mitchell’s death, 89 recruitment, 47, 48 Kebede, Liya, 47 Keitel, Harvey, 59 Kelly, Megyn, 277–78 Kennedy, Anthony, 70, 74, 90–91, 139, 336, 338 Kennedy, Justin background of, 70 at Goldman Sachs, 70–72 Trump presidency, 336–38 Kennedy, Justin, at Deutsche Bank, 80 departure, 145 housing crisis, 139–40 Mitchell’s death, 90–91 recruitment, 73–74 Trump loans, 75–76, 113, 115–17, 145 Khuzami, Robert, 93, 344–45, 345n Kim Jong Un, 253 Kissinger, Henry, 24, 179 Kohl, Helmut, 24, 25–26 Komansky, David H., 86 Kopper, Hilmar, 42–44, 53 Kostin, Andrey, 109–10 Kostin, Andrey, Jr., 110, 196–98 KPMG, 154 Kravis, Henry, 75 Kroenke, Stan, 170 Kushner, Charles, 275–76, 312 Kushner, Jared, 169, 172, 275–77, 315–16 Deutsche Bank investigation, 310, 311–13, 312n, 316, 358 Deutsche Bank loans, 275–76, 306–307, 336–37, 356 New York Observer, 172, 276, 277, 336–37 Kushner, Seryl, 277, 306–307 Kushner Companies, 169, 275–77, 311–13, 315–16, 336–37 Kvalheim, Grant, 47–48, 92 Labor Department, U.S., 343–44 Labor unions, 78, 234, 264–65 Lagarde, Christine, 179, 299 LaGuardia Airport, 278 “Last Day of Our Acquaintance, The” (song), 90, 229 Las Vegas, 32, 282–83 Latvian money laundering, 110–11, 118, 332 Lehman Brothers, 4, 63, 66 Lemon, Don, 278 Levin, Carl, 153–54, 238–39 Levinson, Charles, 256–57 Lewis, Michael, 138n Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), 151–52 Broeksmit and, 288–94 criminal investigations, 195–96, 261–62 criminal settlement, 261–62 Gambino and, 251 Menke’s letter, 263–64 Lincoln, Abraham, 14 Lippmann, Greg, 138–40, 138n Little Dix Bay Resort, 207–208 Loans to Donald Trump.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

In fact, in turning to real estate itself, we will see that those changing skylines are only the start of this transformation. Real Estate Our story begins in the Great Recession of 2008, where the reckless behavior of two familiar players—big banks and big insurance—plunged the country into chaos. Real estate was especially hard hit. The bottom fell out of the market, and kept on falling. The housing crisis ensued, and things went from bad to worse to downright miserable. Which is when Glenn Sanford had what really should have been a stupid idea: start a real estate company. But it was a company built for the times. In the face of rising overhead costs and decimated revenues, Sanford decided not to do what real estate agents had always done: open an office.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

The person I’d planned to stay with in Oakland had an emergency the week before I was supposed to arrive, and rentals in San Francisco and the close parts of Oakland were way more out of my price range than I’d anticipated. Even subletting a tiny bedroom in a place with roommates would run me $3,000, minimum. There’s been some innovative, thinking-outside-the-box solutions to San Francisco’s housing crisis, including “coliving spaces,” a.k.a. dorms for adults. A depressing number of listings I looked at showed barracks-like rows of bunk beds. I actually did look into a few coliving spaces, thinking it might be an interesting window into the broke wannabe startup life. But rent on a single bunk bed would have been roughly twice my mortgage, and my money situation wasn’t any better than it had been in Hickory.


pages: 476 words: 129,209

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon

British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, discovery of penicillin, housing crisis, index card, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

But the world once again made an exception for Halifax. Throughout Thursday, a storm that had started brewing off the Carolinas was making its way up the East Coast through a thick cloud cover, timed to land in Nova Scotia at the end of the most tragic day in the city’s history. But Colwell was surely right about the housing crisis. The explosion destroyed 1,630 buildings and damaged 12,000 more, leaving some 25,000, almost half the population of Halifax-Dartmouth, without adequate housing and dangerously exposed to the elements. After Deputy Mayor Colwell asked Colonel W. E. Thompson for help with temporary shelter, the Engineer and Ordnance Corps outdid itself, putting up tents on the North Commons for 250 people, equipping them with canvas floors, cots, blankets, and oil stoves, and adding temporary hospital accommodations, more than enough to keep people warm through the cold night ahead, in a clean, safe environment—a rare commodity that first night.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

This situation was repeated across the country, with few of the asylum seekers having a chance to be heard. The media was largely uninterested, and the Home Office and charity bureaucracy resented having to talk to journalists and migrants at all. Activists and immigrants all told me that the system was close to useless. This reality of privatized housing for refugees was linked to the country’s housing crisis, both for asylum seekers and for the general population, but not for the reasons its defenders claimed. It had not brought greater freedom in the market; it had simply allowed profiteers to thrive, because the mantra of “self-reliance” for the poor—another term for hanging the underclass out to dry —had become official government policy.


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

The Washington Post states that one of Goldman’s 2006 mortgage deals, the GSAMP Trust 2006-S3, may actually be “the worst deal … floated by a top-tier firm.”2 (One in every six of the 8,274 mortgages bundled in GSAMP Trust 2006-S3 would be in default eighteen months later. People who bought the S3 bonds either had to take a 100 percent loss or sell it at a heavy discount.) In December, anticipating a housing crisis, Goldman takes a negative stance on the mortgage market but does not announce this publicly. Head of the Special Situations proprietary trading area in FICC, who reportedly was paid a $70 million bonus (larger than the CEO’s reported $53 million), leaves Goldman—supposedly because he was frustrated by the bureaucracy at Goldman and because the group was not compensated like a hedge fund or private equity firm for the reported $4 billion in profits the group generated (O).


