popular capitalism

17 results back to index


pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

‘A Sapling’s Sound Roots; Germans Take to Shares’, The Economist, 10 March 2001, p1; George Melloan, ‘Europe’s New Shareholder Culture Spurs Big Changes’, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2000, pA27. 206 FREE MARKET MISSIONARIES 31 ‘A Sapling’s Sound Roots’, p1. 32 Steven Greenhouse, ‘France Embraces “Popular Capitalism’’’, New York Times, 8 June 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 1987; Shawn Tully, ‘Europe Goes Wild over Privatisation’, Fortune, vol 115, no 5, 1987. Greenhouse, ‘France Embraces “Popular Capitalism”’. Hagaman T. Carter, ‘The Myth of Shareholder Democracy’, Management Accounting, vol 72, no 11, 1991. Ibid. Ralph Nader and Joel Seligman, ‘The Myth of Shareholder Democracy’, in Mark Green, et al.

This was supposed to establish, in the words of one Conservative minister, ‘a new breed of owners’ and have ‘an important effect on attitudes’, thereby breaking down ‘the divisions between owners and earners’.20 The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) formed a wider share ownership taskforce and the government formed the Wider Share Ownership Council. The float of shares in privatized companies was said to have ‘given a boost to popular capitalism unimaginable in the pre-Thatcher era’ and the profits made by millions of small investors made it ‘difficult to question the logic underpinning privatisation’.21 Conservatives used the rhetoric that privatization would spread wealth more widely in the community and create ‘real public ownership’ of government enterprises to sell privatization to the electorate and to take away public ownership.

Its sale of shares in glass manufacturer Saint-Gobain was promoted in a $6 million advertising campaign that included television ads that SHAREHOLDER DEMOCRACY 197 sold the shares ‘the way US companies market soap or toothpaste . . . A network of more than 20,000 banks and post offices pushed shares’ to customers conducting their normal business.32 Finance Minister Edouard Balladur declared his campaign for ‘popular capitalism’ a success when floats of these industries were heavily oversubscribed by people wanting to buy shares in them. As in the UK, small shareholders quickly sold their shares when the price went up. Even then, the share floats could be seen as a success in that ordinary people had tasted ‘the fruits of capitalism’, which some said was one of the aims of the exercise – an effort to lure people away from socialism.


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

Instead, they will work quietly to do their very best, aided by the Murdoch press and others, to make sure Labour does not get in.’16 In other words, large corporate interests, deeply embedded in government and backed by the mass media, were muscling up with other sections of the Establishment to take on a democratically elected politician. Here is the legacy of the Thatcherite crusade of mass privatization in the 1980s. Selling off public assets was billed as creating a new ‘popular capitalism’; the result was anything but. Four of the Big Six are owned by foreign companies. The only state-run energy provider is EDF – which is owned by the French government. British ‘popular capitalism’ has actually been in a steep long-term decline. Well over 50 per cent of shares on the London Stock Exchange were owned by individuals in 1963, but today that number is just over 10 per cent. By 2013, 53.2 per cent of British shares were owned by foreign investors.

In the first half of 2011 alone, 60 per cent of new-build homes in central London were bought by overseas investors. The £5.2 billion splashed out by foreign investors on London’s housing in 2011 dwarfed all government investment in the Affordable Housing Programme in the whole of England.17 In no sense could Britain’s modern economic system be described as ‘popular capitalism’, dominated by small-time entrepreneurs, shareholders and property owners. Not that the failures of free-market dogma deter David Cameron’s government, keen as it is to finish what High Thatcherism had begun. Even Margaret Thatcher baulked at selling off the Royal Mail, making it clear she was ‘not prepared to have the Queen’s head privatized’.

