Who is winning what?

We are living challenging times. The fainthearted will not cope with the stress of days, and understandably so. This crisis, like any before it, will eventually subdue. Some nations will rise, some might fall. It is the nature of the history to repeat itself in certain important dimensions. It has happened before, it can happen now as well. The important thing is to get the facts right. I personally think that this crisis is the making of the new global challenges, more than the mistakes of the past. But any crisis is an opportunity, as a famous quotation goes.
The US downgrading is actually more worrisome for its debt holders, with China topping the list: China’s reckless policy of an undervalued Yuan is now shooting back. The US is free-riding on the Chinese appetence for Treasury bonds and printing more money is a win-win situation, from their perspective. It weakens the dollar, thus more competitive exports; it might lead to inflation, a well known steroid for job creation, and makes the debt-repaying much easier.
Aside from the debt issue, it was this crisis that revealed how little a village the world has become. If we are to move forward, governance should change, new global institutions should emerge and new development projects should be fostered together by the most able and willing nations. Otherwise, it will all turn into an egotistic nationalistic race for primary resources and raw materials, something that does not spur productivity, nor technological progress, and it can only bring high-level tensions and possibly, warfare.

Spare a kidney, please?

While this is too of a complex issue to be dealt with in just a few lines, I wish to share my opinion on the matter. I am referring policies and practices concerning transplant of vital organs. At this point in time and this point in my life I sincerely believe that this practice must be advocated against, tightly regulated and eventually outlawed. Transplant of vital organs should only be allowed for research purposes and only on a small scale. Obviously, this is not happening today, since many countries have promoted legislation which presumes tacit agreement for transplant. This means that organs can be harvested from an individual deemed unable to sustain life due to serious injury, even when there is no explicit consent from the person involved or from its close relatives. My main argument against transplant of vital organs is that it can be easily derailed into abusive practices and all sorts of unethical but lucrative businesses. This is already happening and even if on a small scale, the potential to grow out of control is huge, especially due to rapid advancement of cloning technologies. There is potential, as we speak, to bring to life and grow human specimens outside any regulated medical institution and implicitly outside any official registration. My second argument is that what needs to be encouraged instead is the conception and development of artificial organs, be they mechanical, electrical of including organic tissue. I believe that this is a much more sustainable approach and will benefit the humankind on the long run, since ultimately people need to evolve beyond their innate organic limits. The third argument is that encouraging the prolongation of life at all costs it is not desirable. Rather, the quality of life and morality in terms of useful contributions to society should be promoted and advocated for. However dramatic is the ending of a life, especially when it happens outside normal biological limits, it should not lure us into denying our mortal nature and indulging into practices aimed at postponing an inevitable but decent end. Besides, existing technology allows the recording of one’s lifetime experience in the greatest detail, and this can be easily passed to future generations if this is desired.

Bubbles or no bubbles, please..

The inflate - deflate cycle is a sign that the economy is not rigor mortis but alive and kicking. In the famous book “Capitalism and freedom”, Milton Freedman recalls a soviet official who could not understand the fact that there was no department in charge with the supply of bread to the City of London. Instead, the whole supply-distribution system was self-coordinating. Obviously, this is one of the great virtues of the free-market economy. The flip side of the coin is that a once perfectly functioning system of integrated markets can suddenly collapse, without warning and with severe short-term consequences. A tightly controlled system is less prone to this kind of a crash.
In the eve of the current crisis it has become more obvious than ever that one of the intrinsic properties of the free-market system is the boom-bust cycle. Sometimes, various factors compound the intensity of the upturn or of the downturn. Every once in a while, bubbles of various origins burst, leaving the economy in shatters. Is this desirable or the regulators should fight to contain the bubbles and their negative consequences? One of the most analyzed bubbles was the IT bubble which burst in 2000. While scores of newly born or well established IT companies were put to rest, the accumulation of capital and the concentration of interest in the years of the expansionist bubble left a powerful legacy and many of today’s IT giants were born during that auspicious period.
Should governments or regulators try to contain bubbles? I would argue against. There is no way to foresee an optimal path for development. Bubbles have synergetic effects and provide resources to areas that would otherwise linger in an underdeveloped stage for years. It is up to everyone to stay alert and prepared for the big collapse, whenever that might happen. Once the bubble bursts, it will wash away the greedy and the reckless. Personally, I am looking forward to the bubble of interplanetary travel or space exploring, for that matter.

Corporations as gladiators

At the height of the crisis, discussions about the failure of the capitalist system flourish, see the http://blogs.ft.com/capitalismblog/ where illustrious minds share their views. At this point, when the end of the crisis is not in sight, we get the boldest and the most radical proposals for changing this, until very recently, world-wide acclaimed economic system. There is no doubt that more regulation will be needed; oftentimes, free markets fail to function and this leads to sub-optimal equilibria (or even no equilibrium what-so-ever) resulting in an inefficient allocation of resources, but this was already known to economists. Market power, asymmetric information, adverse selection, moral hazard and many other circumstances where the market outcome is not optimal in any conceivable way, were both known and thoroughly analyzed by scholars. Unfortunately, very few of the readily accessible solutions for correction were transposed in practice by decision makers.I, myself being concerned with what has come to be known as corporate social responsibility, can see many developments for this particular paradigm, following the current crisis. However, one should not be fooled into denying perhaps the most important feature of the free-market system, the true engine of growth and sustainable development: sheer competition. The frictions born out of the corporations’ struggle to survive and flourish are what bring about the most rewarding benefits of capitalism. Regulation is needed, no doubt, but only to the extent that it enhances and sharpens the corporate struggle. Sure enough, regulation is also needed to protect the private citizen and the environment from the negative consequences of the corporate fight. There is a comparison which, I believe, embodies my point here. Corporations are the gladiators of the modern world. Gladiators were much prized and esteemed in the golden days of Rome. They provided the spectacular fights that delighted the masses. The fiercer their fight was, the more enjoyable the show. But there were rules. Gladiators were supposed to kill each other, but not the spectators. Their fight was limited to the arena of the Colosseum. Should they have taken their fight outside the arena, killing innocent side-viewers, rioting on the streets of Rome, tearing walls and burning down houses, it would perhaps have been a bigger show, but not so enjoyable and beneficial to the ordinary citizen. In the same manner corporations fight for the benefit of consumers, but ultimately this fight should not inflict harm on them or the environment. Regulators, please give room to corporations to kill each other “peacefully”, but just keep them off the spectators! Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant..

