Sublime

The Clinton administration, led by Lawrence Summers, signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that had been established by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing, Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It se

ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that “pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.” Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E a

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

Starting in the wake of the last Great Depression, when many wealthy people woke up to the fact that their wealth did not protect them against bombs tossed through windows, most industrial nations have done the same thing by ratcheting up working class incomes, providing benefits such as old age pensions and providing plenty of free entertainment i

Turns out that the Milkshake theory is a more colorful and up-to-date version of George Soros’ 1984 Imperial Circle . The core of both arguments is that the US economy is getting smaller relative to the Rest of the World, while the World’s use of US dollars as the international standard of value continues to get bigger and bigger. This creates a po

Leo Melamed, Man of the Futures: The Story of Leo Melamed & the Birth of Modern Finance

For finance to consistently grow as a proportion of GDP, either it is simply upping its take — which might be reasonable within bounds, but raises questions of adequate competition in the sector and of possible regulatory capture — or it is making more and more MBS-like time bombs. It is spinning off flows of toxic financial exposure, of whose valu

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