pages: 363 words: 28,546

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation by R. Marston

asset allocation, Bob Litterman, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carried interest, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, German hyperinflation, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, inventory management, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, passive investing, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

seven cities examined, the nominal appreciation for the FHFA index exceeds that of the Case-Shiller index. In the case of Los Angeles, the average rate of appreciation is 4.7 percent for the Case-Shiller index, but it is 0.6 percent faster for the government series. The gap between the two indexes is largely due to price changes since the housing crisis began. If rates of appreciation are compared over the period from 1987 to 2006 (prior to the crisis), they are much more similar.18 Figure 11.8 shows the cumulative fall in prices over the 36 months starting in January 2007. In the case of Los Angeles, for example, the Case-Shiller index fell 36.5 percent over this period, while the FHFA index falls only 28.2 percent.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Ryan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” Psychological Inquiry, 2000: 227–68. activity is its own reward: Frey, Happiness: A Revolution, 130. freshmen at Harvard: Baker, Meredith C., and Cara K. Fahey, “The Housing Market, 2009: Mather House,” Harvard Crimson, March 9, 2009, www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/3/15/the-housing-crisis-mather-house (accessed January 9, 2011). concrete tower of Mather House: “Dictionary of Harvardisms from A to Z: The Vocabulary You Need to Get Through Your Life at Harvard,” Harvard Crimson, August 24, 2009, www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/8/24/dictionary-of-harvardisms-2-am-1 (accessed January 9, 2011).


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … Can the physical ville straighten out such difficulties? Will plans to pedestrianize a street do anything about the housing crisis? Will the use of sodium borosilicate glass in buildings make people more tolerant of immigrants? The city seems crooked in that asymmetry afflicts its cité and its ville.2 It is sometimes right that there be a mis-fit between the builder’s own values and those of the public. This mis-fit ought to occur if people reject living with neighbours unlike themselves.


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Losses on the home equity portfolio had surpassed Dimon’s stress-testing scenarios, and the CFO, Mike Cavanagh, said that in the future the company would be assuming a more conservative stance. He dropped a bomb on the audience by explaining that the firm could add as much as $450 million more to loan-loss reserves in the first quarter alone. “We did not see the magnitude of the housing crisis coming,” he admitted. Though it had sold off much of its subprime portfolio, the company still owned $15.5 billion worth, and more than 12 percent of those home owners had been delinquent for 30 days or more. The company also shifted $4.9 billion of leveraged loans from “held for sale” to “held to maturity” on its balance sheet; this shift allowed it to delay taking losses on the loans.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

Logan, Michael F. Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Luckingham, Bradford. Phoenix: The History of a Southwestern Metropolis. Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Lucy, William H. Foreclosing the Dream: How America’s Housing Crisis Is Reshaping Our Cities and Suburbs. Chicago: American Planning Association, 2010. Mees, Paul. Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. Oxford: Earthscan, 2009. Pew Research Center. “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” http:// pewresearch.org/pubs, January 29, 2009.


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

‘She visited six families in a blackened Victorian tenement … But even as she stood on the pavement, smiling at the milling crowd who struggled to see her, she also saw at the corner the tall towers of the first Hutchesontown-Gorbals redevelopment area, the gigantic 20-storey flats that are now nearing completion.’1 The story of Glasgow’s attempts to tackle its housing crisis is one of the more extreme episodes in the history of postwar rebuilding, and marks the start of a radical new wave of redevelopment. In the fifties, tenement life for people like Danny hadn’t changed much since the Industrial Revolution first gripped the Clyde valley: whole families still lived in single gas-lit rooms, side by side with a disturbing complement of bugs and rodents, with no hot running water (and often no cold water indoors), and a single outside toilet shared by several households.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

Leisure patterns were transformed by the television and, for a long time after its introduction, cinema audience figures tumbled. The number of TV sets in Scotland grew from 41,000 in 1952 to well over 1 million ten years later, fuelled partly by the huge demand for televisions at the time of the Coronation in 1953. The nation’s housing crisis was now tackled for the first time on a large scale with the extraordinary total of over 564,000 new houses built in the two decades after 1945. As the urban slums came down, many thousands of Scots now had decent houses, equipped to modern standards with inside toilets.11 Yet such gains in living standards failed to stem the flow of emigrants.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Perhaps we should not be surprised that in such turbulent times the Labour Party is again at war within itself. The brief ceasefires in the Conservative civil war are unlikely to hold for long. That civil war resulted in Brexit and is far from settled despite the referendum. At the time of writing, the countries of the UK are in economic peril as the pound weakens, food prices start to climb and the housing crisis approaches a crescendo. Absolute poverty rates are rising, and life expectancy is now falling. You have to look back as far as the 1930s to find so much going wrong so quickly. Today is different, but the echo is uncanny, and the ideas of the one leader calling for social progress at a time of economic disaster are again widely ridiculed, ignored or dismissed.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

The new statutes provide for an increase in rents all over the country of 300 per cent on pre-war figures. Building a house containing twelve to twenty such flats has thus become the latest form of profitable investment.28 The other fashionable speculative object was furniture. That was being hoarded, too, on the basis of the same hopes that the housing crisis would ease in a year or two, as would the inflation, and suddenly people would need to furnish new homes. The trend had been clear for years. Now, for those who could manage it, the headlong flight into ‘things’ had begun. 18 Kicking Germany When She’s Down On 22 November 1922, four years and eleven days after the armistice that ended the First World War, President Ebert undertook what appeared to be a desperate throw of the dice for the Republic to which he had been midwife in those dark days of defeat.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

In the past, middle-class occupations were considered relatively secure and thought to provide opportunities for advancement if people worked hard, increased their level of education, and gained more experience on the job. Today, however, a number of factors—including the recession of the 2000s, the housing crisis and high mortgage-foreclosure rates, occupational insecurity and long-term job loss, and the continual cost-of-living squeeze—are subjects of major concern and increasing analysis in various media sources. The working class (about 30 percent of the U.S. population) comprises semiskilled workers such as machine operators in factories (blue-collar jobs) and some service-sector workers, including clerks and salespeople whose jobs involve routine, mechanized tasks that require little skill beyond basic 9781442202238.print.indb 15 2/10/11 10:46 AM 16 Chapter 1 literacy and brief on-the-job training.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