While the pension fund – that is, the Royal Mail’s debt – remained in public hands, the profitable business was sold off. Yet the company was drastically undervalued, leading it to be privatized at hundreds of millions of pounds below its actual worth, depriving the taxpayer of so much revenue. There was little pretence at popular capitalism. Investors had to have a minimum of £750 available to buy shares. ‘It is disappointing that so much has been reserved for international funds and speculators, taking away from all individual applicants in the UK,’ complained Malcolm Hurlston, the chairman of the Esop Centre, which advocates workers’ shareholding schemes.18 Two-thirds of the company was bought up by City institutions; big winners included sovereign wealth funds, including foreign dictatorships such as Kuwait.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

New Labour enthusiasts do not like to be reminded that between 1990 and 1996, a million people lost their homes through repossession by the mortgage companies, while 390,000 homes, once publicly owned, were seized by those companies. Come 2009 almost one million properties were estimated to be in ‘negative equity’: the homeowners had paid too much for them in the first instance and could not get their money back. Thatcher had resolved to make Britain a nation of small businesses. This was the much vaunted ‘popular capitalism’. Yet by 1997, the year of Labour’s victory, personal bankruptcies had ‘stabilized’ at 22,000 a year; 30,000 companies had become insolvent between 1990 and 1997. The ‘flexible labour market’ so beloved by Thatcher, Blair, and the transnationals had, in reality, made unemployment a mainstream experience.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The richest 1% of the population own more than the rest put together.101 The idea of a ‘popular capitalism’, touted at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s wave of privatisations in the 1980s, in which everyone would own shares, predictably did not materialise. Most of the shares from the privatisation of nationalised industries that the public were allowed to buy were quickly sold on to large institutional ‘investors’ in order to make quick gains. So the privatisations of the 1980s did not produce popular capitalism, though it has to be said that this one-off source of unearned income was popular at the time.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Many leading economies are dangerously focused on one city: most obviously the United Kingdom but also South Korea and Sweden. The United States has numerous centers of excellence: New York for finance, San Francisco for technology, Houston for energy, and Los Angeles for films. American capitalism is also the world’s most democratic. The United States was the birthplace of the engines of popular capitalism, from mass production to franchising to mutual funds. In many countries capitalism has always been associated with a plutocratic elite. In America, it has been associated with openness and opportunity: making it possible for people who were born in obscurity to rise to the top of society and for ordinary people to enjoy goods and services that were once confined to the elites.

Lewis sneers at the standardized nature of all these products—he describes one room as being “as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice”—but Floral Heights represented the democratization of wealth and opportunity as the productivity gains of the previous decades transformed the lives of ordinary Americans. THE COMPANY GOES PUBLIC Democratization extended to the core institution of American business life, the business corporation: the total number of shareholders increased from about a million at the turn of the century to up to 7 million in 1928. The most enthusiastic practitioner of popular capitalism was AT&T, which increased the number of stockholders from 10,000 in 1901 to 642,180 in 1931. The principal stockholders of the country’s biggest railroad (Pennsylvania Railroad), the biggest public utility (AT&T), and the biggest industrial corporation (U.S. Steel) owned less than 1 percent of the shares.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

utm_campaign=Global:%20Trust%20Barometer%202020&utm_source=Website; Pew Research Center, “Stark Partisan Divisions in Americans’ Views of ‘Socialism,’ ‘Capitalism,’ ” FactTank: News in the Numbers, June 25, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/25/stark-partisan-divisions-in-americans-views-of-socialism-capitalism/; and Lydia Saad, “Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in the U.S.,” Gallup, November 25, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx. 2. In May 2016, Time magazine’s cover article was about “American Capitalism’s Great Crisis,” which argued that “the U.S. system of market capitalism itself is broken.” And in 2018, The Economist launched Open Future, an ongoing discussion about fixing the flaws of capitalism.


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

Khandelwal, “The Return to Protectionism,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 25638, issued in March 2019, revised in October 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w25638. 58 higher support for socialism than their elders: Lydia Saad, “Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in U.S.,” Gallup, November 25, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx. 60 “a capitalist to my bones”: In 2018 remarks to the New England Council, as reported by Katie Lannan, Twitter post, July 16, 2018, https://twitter.com/katielannan/status/1018852303212896257?s=20. 60 less pure: Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 61 “market capitalism is not a religion”: Tucker Carlson, “Mitt Romney Supports the Status Quo.


pages: 321

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies by Igor Tulchinsky

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, data science, deep learning, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, natural language processing, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, systematic trading, text mining, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Another type of capital arbitrage is to trade on changes in the company’s capital structure, such as share buybacks, share issuances, debt issuances, or debt exchanges. These trades do not express a view on the overall quality of the company but on relative mispricings or shifts in value among different forms of capital. One of the most popular capital structure arbitrage plays is to profit from mispricings between a company’s equity and its bonds or credit default swaps. This strategy has gained a lot of popularity with the growth of the CDS market. Consider, for example, what happens when extremely bad news hits a company. This will cause both its bonds and its stocks to fall, though the stock prices will likely decline further, for several reasons.


pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

The government too tried to foment the public’s craze for investing in privatized companies. If individuals owned personal stakes in the newly listed businesses, the theory went, they would feel closely connected to the government’s market reforms and less inclined to boot it out at the next general election. Thatcher herself summed up what she described as her ‘popular capitalism’ crusade at the 1986 Tory Party conference in Bournemouth. ‘Millions have already become shareholders. And soon there will be opportunities for millions more, in British Gas, British Airways, British Airports and Rolls-Royce. Who says we’ve run out of steam? We’re in our prime!’ Many of the big privatizations had been funded by workers buying shares in their own employers, but for the upheaval to be a success, they would need to be persuaded to buy shares in other companies as well.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

John Cassidy, “All Together Now: New Theories on Why We Can’t Stay Out of the Stock Market,” New Yorker, March 27, 2000. 52. Quoted in John Cassidy, “Striking It Rich: The Rise and Fall of Popular Capitalism.” 53. John Makin, interview by the author, October 30, 2014. Makin held a position at AEI and was also on the staff of the hedge fund Caxton Associates. 54. “It took me a long time to live that down.” Byron Wien, interview by the author, September 9, 2011. 55. John Cassidy, “Striking It Rich: The Rise and Fall of Popular Capitalism.” 56. Don Kohn confirms that the “irrational exuberance” phrase was intended to attract notice. “The paragraph on irrational exuberance was debated a lot internally.

In his ninth NBI lecture, delivered in 1964, Greenspan had declared that “standards of living tend to grow at an accelerating rate.” The more ideas people generated, the more they were in a position to generate further ideas. 27. The Wall Street seer was Barton Biggs, speaking to John Cassidy of the New Yorker. See John Cassidy, “Striking It Rich: The Rise and Fall of Popular Capitalism,” New Yorker, January 14, 2002. 28. Woodward, Maestro, 171. See also Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 172. Slifman notes that Greenspan’s view that profits were relatively easy to measure was not shared by staff experts. Larry Slifman, e-mail to the author, October 7, 2015. 29.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

In all, Thatcher privatized three-quarters of Britain’s state-owned companies, raising over £30 billion for the exchequer and shifting forty-six major businesses with 900,000 employees to the private sector.28 She encouraged ordinary people to buy shares, thus creating the image, at least, of “popular capitalism.” And she extended her crusade against Leviathan to the emerging sprawl in Brussels. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain,” she thundered in Bruges in 1988, “only to see them re-imposed at a European level.”29 Thanks to Thatcher, the center of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

But that same month he bought his first shares in SQM, at rock bottom prices. He would be back. SQM was at the beginning of a five-year privatisation process, which would eventually lead to Ponce Lerou holding majority control of the company. The privatisation was initially designed to give workers shares in their companies under the slogan ‘popular capitalism’, with a promise to make workers owners of their companies. At the time the labour law stated that all companies had to give ten percent of the profit every year to the workers, in proportion to the salaries they received. At SQM workers were awarded part of the company’s profits in shares.


pages: 309 words: 95,644

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) by William Zinsser

affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, feminist movement, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, popular capitalism, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman

If you look long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life. Even more time went into the sentence about Venice and Versailles. Originally I wrote, “Names like London and Paris didn’t turn up in our accounts of earlier trips.” Not much fun there. I tried to think of other popular capitals. Rome and Cairo? Athens and Bangkok? No better. Maybe alliteration would help—readers enjoy any effort to gratify their sense of rhythm and cadence. Madrid and Moscow? Tel Aviv and Tokyo? Too tricky. I stopped thinking of capitals and tried to think of tourist-infested cities. Venice popped into my head and I was glad to see it; everybody goes to Venice.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

In 1984 he once again asked Americans the question he had posed during the presidential election of 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” They answered massively in the affirmative and gave him a sweeping reelection victory. In both the United States and Britain, conservatives exulted that they had discovered a potent political formula for gaining blue-collar votes: a combination of lower taxes, social conservatism, popular capitalism, and patriotism. In the United States these voters were called “Reagan Democrats”; in Britain they were labeled “Essex man,” after a working-class county just outside London. Reagan and Thatcher shared a common outlook on the world. Both were suspicious of détente, and both were determined to take a tougher line with the Soviet Union.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

