Exchange Rates Quotes

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

Secrets are the currency of intelligence work, and among professional spies a little calculated indiscretion raises the exchange rate.

There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman's mind...whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion's share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.

He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state's means of exchange.

Home. Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...

We have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace. We have computers and iPhone apps that can make millions out of a tiny change in exchange rates, but none that can rescue the poorest countries from their plight. We know how to make Internet pornography, but not how to repair marriages. The very objectivity or neutrality of scientific knowledge as commonly conceived has played into the hands of the gods we secretly worship.

Some readers are bound to want to take the techniques we’ve introduced here and try them on the problem of forecasting the future price of securities on the stock market (or currency exchange rates, and so on). Markets have very different statistical characteristics than natural phenomena such as weather patterns. Trying to use machine learning to beat markets, when you only have access to publicly available data, is a difficult endeavor, and you’re likely to waste your time and resources with nothing to show for it. Always remember that when it comes to markets, past performance is not a good predictor of future returns—looking in the rear-view mirror is a bad way to drive. Machine learning, on the other hand, is applicable to datasets where the past is a good predictor of the future.

facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These

No government can successfully achieve all three goals of having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital flows, and an independent monetary policy.

If the exchange rate is a matter of pride, Japan should be only half as proud as India (120 yen to a dollar) and China ten times more (6.2 yuan to a dollar)! My

The exchange rate is a farce, the price of carrots indefensible, duplicity lives everywhere.

Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. 'Attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive 'package'. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.

when the monetary value of output per capita in Nigeria is less than 2 percent of that in the United States-and in Tanzania less than 1 percent°~-that clearly cannot all be due to exchange rates.

Currency risk is a consideration in international corporate lending, given fluctuating exchange rates. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider when lending internationally.

The libido accepts all currencies, and vicarious pleasures have an over-the-counter exchange rate that is considered reliable enough to pass for real. No one ever went bankrupt borrowing someone else's pleasures. We go bankrupt when we want no one.

It's an established fact that death rates go up on Black Wednesday... All junior doctors change hospitals on exactly the same day every six or twelve months, which is known as Black Wednesday. You might think it would be a terrible idea to exchange all your Scrabble tiles in one go and expect the hospital to run exactly as it did the day before, and you'd be quite right.

Nothing belongs to us, not even ourselves. But the exchange rate is unbelievable. All of our sin is transferred to Christ’s account, and all of His righteousness is transferred to our account. God cancels our debt, writes us into His will, and calls it even!

Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother's Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody.

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth

Ten kings met once a year to decide about water sharing, fixing customs, excise, and toll rates, port levies, and to exchange musicians and artisans. An

One of the ways in which cooperatives rectify the injustices of capitalism is by instituting a relatively equal compensation-scheme for their members. While in the U.S. the average ratio of CEO compensation in the Fortune 500 companies to the ordinary worker’s has recently been reported as 344:1,49 in co-ops the pay-differential between management and the average worker rarely exceeds 4:1. In collectives, everyone is usually paid the same amount. For example, a British study from the 1980s reports that all of the dozens of small co-ops it researched had lower pay-differentials than conventional businesses, and most had little or no differential at all.50 At Arizmendi Bakery everyone currently receives about 20 dollars an hour plus a percentage of the year’s profits. The worker-owners of Mondragon Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Canada earn the same rate of pay. At Equal Exchange, a relatively large co-op, there is a 4:1 pay ratio.

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.

In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. If one hundred different commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 different exchange rates. And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates!5 How do you figure it out?

A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a

Imagine a world in which you can use technology to connect to a system in which you can input the issue you’re dealing with and have exchanges about what you should do and why with the highest-rated thinkers in the world.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

The harder a government, such as a dictatorship, tries to maintain monetary policy autonomy, the more it must either limit the movement of capital into and outside of the country, or the more it must compromise exchange-rate stability.