On the Taussig controversy, see Mises, Theory, 204. On Austrian currency policy, see Ebeling, Political Economy, 65–68. For Menger’s verdict, see C. Menger, Das Goldagio, 1. 7. Die direkte Personalsteuern, 1–7. On the Austrian bureaucracy, see Deak, Forging. 8. Fürth, Die Einkommensteuer; Die direkten Personalsteuern, ii, 11–14. 9. On the housing crisis, see Feldbauer, Stadtswachstum; John and Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel. On populist politics, see McGrath, Dionysian Art; Schorske, Vienna; Boyer, Political Radicalism. 10. On the Second International, see Braunthal, International. 11. Bonnell, “Marx.” See Sweezy, introduction to Karl Marx, vi–x.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

In November 2019, the US Census Bureau announced that Americans’ rate of moving was the lowest it had been in decades; Balazs Szekely, ‘Renters Became the Majority Population in 22 Big US Cities’, Rent Café Blog, 25 January 2018, https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/change-renter-vs-owner-population-2006-2016; Wendell Cox, ‘Length of Residential Tenure: Metropolitan Areas, Urban Cores, Suburbs and Exurbs’, New Geography, 17 October 2018, https://www.newgeography.com/content/006115-residential-tenure. 28 Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn and Ruth Igielnik, ‘What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities’, Pew Research Center, 22 May 2018, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-divides-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. 29 Peter Stubley, ‘Berlin to freeze rents and give tenants rights to sue landlords after rising costs force residents out to suburbs’, Independent, 23 October 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/berlin-rent-freeze-tenants-sue-landlords-housing-crisis-germany-a9167611.html. 30 Ben Knight, ‘Berlin’s new rent freeze: How it compares globally’, Deutsche Welle, 23 October 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-new-rent-freeze-how-it-compares-globally/a-50937652. 31 Prasanna Rajasekaran, Mark Treskon, Solomon Greene, ‘Rent Control: What Does the Research Tell Us about the Effectiveness of Local Action?’


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Classification: LCC HF5811 .W82 2016 | DDC 659.1/042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016010140 Ebook ISBN 9780385352024 Cover design by Jon Gray v4.1 ep Contents Cover Also by Tim Wu Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: Here’s the Deal Part I: Masters of Blazing Modernities Chapter 1: The First Attention Merchants Chapter 2: The Alchemist Chapter 3: For King and Country Chapter 4: Demand Engineering, Scientific Advertising, and What Women Want Chapter 5: A Long Lucky Run Chapter 6: Not with a Bang but with a Whimper Part II: The Conquest of Time and Space Chapter 7: The Invention of Prime Time Chapter 8: The Prince Chapter 9: Total Attention Control, or The Madness of Crowds Chapter 10: Peak Attention, American Style Chapter 11: Prelude to an Attentional Revolt Chapter 12: The Great Refusal Chapter 13: Coda to an Attentional Revolution Part III: The Third Screen Chapter 14: Email and the Power of the Check-in Chapter 15: Invaders Chapter 16: AOL Pulls ’Em In Part IV: The Importance of Being Famous Chapter 17: Establishment of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex Chapter 18: The Oprah Model Chapter 19: The Panopticon Part V: Won’t Be Fooled Again Chapter 20: The Kingdom of Content: This Is How You Do It Chapter 21: Here Comes Everyone Chapter 22: The Rise of Clickbait Chapter 23: The Place to Be Chapter 24: The Importance of Being Microfamous Chapter 25: The Fourth Screen and the Mirror of Narcissus Chapter 26: The Web Hits Bottom Chapter 27: A Retreat and a Revolt Chapter 28: Who’s Boss Here? Epilogue: The Temenos Acknowledgments Notes A Note About the Author For Sierra INTRODUCTION HERE’S THE DEAL In 2011, the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a tough situation. The district, never wealthy, was hit hard by the housing crisis of the early 2000s and the state government’s own financial meltdown. By the 2010s, schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even some of the basics, like heat. One day in winter, a student posted a picture of a classroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit. Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approached by a company named “Education Funding Partners.”


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

As noted above, there was widespread disagreement, even among experts, about whether there was a paradigm shift in the housing market that justified higher prices. 22. John G. Taylor, professor at Stanford and author of Getting off Track: How Government Actions and Invention Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, blamed Greenspan’s Fed for keeping interest rates too low too long. Other who blamed the Fed for causing the housing crisis included Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr., of the Cato Institute, David Malpass, president of Encima Global, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a steadfast critic of the Fed. 23. BBC news sourcing Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and SIFMA, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm. 24. These funds carried fancy names such as High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. 25.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Ford, “The New Wartime Economy in the Era of Coronavirus,” Financial Times, March 25, 2020. “How to Battle the Coronavirus and Win: A Historians’ Roundtable,” www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-29/history-s-coronavirus-lessons-going-to-war-against-covid-19. 22. E. Levitz, “This Recession Is a Bigger Housing Crisis Than 2008,” Intelligencer, July 13, 2020. 23. M. Konczal, “Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform,” Dissent, March 26, 2020. 24. A. Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking, 2018) and A. Mian and A. Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 25.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

You could find advice about complications when cutting the cord after birth; a short discussion of whether “sportsmen should take dope”; an endorsement of New Scientist magazine; a reproduction of the Ariadne astrological symbol; an article about how house shells quickly made from epoxy could solve the world’s housing crisis; a discussion of “bioholography,” which argued that animals take advantage of “a ‘coherent’ level of background ultrasound”; a cartoon of a naked woman with an elephant head; instructions (printed upside down) on how to correctly use a barometer to measure building height; sketches of the molecular structure of LSD, psilocybin, trimethoxyamphetamine, and inactive bufotenine under the headline ALL THE WAY WITH DNA; and an analysis of the causes of urban rioting—and that was just up to page twenty-four.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