Data collected by Robert Shiller of Yale University confirmed that despite the severe bear market of 2001 to 2002, as of January 2007, three-quarters of investors believed that stocks were the best long-term investment.37 And with good reason. Stocks have returned a very healthy 15 percent per year measured from the market lows reached in October 2002 through the end of 2006. By 2007, stocks as measured by the popular capitalization-weighted indexes were at or near all-time highs, having recovered all their losses sustained in the bear market. The bull and bear markets of the last decade were no different from the bull and bear markets that preceded them. As stocks rose, the bulls came out of the woodwork, and at the top they fabricated theories that would support even higher prices.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

In a broad sense, he is right: the real bosses are not the likes of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, but the workers themselves. They are the ones who own most of society’s capital, through their pension rights, and who receive most of society’s rewards, through their wages and social benefits. But would it not be better to call this popular capitalism? Drucker’s work can also be criticized for its unevenness. Whereas The Concept of the Corporation is a model monograph, tightly argued and based on original research, some of his later books can be rambling and repetitive, full of recycled examples. His voice has also become less distinctive.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

However, the death of a local MP in October meant that Vincent Hanna, a BBC journalist with a talent for getting his own way, was due up north to cover the by-election, equipped with one of the new phones. The now customer-conscious BT obligingly extended the network several days early for his benefit.25 The success of the BT sale awoke Margaret Thatcher’s enthusiasm for something she now called ‘popular capitalism’. She declared in October 1986: ‘The great political reform of the last century was to enable more and more people to have a vote. Now the great Tory reform of this century is to enable more and more people to own property.’26 In that spirit, privatizations came thick and fast, and everyone was invited to join the great share sale.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, 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 Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Thatcher’s second term was marked by a year-long miners’ strike, the failure of which symbolised the decline of trade union power. And it also saw the speeding up of the transfer of businesses from the public to the private sector, a process that was known as privatisation. The telecom and gas industries were privatised with the help of marketing campaigns aimed at the general public. The goal of this “popular capitalism” was to create a class of share- and property-owners who would be resistant to the appeal of socialism. All told, 50 companies were privatised or sold under Thatcher, including the national airline, the airport operator, the main steel company and the water utilities. The electricity and railway companies would follow under Thatcher’s successor, John Major.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Indeed, 18.5 percent of households had zero or negative net wealth. Much has been made of the shareholders democracy in the new forms of capitalism, but table 4.29 shows the extreme concentration of stock ownership in 1995, even when we include stock plans, mutual funds, individual retirement accounts, and other instruments of popular capitalism. While America is an extreme case of income inequality and declining real wages among the industrialized nations, its evolution is significant because it does represent the flexible labor market model at which most European nations, and certainly European firms, are aiming.141 And the social consequences of such a trend are similar in Europe.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The British balance of payments had been suffering, because oil prices declined, and Lawson took the circumstances of 1985 as guide: the pound had indeed declined by 16 per cent against the Mark, which would of course add to inflation. In 1986 these circumstances were to change, as the boom went ahead. ‘Big Bang’ meant that the City could bid for world financial supremacy, and ‘popular capitalism’ was an enormous success, with a great part of the population now owning assets in property or even shares. The City firms turned into ‘security houses’ as in New York, and the wonder occurred that the British sold automobiles again, even if they were from foreign-managed factories. The British addiction to buying property meant that credit based upon property assets was in heavy demand.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

In Britain, in emulation of the Dutch, this period saw the growth of all the permanent institutions of public credit—the Bank of England (1694), the Royal Exchange, and the National Debt. The first steps of the Industrial Revolution were taken in the 1760s. [CAP-AG] Britain produced John Law (1671–1729), a racy Scots financier, who invented the first experiment for harnessing colonial trade to popular capitalism. His grand ‘Scheme’ and Banque royale (1716–20) in Paris, which was patronized by the Regent, and which coincided with the similarly disastrous South Sea Company in London, created a veritable fever of speculation by selling paper shares in the future of Louisiana. The Bubble burst; thousands, if not millions, of investors were ruined, Law fled, and France was permanently inoculated against credit operations.