The basic reason for Germany’s lack of competitiveness, however, was not political in this crude sense. The basic problem was the uncompetitive exchange rate of the Reichsmark. As we have seen, this fundamental misalignment had first emerged in the autumn of 1931 after the devaluation of sterling. The second shock had come in April 1933 with the devaluation of the dollar. By 1933 only 20 per cent of world trade was still conducted between countries with currencies fixed in terms of gold. Germany’s failure to follow this trend meant that the prices of its exports, translated at the official exchange rate of the Reichsmark, were grossly uncompetitive. This was not a matter of particular industries or sectors. It was not a matter of high wages, or excessive taxes and social levies. At prevailing exchange rates, the entire system of prices and wages in Germany was out of line with that prevailing in most of the rest of the world economy.

The Book of Chuang Tzu is like a travelogue. As such, it meanders between continents, pauses to discuss diet, gives exchange rates, breaks off to speculate, offers a bus timetable, tells an amusing incident, quotes from poetry, relates a story, cites scripture. To try and make it read like a novel or a philosophical handbook is simply to ask it, this travelogue of life, to do something it was never designed to do. And always listen out for the mocking laughter of Chuang Tzu.

How is forex traded? The main idea of forex is that you’re buying one currency and at the same time, selling another. Currencies are normally quoted in pairs, like EUR/USD or USD/SGD. The exchange rate represents the purchase price between the two currencies. In EUR/USD ratio, This represents the number of US Dollars in every Euro you have. If you think the Euro will increase in value against the US Dollar from the last exchange rate, you buy Euros with US Dollars and you cash in profit from that.

Money? It’s the oh-so-simple miracle that allows you to take home veal in your shopping bag…’, the Trader-Knights repeat, forgetting that behind the head of veal or the pork cutlet there is a futures market in livestock and pork bellies, and that behind that market looms the futures market of exchange rates, interest rates and so many other levels all the way down to absolute volatility, all utterly inaccessible to those bit-part players in the great comedy of trading, the small individual shareholders.

In this kind of situation one might well ask: why continue to make the 80 percent of products that only generate 20 percent of profits? Companies rarely ask these questions, perhaps because to answer them would mean very radical action: to stop doing four-fifths of what you are doing is not a trivial change. What J-B Say called the work of entrepreneurs, modern financiers call arbitrage. International financial markets are very quick to correct anomalies in valuation, for example between exchange rates. But business organizations

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.” A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted. He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.” He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations.

A rats’ maze of thoroughfares, the ville-bas was where medieval Marseille lived and worked and played. Inside the quarter’s shops, drapers, fishmongers, and box and barrel makers bent over workbenches, cutting, tearing, and banging, while outside on sinewy streets illuminated by a sliver of blue sky, money changers shouted out the latest exchange rates, drunken mariners ogled broad-hipped women in dresses cut so low the necklines were called “windows of hell,” and tanners poured vats of steaming hot chemicals into piles of mud and human waste. With ventilation limited to a breeze from the harbor, on most days the ville-bas had the pungent odor of a mermaid with loose bowels. In

a result, the most efficient way for evolutionary forces to spread beneficial mutations has often been to invent mutations anew rather than to import them from other populations.44 The limited migration rates between some regions of Africa over the last few thousand years has resulted in what Ralph and Coop have described as a “tessellated” pattern of population structure in Africa. Tessellation is a mathematical term for a landscape of tiles—regions of genetic homogeneity demarcated by sharp boundaries—that is expected to form when the process of homogenization due to gene exchanges among neighbors competes with the process of generating new advantageous variations in each region.

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite of their fundamental shortcomings and the inexactness of the methods by which they are actually determined, perform useful workaday services for the politician. If we have no other aim in view than the comparison of points of time that lie close to one another, then the errors that are involved in every method of calculating numbers may be so far ignored as to allow us to draw certain rough conclusions from them. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to a certain extent to span the temporal gap that lies, in a period of variation in the value of money, between movements of Stock Exchange rates and movements of the purchasing power that is expressed in the prices of commodities.

... this is why Gottman has couples talk about something involving their marriage — like their pets — without being about their marriage. He looks closely at indirect measures of how the couple is doing: the telling traces of emotion that flit across one person's face; the hint of stress picked up in the sweat glands of the palm; a sudden surge in heart rate; a subtle tone that creeps into an exchange.

