Brexit reminds us that we need to take a lead in making globalization fairer

Brexit was an interesting campaign to watch, and there’s not too much I can add that hasn’t been stated already. I saw some incredibly fake arguments from Brexit supporters, including one graphic drawing a parallel between the assassinations of Anna Lindh in 2003 and Jo Cox MP, saying how the murder of the former led […]

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A year of random thoughts: 2014 in review

For the last few years, I’ve looked back at the events of the year in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. (In fact, in 2009, I looked back at the decade.) Tumblr’s the place I look at these days for these summaries, since it tends to have my random thoughts, ones complemented by very little critical thinking. They […]

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Finance is broken, and we still haven’t learned

I posted this quotation from I Acknowledge on my Tumblr today: The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.   Global GDP stands at $69·4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts […]

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Small is beautiful, whether it’s a company or a country

My friend Summer Rayne Oakes at Source4Style put me on to an article in The Guardian by Ilaria Pasquinelli, on how small firms drive innovation. If the fashion industry is to survive, she says, it must team up with the small players where innovation takes place, thanks to the visionaries who drive those firms.   […]

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Endgame: Saab files for bankruptcy

If you’re a car nut, then you won’t be mourning, too much, the passing of former Czech president Vaclev Hável. Or, for that matter, Kim Jong Il. It’s Saab that has finally died as it files for bankruptcy after GM, which still licenses key technologies to the Swedish firm, vetoed its sale to Zhejiang Youngman […]

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Occupy, the brand

VBlessNYC, under Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic It was in the fourth quarter of the year that Occupy became a brand. Just capitalize it, and everyone knows what you mean. The original geographical indicator of Wall Street disappeared—to be fair, it began disappearing when similar protests began happening across the United States and then, the world—but I’ve […]

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Today’s adventures with US dollars and New Zealand banks

Above: I’m Asian, and I want banking. National Bank gets me again. (For that story, click here.) Out of the businesses I have, one is unincorporated, and it has a US dollar bank account based in New Zealand. Over the years, it’s been at numerous banks, and was at the ANZ.    Until the ANZ […]

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Taranaki food shop must be a front for international finance

In the Fairfax Press today, this story: ‘Food shop protest “racist”’.    From what I can make out from this story, New Plymouth District Councillor Sherril George (her address, telephone number and email are here) has been urging people to boycott a Waitara food outlet run by some folks of Cambodian ethnicity.    This business, […]

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Learned misbehaviours

Preparing for one of my Swedish speeches, I came across this, which I delivered in India in December 2008: If you ever get to read Michael Lewis’s writings about the US financial industry, you’ll learn that a lot of people within there do not know what they are doing or why they are doing it. […]

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