Entries Tagged 'Economics and Investing' ↓

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan (Princeton University Press, 2010)

As its title suggests, this book is a wake up call!

Its author, Raghuram G. Rajan (“Raj”) is an economist who challenged his community’s adoration of Alan Greenspan in the years before the Financial Crisis.

After the crisis “Raj” looked deeper into that crisis. He revealed the “fault lines” that nearly ten years after the Financial Crisis, still threaten us today.

 Fault Lines’ Questions

Raj Raghuram dared to ask “why’ questions about the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, questions that most economists have not yet explained.

So why do we need a reminder about the Financial Crisis? Because we have not yet plumbed the depths of what happened in the first decade of this century. Continue reading →

Those of us who lived through recession during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency will remember this word—stagflation.

During Carter’s time in office we had long-lasting rise in unemployment and even gasoline rationing – one could only fill up on certain days of the week. 

It was a frustrating time for me as, with two graduate college degrees I stood in a line of 200 unemployed workers in South Carolina trying for a grocery store’s cashier job. 

Stagflation is a word that conflates inflation with stagnation into one word.

First inflation comes about because there is “too much money chasing too few goods”. (And since our tariffs on imports are a tax on U.S. consumers, we expect prices of U.S.-made goods will go up in a trade war).

Then, if the government does nothing to curtail inflation, will come layoffs of workers.

After that, if too many Americans aren’t able afford to buy higher-priced U.S. goods, we’ll have stagnation occur in our economy because the production of goods and services slows down or even starts to decline.

Note too that the US. is a debtor country. We import $3.1 trillion and export only $2.5 trillion in goods and services.

Trump’s tariffs are threatening us with this fate again. Here’s why. Continue reading →

The New Rules of War: Victory in The Age of Durable Disorder (© 2019) is a book written by a Harvard-trained scholar. You can verify that fact by the amount of footnotes in the back of the book. 

But don’t let that stop you! This is a book for anyone interested in the history of war—and the changes in the way wars are conducted in the Twenty First Century.

Sean McFate brings this book to life by telling numerous stories from history, starting as far back as centuries before the Bible, and leading up to the present.

The stories Sean tells to support his views of ancient and modern of warfare are also drawn from virtually every geographic area of the globe—even the oft-ignored Central Asian “istans,” i.e., Kurdistan and Turkistan, and Uzbekistan. [“stan” meaning ‘land’ in Persian] Continue reading →