When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham's Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Blood player could acquire a Rose item, but only by handing over an atrocity, thus leaving himself with less ammunition and the Rose player with more. If he was a skilful player he could attack the Rose side by means of the atrocities in his possession, loot the human achievement, and transfer it to his side of the board. The player who managed to retain the most human achievements by Time’s Up was the winner. With points off, naturally, for achievements destroyed through his own error and folly and cretinous play. The exchange rates – one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids – were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers – the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

In the Middle Ages the outbreak of a plague caused people to raise their eyes towards heaven, and pray to God to forgive them for their sins. Today when people hear of some deadly new epidemic, they reach for their mobile phones and call their brokers. For the stock exchange, even an epidemic is a business opportunity. If enough new ventures succeed, people’s trust in the future increases, credit expands, interest rates fall, entrepreneurs can raise money more easily and the economy grows.

It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

This move by President Nixon completed the process begun with World War I, transforming the world economy from a global gold standard to a standard based on several government-issued currencies. For a world that was growing increasingly globalized along with advancements in transportation and telecommunications, freely fluctuating exchange rates constituted what Hoppe termed “a system of partial barter.”13 Buying things from people who lived on the other side of imaginary lines in the sand now required utilizing more than one medium of exchange and reignited the age-old problem of lack of coincidence of wants. The seller does not want the currency held by the buyer, and so the buyer must purchase another currency first, and incur conversion costs. As advances in transportation and telecommunications continue to increase global economic integration, the cost of these inefficiencies just keeps getting bigger. The market for foreign exchange, at $5 trillion of daily volume, exists purely as a result of this inefficiency of the absence of a single global homogeneous international currency.

Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.

There were massive protests in debtor nations such as Greece, and Obama indirectly lectured Merkel that austerity policies might destroy the fragile recovery. Some nations agreed with him, such as France, which went “all in” by electing an outright socialist, François Hollande, as President and giving him a socialist Parliament. Hollande imposed the predictable economic solutions of punishing the successful, including a controversial 75 percent millionaire’s tax. These measures caused capital to flee from France and even led French film icon Gerard Depardieu to give up his French passport and move to Belgium and be granted citizenship by Russia, which charges him a 6 percent income tax rate. (I hear that in exchange, he must appear in every movie made in Russia, the way he did in France.) Panicking at the public revolt, Hollande promised to enact some market-based reforms, such as cutting spending to reduce the deficit, enacting some pro-growth policies, and capping government worker salaries. But it was too little too late. The voters took a sharp right turn in the next election. Sound familiar?

The most-studied evidence, by the greatest number of economists, concerns what is called short-term dependence. This refers to the way price levels or price changes at one moment can influence those shortly afterwards-an hour, a day, or a few years, depending on what you consider "short." A "momentum" effect is at work, some economists theorize: Once a stock price starts climbing, the odds are slightly in favor of it continuing to climb for a while longer. For instance, in 1991 Campbell Harvey of Duke- he of the CFO study mentioned earlier-studied stock exchanges in sixteen of the world's largest economies. He found that if an index fell in one month, it had slightly greater odds of falling again in the next moth, or, if it had risen, greater odds of continuing to rise. Indeed, the data show, the sharper the move in the first, the more likely is is that the price trend will continue into the next month, although at a slower rate. Several other studies have found similar short-term trending in stock prices. When major news about a company hits the wires, the stock will react promptly-but it may keep on moving for the next few days as the news spreads, analysts study it, and more investors start to act upon it.

Jacques Ellul has a word for this instrumentalizing attitude: technique. His analysis helps us to appreciate just how deep and wide the n-shaped dynamic runs in our society. He defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.”14 It is “never anything but a collection of means and the search for the most efficient means” in any given situation,15 with its origin in Cain’s city-building and Lamech’s polygamy.16 Up until the eighteenth century, Ellul argues, technique was largely absent from all areas of society apart from the mechanical, but in the industrial revolution, technical progress suddenly exploded and began to reconfigure every area of life, from industrial production through politics to the family. The result is that today technique is not a thing out there in the world; it is how we do everything we do in the world: “The Third World, Europe, militarization, etc., are all political matters. Inflation, exchange rates, standards of living, and growth are all economic matters. Yet technique has a part in all of them. It is like a key, like a substance underlying all problems and situations. It is ultimately the decisive factor.