End tax abatements and other incentives for developers, corporations, and chains. Reroute those deals to developers of affordable housing and to small, local businesspeople. 8. Strengthen and expand residential rent regulation. Create real affordable housing not tethered to luxury development. 9. Enforce a moratorium on new luxury construction. New York’s housing crisis is an affordability crisis. Politicians in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities are fighting for this measure. 10. Reduce speculative real estate investment with a tax on luxury pieds-à-terre, as recommended by New York state senator Brad Hoylman. This is similar to London’s “ghost town” tax.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

To put those numbers into context, Americans had $1.3 trillion in outstanding subprime mortgages headed into the 2008 crisis,[18] and when those debts went bad, it had helped to knock the financial system to its knees. If a silver lining existed, it was where the riskiest corporate loans were not. Banks appeared to be far less exposed to leveraged borrowers than they had been to exotic debt bundles during the housing crisis. Unfortunately, nobody had perfect insight into just where the leveraged loans were. In a 2019 report, the Financial Stability Board had been able to directly identify the holders of eight in ten leveraged loans. “Little is known, in particular, about the direct exposures of certain non-bank investors to these markets,” the FSB had acknowledged.[19] As recently as their January meeting, Fed officials had worried that “financial imbalances—including overvaluation and excessive indebtedness—could amplify an adverse shock to the economy.”[20] In 2019, Powell himself had warned that “a highly leveraged business sector could amplify any economic downturn as companies are forced to lay off workers and cut back on investments.”[21] He was an expert on the topic: He had helped to pile debt onto companies during his work in the private sector and had himself questioned whether the Fed’s bond purchases risked sowing the seeds of instability during his early days as a Fed governor.


pages: 549 words: 147,112

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History by Kirsten Grind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, financial engineering, fixed income, fulfillment center, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, junk bonds, low interest rates, Maui Hawaii, money market fund, mortgage debt, naked short selling, NetJets, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, too big to fail, Y2K

Not long before the shareholder meeting, McMurray made a presentation to WaMu’s board of directors, outlining an even bleaker situation than shareholders read about in the year-end report. Killinger allowed him to deliver his thoughts, but he preceded McMurray’s report with a preemptive explanation of the bank’s position. For perhaps the first time, the board saw, in detail, WaMu’s perilous concentration of mortgages in the states hit hardest by the housing crisis. McMurray included a series of charts and graphs illustrating home appreciation in different California markets growing sharply, then falling. In one breathtaking slide, he showed that WaMu’s home equity loans represented 1,366 percent of the bank’s total equity. That startling percentage was colored red.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

According to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, the state “leads the nation in imposing fees on new residential development . . . which vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, often with no explicit rationale. They average $20,000 to $30,000 per unit and account for more than 15 percent of new home prices in jurisdictions providing substantial shares of affordable housing.” State of California Little Hoover Commission, “Rebuilding the Dream: Solving California’s Affordable Housing Crisis,” Report no. 165, May 2002, p. 39, http://www. lhc.ca.gov/studies/165/report165.pdf. 89. Marla Dresch and Steven M. Sheffrin, Who Pays for Development Fees and Exactions? (Sacramento: Public Policy Institute of California, June 1997), p. v, http://www. ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_697SSR.pdf. 90.


pages: 468 words: 145,998

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Henry M. Paulson

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doha Development Round, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, price discovery process, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, trade liberalization, young professional

Dodd had interrupted his presidential campaign for what appeared to be a publicity event. I was new enough to Washington to be put off by this request, and I was also frustrated that GSE reform had been held up during the year. Ben and I met with Dodd in his office at the Russell Senate Office Building, discussing the markets and the housing crisis. The affable Dodd was friendly but criticized me to reporters afterward, questioning whether I understood the importance of the subprime mortgage problem. In fact, I was watching the mortgage market more closely than the senator realized. It was becoming increasingly clear that the housing problems had crossed into the financial system, producing the makings of a much more ominous crisis.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Although our larger portfolio gains happened in October, this position profited throughout the fall of 2008.” Sure, we all focus on “stocks,” but what about lumber? Vandergrift explained his lumber trade (see Chart 4.10): “Lumber was another great market over the fall of 2008. Lumber fell due to the housing crisis in the U.S. Lower demand means lower lumber prices. We sold the market short in the late summer and held the position until mid-November. However, it is important to keep in mind that we went short based off of price action, not fundamentals.” 133 134 This evidence of structure in stock prices suggests alluring possibilities in the way of forecasting.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Headlines from one paper were daubed on an Asian-owned Tower Hamlets newsagent’s shop. The story was the flavour of the week in mid-October 1986. The headlines cited by Jubo Barta included: ‘THEY’RE STILL FLOODING IN’ – London Standard; ‘3,000 ASIANS FLOOD BRITAIN’ – the Sun; ‘IMMIGRANTS PARALYSE HEATHROW’ – Daily Mail; ‘ASIANS START HOUSING CRISIS’ – Daily Mail. The Star commented: ‘Britain finally began to drop the portcullis and raise the drawbridge against the alien hordes.’ The Sun, under the banner headline ‘THE LIARS’, reported ‘the 1,001 lies used by immigrants to cheat their way into Britain’. One pop paper wrote: ‘Remember too that every male immigrant to this country represents either an addition to the dole queues, or a job lost to a native Briton, or both.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

The student is thousands of dollars in debt—on average $14,000—with higher forgone opportunity costs.5 But once the for-profit college gets an enrollment, it receives its $14,000 a year—no risk, no skin in the game. Enrollment equals payment and profit, usually paid for with your taxpayer dollars. Sound familiar? It should. It is precisely the formula that contributed to the subprime housing crisis. Once the secondary markets were willing to buy even the shadiest of mortgages and stamp them with AAA ratings, those actors who originated mortgages were going to get fully paid even if these mortgages were reckless or illegitimate. The government might lose because it was guaranteeing investors; the borrower might have massive debt and could even lose their home, down payment, and credit.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

‘I saw poverty all around me while people worked long hours, often in physically demanding and filthy jobs.’8 Lyn O’Reilly’s father, a casual worker hired by the day, did not enjoy the benefits of secure employment and overtime that some factory workers had – ‘if my dad didn’t have work then we’d be hungry’.9 And many families better off than the O’Reilly’s endured housing poverty in the 1950s. Although the Conservatives built more council accommodation in the 1950s, they relied heavily on the private sector to solve the housing crisis. Their refusal to implement rent controls helped a few slum landlords – most famously London’s Peter Rachman – to make their fortune, but left thousands of families languishing in overcrowded, dilapidated rented housing. Don Milligan, his parents and his older brother ‘lived in three rooms … it wasn’t a flat; there were three separate rooms in a tenement house … no bath’.


Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Bush had fought to reform the two entities repeatedly over the years, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition in Congress. “It was literally like William Wallace fighting the British,” said Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary who specialized in economic issues. “It was a slaughter.” Now with a housing crisis in full flame, the question was whether it was too late. A week later, John McCain began airing a new ad with a theme typically used by the party out of power. “We’re worse off than we were four years ago,” the ad said. ON AUGUST 8, Bush was standing in a reception line in Beijing about to shake hands with President Hu Jintao marking the opening of the Summer Olympics when his deputy national security adviser, James Jeffrey, sidled up and whispered in his ear.

., ranch of, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 16.1, 19.1, 22.1, 23.1, 23.2, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 30.1, 30.2, 32.1, 33.1, 34.1, 34.2, 36.1, 37.1 “dead or alive” comment of, 8.1, 15.1 democracy and freedom agenda of, prl.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1, 16.1, 17.1, 19.1, 20.1, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4, 21.5, 21.6, 24.1, 25.1, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 27.4, 27.5, 28.1, 28.2, 31.1, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2 37.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 Democratic opposition to, 5.1, 5.2, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1, 17.1, 21.1, 24.1, 24.2, 24.3, 26.1, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 33.4, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, epl.1 detainee policy of, 10.1, 11.1, 13.1, 18.1, 18.2, 20.1, 21.1, 24.1, 24.2, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 31.1, 34.1, 35.1, epl.1 domestic policies of, prl.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 11.1, 16.1, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 31.1, 32.1, 34.1, epl.1, epl.2 drinking problem of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 4.1 drunk-driving arrest of, 1.1, 3.1, 4.1 economic policies of, prl.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 11.1, 13.1, 18.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 460–61, 32.1, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, 37.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4, epl.5 education of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 11.1 education reform supported by, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1, 21.1, 31.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3 energy policies of, 5.1, 6.1, 9.1, 18.1, 22.1, 24.1, 30.1, 33.1, epl.1 environmental policies of, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 15.1, 25.1, 31.1, 34.1, 35.1 as father, prl.1, 2.1, 2.2, 13.1, 14.1, 14.2, 16.1, 16.2, 17.1, 34.1 final days and retirement of financial bailouts approved by, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 first term of, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, 4.1, 5.1, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4, 23.1, 25.1, 25.2, 27.1, 31.1, 31.2, 35.1, epl.1, epl.2 foreign policy of, prl.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 14.1, 17.1, 20.1, 20.2, 21.1, 23.1, 26.1, 27.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3 free market ideology of, 11.1, 34.1 at G-8 summit gay rights and, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 30.1, epl.1, nts.1n at Ground Zero, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 10.1, 11.1, 18.1 gubernatorial campaign of (1994) gubernatorial campaign of (1998) at Harvard Business School, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 homeland security policy of, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1n housing crisis and policies of, 24.1, 26.1, 27.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 Hurricane Katrina response of, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 24.1, 27.1, 31.1, 35.1, 35.2, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n–29n, nts.2n–49n immigration policy of, 2.1, 3.1, 20.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 31.1, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 37.1, epl.1, epl.2 inaugurations of, epi.1, 5.1, 19.1, 20.1 intelligence information of, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 15.1, 17.1, 18.1, 33.1 Iraq War as conducted by, see Iraq War Kabul visited by, 25.1, 36.1 at Kennebunkport compound, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 27.1, 32.1 legal council of Libby pardon denied by, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, prl.4, prl.5, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 32.3, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1, nts.1n–62n loyalty to, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1, 17.1, 19.1, 20.1, 23.1, 23.2, 26.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 31.3, 32.1, 32.2, 34.1, 36.1, 36.2, 37.1, epl.1 media coverage of, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 15.1, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 18.1, 19.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 28.1, 34.1, 37.1 memoir of, prl.1, prl.2, 5.1, 11.1, 13.1, 16.1, 17.1, 36.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 Middle East policy of, prl.1, prl.2, 6.1, 8.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 14.1, 16.1, 19.1, 21.1, 24.1, 25.1, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 28.1, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 34.2, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 37.1 in Midland, Tex., 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 9.1, 37.1 military commissions established by, 10.1, 20.1, 20.2, 22.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 33.1, 34.1, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n “Mission Accomplished” ceremony of, 14.1, 15.1, 23.1, 18.1 nicknames given by, prl.1, 1.1, 2.1 North Korean policy of, prl.1, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 13.1, 16.1, 17.1, 21.1, 22.1, 23.1, 25.1, 28.1, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 34.1, 34.2, 34.3, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 in oil industry, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2 Ownership Society agenda of, 18.1, 21.1, 32.1, epl.1 Palestinian state supported by, 11.1, 27.1, 33.1, 34.1 personality of, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, 15.1, 18.1, 25.1, 26.1, 26.2, 30.1, 32.1, 36.1, 37.1 pets owned by, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 14.1, 17.1, 31.1 Powell’s relationship with, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 16.1, 18.1, 20.1, 20.2 preemptive war doctrine of, prl.1, 11.1, 12.1, 18.1, 20.1, 32.1 prescription drugs program of, 16.1, 21.1, 22.1, epl.1, epl.2 in presidential debates, 4.1, 18.1, 18.2 Putin’s relationship with, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 21.1, 21.2, 27.1, 27.2, 32.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 37.1, nts.1n reading by, 4.1, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 27.1, 28.1, 29.1, 35.1 religious convictions of, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 11.1, 17.1, 19.1, 25.1, 26.1, 31.1 as Republican leader, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 15.1, 17.1, 17.2, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 23.2, 25.1, 26.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 28.4, 29.1, 29.2, 30.1, 30.2, 31.1, 32.1, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 34.2, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 36.1 reputation of, prl.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 8.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2, 16.1, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 24.1, 25.1, 28.1, 31.1, 31.2, 35.1, 37.1, 37.2, epl.1, epl.2 Rice’s relationship with, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 16.1, 20.1, 20.2, 21.1, 26.1, 27.1, 27.2, 28.1, 29.1, 29.2, 30.1, 30.2, 30.3, 31.1, 31.2, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2 Rumsfeld’s relationship with, 6.1, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1, 16.1, 18.1, 18.2, 20.1, 20.2, 25.1, 25.2, 26.1, 26.2, 27.1, 27.2, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 28.4, 29.1, 29.2, 29.3, 30.1, 31.1 running by, 7.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 13.1, 16.1 at St.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Marco Rubio, a rising Republican star from Florida, for instance, who had defeated a moderate in the 2010 Republican Senate primary with the help of forty-nine donors from the June 2010 Koch seminar, soon proclaimed, “This idea—that our problems were caused by a government that was too small—it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.” Against this backdrop, on April 15, 2011, Ryan’s budget plan, now packaged as “The Path to Prosperity,” came up for a vote in the House of Representatives. In the past, its prospects had been uncertain at best. Not just Democrats but many Republicans had deemed previous versions too harsh.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

