Financial systems are sugar pills by which we collectively embolden ourselves to bear economic risk. As with any good placebo, we must never understand that it is just a bit of sugar. We must believe the concoction we are taking to be the product of brilliant science, the details of which we could never understand. The financial placebo peddlers make it so.
Category: Finance
Why humans are obsessed with the longest bridges, the biggest buildings and other ways to blow billions
But why this pervasive failure to predict these overruns, despite their seeming inevitability? The answer lies in the very things that make us human, what Flyvbjerg calls the “four sublimes”: the excitement of engineers and technologists building the newest or largest item of its kind; the rapture politicians receive from building monumental works that increase their public profile; the delight of businesses and trade unions generating money and jobs; and the aesthetic pleasure generated by iconically large design.
Why Won’t U.S. Firms Invest More ?
American businesses aren’t making enough capital investments to secure the economy’s future. And, unless that changes, we’ll never see the sort of recovery that we’ve all been hoping for.
If a Bubble Bursts in Palo Alto, Does It Make a Sound?
The truth is that most Americans have little interaction with the big-money, small-jobs technology boom, so they might be sheltered from the worst of the technology bust, at least as it looks today, if not years from now. But that might be cold comfort: It is a sad state of affairs if one of the most vibrant, explosive and creative parts of the economy — and one of the few that is minting millionaires — seems more like a walled garden than a public park.
Still No. 1, and Doing What He Wants
It is good to be the king. It is even better to be Larry Ellison.
Most of us spend much of our lives thinking that we should do the right thing, or worrying that we didn’t do the right thing, or trying at long last to finally do the right thing. Mr. Ellison, the fifth-richest person in the world and the chief executive with the highest total compensation in 2013, appears burdened by no such concerns.
Abnormal Capitalist 