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very bad. There have seldom been more brilliant victories than those eventually achieved by the American insurgents under Washington against the English troops. But the American 'continental" dollar did not benefit from them. The more proudly the star-spangled banner rose on high, the lower did the exchange-rate fall, until, at the very moment when the victory of the rebels was secured, the dollar became entirely valueless. The course of events was no different not long afterwards in France. In spite of the victories of the revolutionary army, the metal premium rose.

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

Oil production affects gender relations by reducing the presence of women in the labor force. The failure of women to join the nonagricultural labor force has profound social consequences: it leads to higher fertility rates, less education for girls, and less female influence within the family. It also has far-reaching political consequences: when fewer women work outside the home, they are less likely to exchange information and overcome collective action problems; less likely to mobilize politically, and to lobby for expanded rights; and less likely to gain representation in government. This leaves oil-producing states with atypically strong patriarchal cultures and political institutions

Students at the instituted for Environmental Research at RWTH Aachen discovered something amazing about photosynthesis in undisturbed beech forests. Apparently, the trees synchronize their performance so that they are all equally successful. And that is not what one would expect. Each beech tree grows in a unique location, and conditions can vary greatly in just a few yards. The soil can be stony or loose. It can retain a great deal of water or almost no water. It can be full of nutrients or extremely barren. Accordingly, each tree experiences different growing conditions; therefore, each tree grows more quickly or more slowly and produces more or less sugar or wood, and thus you would expect every tree to be photosynthesizing at a different rate. And that's what makes the research results so astounding. The rate of photosynthesis is the same for all the trees. The trees, it seems, are equalizing differences between the strong and the weak. Whether they are thick or thin, all members of the same species are using light to produce the same amount of sugar per leaf. This equalization is taking place underground through the roots. There's obviously a lively exchange going on down there. Whoever has an abundance of sugar hands some over; whoever is running short gets help. Once again, fungi are involved. Their enormous networks act as gigantic redistribution mechanisms. It's a bit like the way social security systems operate to ensure individual members of society don't fall too far behind.

When text messaging first came about, it was still a one-to-one negotiation: I propose an idea or something to you, you exchange back to me. When you get to 2010/2011, this new model of communication that exists is that you put something out there into the world and then you wait for a reaction. Now, if you look at the depression rates amongst young men, the correlation between these two things is very measurably concise, and amongst young women it’s insane. I’m not necessarily an empiricist, I believe in nuance and subtext and context, but I think that if there’s evidence like that, I mean — I’m sure we could really map depression on to the sale of avocados, too — but I do feel like that’s got something to do with it and it kind of freaks me out.

(BDO) October 22: The Dollar Squeeze A debt is a short cash position—i.e., a commitment to deliver cash that one doesn’t have. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and because of the dollar surplus recycling that has taken place over the past few years…lots of dollar denominated debt has been built up around the world. So, as dollar liquidity has become tight, there has been a dollar squeeze. This squeeze…is hitting dollar-indebted emerging markets (particularly those of commodity exporters) and is supporting the dollar. When this short squeeze ends, which will happen when either the debtors default or get the liquidity to prevent their default, the US dollar will decline. Until then, we expect to remain long the USD against the euro and emerging market currencies. The actual price of anything is always equal to the amount of spending on the item being exchanged divided by the quantity of the item being sold (i.e., P = $/Q), so a) knowing who is spending and who is selling what quantity (and ideally why) is the ideal way to get at the price at any time, and b) prices don’t always react to changes in fundamentals as they happen in the ways characterized by those who seek to explain price movements in connection with unfolding news. During this period, volatility remained extremely high for reasons that had nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with who was getting in and out of positions for various reasons—like being squeezed, no longer being squeezed, rebalancing portfolios, etc. For example, on Tuesday, October 28, the S&P gained more than 10 percent and the next day it fell by 1.1 percent when the Fed cut interest rates by another 50 basis points. Closing the month, the S&P was down 17 percent—the largest single-month drop since October 1987.