They warned him not to buy real estate until 2009 at the earliest. Biden was running for president again, and Connaughton joined the campaign and traveled to Des Moines, where a city councilman told him that one of the top three issues in Iowa was foreclosures. Connaughton relayed the message to a Biden staffer: the growing housing crisis should be a focus. (In the seventies, when Biden was still a freshman senator, Hubert Humphrey advised him, “You have to pick an issue that becomes yours. You should become Mr. Housing. Housing is the future.”) The idea went nowhere. The candidates weren’t talking about foreclosures. Connaughton ignored the warnings, too.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Many writers have picked up this theme, including the urban economists Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, but none has been as forthright and bold as Benjamin Barber in his book with the provocative title If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.5 These are indicative of a rising consciousness that cities are where the action is—where challenges have to be addressed in real time and where governance seems to work, at least relative to the increasing dysfunctionality of the nation-state. 3. AN ASIDE: A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF GARDEN CITIES AND NEW TOWN Following the destruction wrought by the Second World War in which millions of houses were destroyed, the socialist government in Britain faced a mammoth housing crisis. The majority of these damaged houses were in working-class areas, so this greatly accelerated the ongoing processes of “urban development” and “slum clearance” that had already been on the agenda before the war, and in which Ebenezer Howard’s idea of garden cities was a classic visionary example.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

She would give you what you needed: moral support, good advice, and just the warmth of her character. And if you had practical problems: a car that needed fixing, or a rat in the basement, or a problem to get the coal furnace either to work at all or not to work too much, Julian would always be able to fix it. Those were wonderful years.”15 With the housing crisis solved, and the computer building completed, the engineers could start building the computer—along with its power supplies and cooling equipment—rather than working on one component at a time. The computer building was adjacent to the housing project, and, says Rubinoff, “you could get to work and get home to lunch and back to work in less time than you can do it anywhere else.”


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“Synod Working Document Seeks Ways to Promote Justice, Peace in Africa.” Catholic News Service, March 19, 2009. Grandoni, Dino. “98% of Catholic Women Have Used Contraception the Church Opposes.” Atlantic Wire, February 10, 2012. Gumbel, Andrew. “Italian Men Cling to Mamma; Unemployment and a Housing Crisis Force Males to Live at Home in Their Thirties.” The World section, Independent (UK), December 15, 1996. Hebblethwaite, Peter. “Science, Magisterium at Odds: Pontifical Academy Emphasizes Need for Global Population Control—Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” National Catholic Reporter, July 15, 1994.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “Long Term Persistence,” Journal of the European Economic Association 14, no. 6 (December 1, 2016): 1401–36. 3. Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 3 (September 2005): 762–800. 4. Henry Grabar, “California Bill Would Allow Unrestricted Housing by Transit, Solve State Housing Crisis,” Slate, January 05, 2018, https://slate.com/business/2018/01/california-bill-sb827-residential-zoning-transit-awesome.html. 5. “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center (website), accessed August 07, 2018, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband. 6. “Archive: Internet Access and Use Statistics—Households and Individuals,” eurostat (website), https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Without such insurance, most homebuyers can’t get a mortgage, and in those fire and flood zones where insurance rates skyrocket, many owners will try to sell – but to whom, and who will finance the purchase? This would set the stage for panic selling and a housing market collapse more serious than the crisis of 2008 because it would not be a one-off event. As we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate. Our global economy is a tightly coupled system – that’s the message of 2008 and, more recently, of the supply-chain disruptions resulting from the pandemic.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Some economists who had been strong advocates of behavioral approaches prior to the crash, such as Robert Shiller and Robert Frank, leaped in with op-eds essentially blaming the entire crisis on native cognitive weaknesses of market participants.37 This line became entrenched with the appearance of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: displaying an utter contempt for the history of economic thought, they “reduced” the message of Keynes’s General Theory to the proposition that people get a little irrational from time to time, and thus push the system away from full neoclassical general equilibrium.38 They wrote: The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking. But current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions . . . In Keynes’ view these animal spirits are the main cause for why the economy fluctuates the way it does.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