Long run vs. short run

You will probably expect me to quote the famous words of Lord Keynes. But this is not just about that. I have discussed before on this blog about the fact that unless humankind establishes some long-term goal(s), whatever those might be, it is fairly easy to show that any course of action is futile and condemned to be a waste of energy and resources. On the other hand, besides the fact that no moral authority could, at present, set any reasonable long-term purpose for the mankind, this exercise is actually dangerous, as it can easily lead to abuse and dangerous derails. Some groups can confiscate the long-term goal as a mean to attain their own subjective interests, or even worst, they can require unnecessary sacrifices on the behalf of attaining those established goals.
In my humble opinion, and I must emphasize the subjectivism of this opinion, creating an International Space Agency with the purpose to develop space exploring, very much similar to NASA, would be a reasonable undertake. Unlike NASA, this agency would be international, funded with contributions from all member countries and would share the benefits of its activities among all funding members. NASA is great but it is extremely proprietarily.

What a diff’rence a crisis made..

I hope you recognized the adaptation in the title, after Dinah Washington’s lovely song. Let me tell you a little story about 3 people. There’s Jonas, an experienced merchandise trader who owns a warehouse at the quay, there’s Andrew, a young and promising artist who is at the forefront of the new “urban art” movement, and then there’s Misha, Andrew’s brother, who is a libertarian soul, adept of an “alternative” life style, and in love with social movements. Currently, he is doing his best to run a small downtown grocery for a living, but now here comes the Big Bad Crisis.
Andrew struggled for a long time, trying to find a decent place to exhibit his latest creations. The posh downtown galleries were asking for crazy amounts (in line with the current real estate rental rates) and the adequate space, the kind of surface that would really put Andrew’s work in the right perspective, wasn’t even being offered.
In the meantime, on Jonas’ side of the story; after enjoying quite a long streak of successful business he experienced a sudden drop in demand, with most of its long-standing customers cancelling orders, with imported merchandise becoming prohibitively expensive due to a strengthening of the local currency. After a couple of months in the serious red, he was pretty desperate; especially considering that he needed to catch-up with his mortgage along with the tuition for his four children. One day, while Andrew was wandering the quay, precisely in search of a deserted warehouse that might be converted with little investment into exhibition space, he was immediately struck by the 18th century-style brick warehouse that Jonas used to own, but was no longer much use to him considering the current circumstances. The rest is details. Andrew rented the place, and after a light reconversion he displayed his work;the place becoming a smashing hit among the critics and art consumers alike. Jonas in fact, after hearing about the languishing grocery business of Misha, took over the place and transformed it into a really successful business, based on his previous knowledge of perfectly synchronized commerce, while Misha found a position with an NGO and immediately left for Africa, where he would become the most successful project manager the philanthropy industry has ever seen (maybe his brief experience as a lousy grocer helped out here, who knows). The morale of the story thus being: A crisis implies a lot of disruption in the economy and in the people’s lives, but it is the only mechanism which can shake and unwind sub-optimal processes, reshuffle and free resources and bring new skills onto the market, at the same time as it sends rotten business practices to the garbage bin of history.

CRISIS!!!

I believe that the unfolding of the current events can be attributed, to a large extent, to the precipitous measures taken by governments to support faltering financial institutions and try to boost confidence in the stock market and ultimately prop the stock prices. They were, of course, looking at the 1929 events, when a series of uninspired governmental decisions did nothing but bad to the developing crisis. Well, 2008 is not 1929. The level of integration and coordination of economies worldwide is incomparably higher today and the cooperation of governments is at a different level now than back then. The smartest way to deal with the crisis today would have been to let the stock prices fall in an unprecedented manner, because in my opinion, prices would have bounced back once they have reached the psychological bottom. This, coupled with a slight alteration of the central banks’ interest rates would have certainly led to a quick recovery. What is happening today is that investors are still searching for the real bottom, after a series of false rallies each triggered by the various measures taken by governments. This has lead to an escalating uncertainty and people, rightly so, are looking for safe heavens, waiting for the crisis to consume itself. This waiting, of course, is translated in the real economy through suspended investments, postponed expenditure and decrease in consumption.
In any case, contrary to many pundits’ beliefs, I do think that, however deep, recession will be short in time and the recovery will be rather quick, bringing the world development to unprecedented levels. This would be so because today we have a much higher number of informed and eager consumers, all over the world, with increased purchasing power and with a willingness to increase their life standard. The only real risks ahead are an uneven spread of wealth, exhaustion of natural resources, depreciation of natural environment and climate change.