An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculation by reference to the fact that there are times when there is nobody in opposition to the bears in the foreign-exchange market so that they alone are able to determine the rate of exchange. That, of course, is not correct. Yet it must be noticed that speculation has a peculiar effect in the case of a currency whose progressive depreciation is to be expected while it is impossible to foresee when the depreciation will stop, if at all. While, in general, speculation reduces the gap between the highest and lowest prices without altering the average price-level, here, where the movement will presumably continue in the same direction, this naturally can not be the case. The effect of speculation here is to permit the fluctuation, which would otherwise proceed more uniformly, to proceed by fits and starts with the interposition of pauses.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

Taki As a prolific author and journalist, Taki has written for many top-rated publications, including the Spectator, the London Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, National Review, and many others. Greek-born and American-educated, Taki is a well-known international personality and a respected social critic all over the world. In June 1987, I was an usher at the wedding of Harry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, to Tracy Ward. The wedding and ensuing ball took place in the grand Ward country house, attended by a large portion of British society, including the Prince and Princess of Wales. Late in the evening, while I was in my cups, a friend, Nicky Haslam, grabbed my arm and introduced me to Diana, who was coming off the dance floor. We exchanged pleasantries, me slurring my words to the extent that she suddenly took my hand, looked at me straight in the face, and articulated, “T-a-k-e y-o-u-r t-i-m-e.” She mistook my drunken state for a severe speech impediment and went into her queen-of-hearts routine. Nicky, of course, ruined it all by pulling her away and saying, “Oh, let him be, ma’am; he’s drunk as usual.

So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms of credit transactions. If a future fall in the purchasing power of the monetary unit has to be reckoned with, lenders must be prepared for the fact that the sum of money which a debtor repays at the conclusion of the transaction will have a smaller purchasing power than the sum originally lent. Lenders, in fact, would do better not to lend at all, but to buy other goods with their money. The contrary is true for debtors. If they buy commodities with the money they have borrowed and sell them again after a time, they will retain a surplus over and above the sum that they have to pay back. The credit transaction results in a gain for them. Consequently it is not difficult to understand that, so long as continued depreciation is to be reckoned with, those who lend money demand higher rates of interest and those who borrow money are willing to pay the higher rates. If, on the other hand, it is expected that the value of money will increase, then the rate of interest will be lower than it would otherwise have been.

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

Dopey, in out of his depth, began to look desperate. "Debbie Mancuso," he yelled, "and I are not having sex!" I saw my mom and Andy exchange a quick, bewildered glance. "I should certainly hope not," Doc, Dopey's little brother, said as he breezed past us. "But if you are, Brad, I hope you're using condoms. While a good-quality latex condom has a failure rate of about two percent when used as directed, typically the failure rate averages closer to twelve percent. That makes them only about eighty-five percent effective against preventing pregnancy. If used with a spermicide, the effectiveness improves dramatically. And condoms are our best defense - though not as good, of course, as abstention - against some STDs, including HIV." Everyone in the kitchen - my mother, Andy, Dopey, Sleepy, and I - stared at Doc, who is, as I think I mentioned before, twelve. "You," I finally said, "have way too much time on your hands." Doc shrugged. "It helps to be informed. While I myself am not sexually active at the current time, I hope to become so in the near future." He nodded toward the stove. "Dad, your chimichangas, or whatever they are, are on fire." While Andy jumped to put out his cheese fire, my mother stood there, apparently, for once in her life, at a loss for words.

Dear Net-Mail User [ EweR-635-78-2267-3 aSp]: Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036 by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western Alaska. [ ref: sequestered confession 592864-2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:34:21. Expiration-disclosure 10 years.] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Charter of Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come due when our confession is released in 2046. However we feel that’s a small price to pay for the message brought to you by EmilyPost. In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. EmilyPost’s syntax analysis subroutines show that a very high fraction of your Net exchanges are heated, vituperative, even obscene. Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the Net. EmilyPost homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please consider the advantages of politeness. For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (EmilyPost has checked your favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren’t high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover, consider that courtesy can foster calm reason, turning shrill antagonism into useful debate and even consensus. We suggest introducing an automatic delay to your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people seldom stop and think. Some Net users act like mental patients who shout out anything that comes to mind, rather than as functioning citizens with the human gift of tact. If you wish, you may use one of the public-domain delay programs included in this version of EmilyPost, free of charge. Of course, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you’ll soon find out about…