., 263 Mean Genes (Burnham), 337 mean reversion, 286, 292, 324–326 Medallion Fund, 6 “ME HURT YOU” narrative, 339–340, 341, 343, 345 Melanesia, 151–152 memory, 130 merger arbitrage, 267 Meriwether, John, 241 Merrill Lynch, 242–243, 306, 308, 309 Merton, Robert C., 27, 127, 266, 356–357; financial engineering innovations by, 211; housing crisis viewed by, 322–323; at Long-Term Capital Management, 241; network contagion viewed by, 376–377; Nobel Prize awarded to, 97. See also Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing formula mescaline, 79 meta-analysis, 100 Metallgesellschaft, 320, 321 method acting, 105 Microsoft Windows, 372 Milgram, Stanley, 346, 347 Mill, John Stuart, 211 Milner, Peter, 87 Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research, 159 Minsky, Marvin, 132–133 mirror neuron, 110, 157 miscarriages, 152 Mischel, Walter, 120–121 mobile banking, 356 money market funds, 228, 300, 301, 409 Moffitt, Terrie, 160 Montague, Read, 97, 98 Moore, Gordon, 356 Moore, Jesse W., 12 Moore’s Law, 356, 358, 385 Morgan Stanley, 235–237, 240, 284, 286, 307, 308 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 46–47 morphine, 89, 90 Morse, Adair, 353–354 mortgages, 7, 290, 292, 293, 297–329, 376, 377, 410 Morton Thiokol Inc., 13–16 Mossin, Jan, 263 motor control, 153 MSCI World Index, 251 Mulherin, J.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

While the mama-san, the matriarch who ran the bar, served us another shot of whisky from Kodama’s personal bottle, he told me the tragic saga of a Chinese man who had fallen deeply in love. His tale was embellished with multiple details from reliable sources that I was subsequently able to cross-check, point by point. For 4,000 yen, Xu had rented a small studio in the love hotel for a few hours, to engage in a bout of phoenix and dragon. Given the housing crisis and the small size of Tokyo apartments, it is common for married couples to use love hotels to have some intimate time together, away from the rest of the family. Naturally, I am summarizing. After the autopsy, the background of 58-year-old Xu Yuanhai, director of the Sino-Japanese Friendship Association, left investigators with some serious reservations about Madame Liu’s version of events—the pillow talk on this particular futon seemed to have been of a particular flavour: the spice of an espionage case.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

So, I figured, there was a $500 billion financial loss from the housing crash that holders of financial securities would have to bear, one way or another. But, the dot-com crash involved an even greater financial loss—and the dot-com crash only pushed unemployment up by about 1.5 percent. The housing crisis, I concluded, was unlikely to have large effects on the economy. But the market reasoned differently. As a large swath of those with money who move financial markets saw things, there were $500 billion in known losses somewhere. But maybe that was just the tip of an iceberg. Maybe the trained professionals who had told us that owning tranches of millions of houses between Los Angeles and Albuquerque was safe had lied, or were profoundly misinformed.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Yet during this short period a radical transformation of Florence was begun, following a masterplan conceived by engineer-architect Giuseppe Poggi (1811–1901). So great was the impact of Poggi’s scheme that the present-day appearance of Florence owes more to him than to any architect of the Renaissance. The housing crisis Aerial view of Piazza Beccaria Porta San Gallo, Piazza della Libertà In 1865 Florence had a population of 150,000, so an influx of twenty thousand government employees plus their families created an immediate strain. Finding offices wasn’t a problem – while the parliament moved into the Palazzo Vecchio, the ministries requisitioned buildings such as the Uffizi and the Palazzo Medici.


pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

While the process of gentrification kept tensions at a constantly elevated state in Jaffa, a reverse migration of fundamentalist settlers to Israel’s coastal heart threatened to set the neighborhood of Ajami alight. In 2010, the Israeli Supreme Court authorized a group of religious nationalist Jewish settlers from the West Bank to build a Jews-only settlement in the heart of Ajami, on a plot of land originally promised by the state to the local Arab population to help ameliorate its housing crisis. The new settlement was a central cog in the radical right’s “building in the hearts” campaign, which aimed to create a bloc of settlements in the center of mixed Arab-Jewish cities that would be impossible to dislodge, and to use them as citadels for the incitement of ethnic conflict. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, a West Bank rabbi who planned to lead the Jaffa settlement’s yeshiva, said that if settlers “would send one-tenth of their residents to large cities . . . this one-tenth of people imbued with faith will establish a community, a yeshiva, and a center amid the Jewish populace, which will create a different reality than we know today.”


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

Rattling off reams of housing data, Greenspan described how he considered the crisis in the markets to be a once-in-a-hundred-year event and how the government might have to take some extraordinary measures to stabilize it. The former Fed chairman had long been a critic of Fannie and Freddie but now realized that they needed to be shored up. He did have one suggestion about the housing crisis, but it was a rhetorical flourish befitting his supply-and-demand mind-set: He suggested that there was too much housing supply and that the only real way to really fix the problem would be for the government to buy up vacant homes and burn them. After the call, Paulson, with a laugh, told his staff: “That’s not a bad idea.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Rainbow flags and emblems are posted in the windows and yards of countless businesses and residences. Unlike most progressive cities with high LGBTQ+ populations, Portland lacks a definitive ‘gayborhood.’ The collective, speculative sentiment as to why is that it’s already a liberal bubble, or that everyone in town is a little bit gay. Undoubtedly, gentrification and the city’s housing crisis play a larger part in this. But no matter where you find yourself, it is generally safe – and even empowering – to exist in your skin here. However, despite an embrace of LGBTQ+ people and culture by Portland’s wider population, bias crimes (especially toward transgender and nonbinary people) do still occur.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

