- I continue to reference back to a Ted talk from 2014 by Nick Hanauer, who originally made his riches through a family pillow and bedding business, was an early investor in Amazon and now invests in new ventures. In “Beware Fellow Plutocrats The Pitchforks Are Coming”, Hanauer is an evangelist for higher minimum wages — not by way of altruism but for pragmatic business and self-preservation reasons. He points out that we are approaching conditions of inequality similar to pre-revolutionary France. We know what happened there. Here’s a follow-up from Hanauer on being a .01%er.
- Speaking of pitchforks, I’m reading Bruce Gibney’s book: “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America”. Gibney is careful to point out that he excludes people of color from the sociopath designation as well as immigrant populations. We would add women to the exclusion list. For the majority of the time-period he covers, women were excluded from positions of power, authority and today, still have a ways go to reach pay or power parity. You may not agree with his opinions, but the history Gibney paints is instructive as is his petulance against Boomers. However, I am also noticing the term “sociopath” occurring with greater frequency… including Nick Hanauer who said, “being rapacious doesn’t make you a capitalist; it makes you a sociopath”. Ben White, who writes for Politico on money issues recently interviewed Gibney, as part of his podcast series “Baby Bust”.
- Ray Dalio recently published “The World Has Gone Mad and the System is Broken” on LinkedIn, about the craziness of negative interest rates.
- Further to the issue of rates manipulation is George Selgin’s book “Floored: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession” (at Amazon as a book or as a pre-publication paper at CATO here). Thank you to Chris Whalen who writes the Institutional Risk Analyst for the recommendation.
- Then there are two papers from Federal Reserve banks. The first, if you are not a macro-economist and want some background on the origins of the banking network, from Matthew Jaremski and David C. Wheelock of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: “The Founding of the Federal Reserve, the Great Depression and the Evolution of the U.S. Interbank Network”. The second, “The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure” by Robert Hetzel, who was senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond until 2018. We link to a blog post at AEI, which cites Hetzel’s book as well as a shorter article that formed the basis of the book (quicker read).
- Finally, in the wake of horrific wildfires in California (and Australia) Alex Madrigal describes the woeful condition of infrastructure in California’s electric system “The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America”… Forgive us the analogy to the boiling frog parable.