The median wealth of the Hispanic population, which had participated particularly actively in the housing boom, plunged by 86.3 percent between 2007 and 2010.43 The median African American household saw virtually its entire housing wealth wiped out, and African American home owners were twice as likely to suffer foreclosure as white borrowers.44 It did not produce the memorable imagery of the 1930s Dust Bowl, but the housing crisis that began in 2007 forced the largest mass movement of people in the United States since the Great Depression. And as minority home ownership collapsed, the result was resegregation along racial lines.45 With households suffering, in America’s economic downswing of 2008 it was consumption that led the way.46 As demand fell, so did production and employment.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Architects are as keen on high density as ever but now want to devise street patterns, squares and low-rise homes on a human scale. By the early eighties Britain’s housing shortage was, in general terms, solved by the concrete boom: some 440,000 homes were created in tower blocks alone. But migration and the break-up of families since then have created a new housing crisis and once again skyscrapers are coming back in fashion. They are different now. From Manchester’s new forty-seven-storey Beetham Tower, with its queasy-making overhang, to plans for a 66-storey shard-shaped London Bridge Tower, these are chic palaces for the urban rich, not upended slums. They are as close to Harry Watton’s off-the-peg blocks as the drug habits of supermodels are to the ravages of heroin in prison.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Burns, George. (1988). Gracie: A Love Story. New York: Putnam. Bushway, Shawn D., and Stoll, Michael A., and Weiman, David, eds. (2007). Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Butkiewicz, James L. (2009). “Fixing the Housing Crisis,” Forbes, April 30, p. 26. Caillau, Robert. (1995). “A Little History of the World Wide Web,” World Wide Web Consortium, www.w3.org/History.html. Cain, Louis P., and Paterson, Donald G. (2013). “Children of Eve: Population and Well-being in History,” Population and Development Review 39, no. 3.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It also serves tapas and good burgers (mains $11 to $22). 7Shopping Cheese CentralFOOD ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.cheesecentrallodi.com; 11 N School St; h10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 1- 5pm Sun) Ask Cindy the cheesemonger for thoughtful pairings with Lodi wines. If you want to make a weekend out of Lodi’s wine region, try one of the cooking classes. Stockton Stockton has had its share of ups and downs – including recent challenges with the housing crisis and large civic debt – but the downtown and waterfront redevelopment is one of the valley’s more promising grassroots efforts. In the summer, when festivals take over the Weber Point Events Center, Stockton makes for a fun detour. The city has an interesting past that is just under the surface of its checkered facades.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

Those who knew him from Berkeley understood that this was a man with a remarkable flair for drawing others into his orbit. And those, like Dorothy McKibbin, who met him for the first time in New Mexico invariably found themselves eager to please him. “He made you do the impossible, ” McKibbin recalled. One day, she was called from Santa Fe to the Site and asked if she would help to alleviate the ongoing housing crisis by taking over a lodge ten miles up the road and turning it into housing for a hundred employees. McKibbin resisted. “Well,” she protested, “I’ve never run a hotel before.” At that moment the door of Oppenheimer’s office opened and he stuck his head out and said, “Dorothy, I wish you would.” He then withdrew his head and closed the door.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Big-name entertainers, like Frank Sinatra, Liberace and Sammy Davis Jr, arrived on stage at the same time as topless French showgirls in the ‘Fabulous Fifties.’ Since then, Sin City continues to exist chiefly to satisfy the desires of visitors. Once North America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, the recent housing crisis hit residents here especially hard. Now among the glittering lights of the Strip, you’ll spot unlit, vacant condominium towers that speak to a need for economic revival. Yet Vegas has always been a boom or bust kind of place, and if history is any judge, the city will double-down and resume its winning streak in no time.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

The UK’s first public building built in the Modernist style was the sleek, streamlined De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff in 1935, and described by Mendelsohn as a “horizontal skyscraper”. 1945 to 1980 The German bombing of World War II created a national housing crisis of immense dimensions: by 1945, nearly a third of the nation’s houses had been destroyed or damaged. City planners up and down the country set about the problem with vim and gusto – but, with one or two notable exceptions, they got the solutions very wrong. Terraced houses were associated with slums, so they were knocked down by the thousand, but all too often they were replaced by tower blocks in a pale imitation of the Modernist style proclaimed by the likes of Corbusier: Modernism had gained a foothold in England after London’s 1951 Festival of Britain.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Carnegie’s response was to integrate production forward—into finished steel. With Frick out of the way, Phipps in full retirement, and Tom Carnegie long gone, there was no one left to restrain Andrew’s adventurism. “Urge prompt action, essential,” he cabled Schwab on July 7 from the telegraph office he had set up at the Skibo lodge house. “Crisis has arrived, only one policy open; start at once hoop, rod, wire, nail mills, no half way about last two. Extend coal and coke roads, announce these; also tubes. Prevent others building…. Never been time when more prompt action essential, indeed absolutely necessary to maintain property…. Have no fear as to result, victory certain.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Settlers of Swiss and German descent, moving west from Illinois and Nebraska, populated the area in 1886, and most residents made their living as farmers, growing alfalfa, pears, and apples. After World War II, with the creation of Edwards Air Force Base and U.S. Air Force Plant 42, the region evolved into a center for aerospace and defense activities, with contractors such as McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Northrop, and Lockheed establishing factories here. Until the housing crisis and recent recession struck, Palmdale was one of Southern California’s fastest-growing cities. Getting Here and Around From the Los Angeles basin take Highway 14 to get to Palmdale. From the east, arrive via the Pearblossom Highway (Highway 18/138). Regional Metrolink trains serve the area from Los Angeles.


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

If you’re out on a F riday night and looking for something that ’s off the straight-laced path, head to the Cinch (& 415/776-4162) for its weekly Charlie Horse drag show. On weekends, check out Harry Denton’s Starlight Room ( & 415/ 395-8595): Their Sunday’s a Drag brunch performance is fit for a queen. NORTHERN C ALIFORNIA WINE COUNTRY While the r est of the countr y struggles with unstable economic times and a housing crisis, the Wine Country seems to remain unscathed, at least to the visitor. Sure, you can scoop up a house in do wntown Napa at a fraction of the cost of pr evious years, but the multimillion-dollar homes ar e still as hot as ev er, as ar e the upscale r estaurants, luxur y hotels, and r eservations-only wineries.