The newspapers, according to their political colour, urged punishment, eradication, colonisation or a crusade against the newts, a general strike, resignation of the government, the arrest of newt owners, the arrest of communist leaders and agitators and many other protective measures of this sort. People began frantically to stockpile food when rumours of the shores and ports being closed off began to spread, and the prices of goods of every sort soared; riots caused by rising prices broke out in the industrial cities; the stock exchange was closed for three days. It was simply the more worrying and dangerous than it had been at any time over the previous three or four months. But this was when the minister for agriculture, Monsieur Monti, stepped dexterously in. He gave orders that several hundred loads of apples for the newts should be discharged into the sea twice a week along the French coasts, at government cost, of course. This measure was remarkably successful in pacifying both the newts and the villagers in Normandy and elsewhere. But Monsieur Monti went even further: there had long been deep and serious disturbances in the wine-growing regions, resulting from a lack of turnover, so he ordered that the state should provide each newt with a half litre of white wine per day. At first the newts did not know what to do with this wine because it caused them serious diarrhoea and they poured it into the sea; but with a little time they clearly became used to it, and it was noticed that from then on the newts would show a lot more enthusiasm for sex, although with lower fertility rates than before. In this way, problems to do with the newts and with agriculture were solved in one stroke; fear and tension were assuaged, and, in short, the next time there was another government crisis, caused by the financial scandal around Madame Töppler, the clever and well proven Monsieur Monti became the minister for marine affairs in the new cabinet.

Therefore, when labour-saving technology reduces total socially necessary labour time (per commodity – for an increase in the number of commodities made may increase socially necessary labour time in absolute terms), there tends to be a relative fall in the surplus value contained in the total value of commodities, ie less surplus value per commodity, despite the fact that the rate of exploitation has increased, ie that each worker is now giving the capitalist more surplus labour time and therefore producing more surplus value relative to their necessary labour. As Grossman says: “Technological progress means that since commodities are created with a smaller expenditure of labour their value falls. This is not only true of the newly produced commodities. The fall in value reacts back on the commodities that are still on the market but which were produced under the older methods, involving a greater expenditure of labour time. These commodities are devalued.”[67] The very possibility of crisis is contained in the contradictory nature of the commodity. It is at once an object of use, or use-value, and something that can be exchanged for another thing, an exchange-value. Since different commodities contain different magnitudes of value and therefore cannot be directly exchanged, the creation of money proceeds logically and historically from the contradiction. It is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their value, but the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange value. Exchange-value is the only form in which the value of commodities can be expressed. Someone will buy a use-value because they need or want it, but only if they can exchange it for something else, ie money. If they do not have enough money, they cannot buy it, and profit goes unrealised. But to focus on this final ‘surface level’ aspect is what produces the mistaken underconsumptionist theory, for it forgets or ignores where it arose from – the dual character of the commodity.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

We needed to drive down the road a couple of miles to meet the rest of the cowboys and gather the cattle from there. “Mom, why don’t you and Ree go ahead in her car and we’ll be right behind you,” Marlboro Man directed. His mother and I walked outside, climbed in the car, and headed down the road. We exchanged pleasant small talk. She was poised and genuine, and I chattered away, relieved that she was so approachable. Then, about a mile into our journey, she casually mentioned, “You might watch that turn up ahead; it’s a little sharp.” “Oh, okay,” I replied, not really listening. Clearly she didn’t know I’d been an L.A. driver for years. Driving was not a problem for me. Almost immediately, I saw a ninety-degree turn right in front of my face, pointing its finger at me and laughing--cackling--at my predicament. I whipped the steering wheel to the left as quickly as I could, skidding on the gravel and stirring up dust. But it was no use--the turn got the better of me, and my car came to rest awkwardly in the ditch, the passenger side a good four feet lower than mine. Marlboro Man’s mother was fine. Lucky for her, there’s really nothing with which to collide on an isolated cattle ranch--no overpasses or concrete dividers or retaining walls or other vehicles. I was fine, too--physically, anyway. My hands were trembling violently. My armpits began to gush perspiration. My car was stuck, the right two tires wedged inextricably in a deep crevice of earth on the side of the road. On the list of the Top Ten Things I’d Want Not to Happen on the First Meeting Between My Boyfriend’s Mother and Me, this would rate about number four. “Oh my word,” I said. “I’m sorry about that.” “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she reassured, looking out the window. “I just hope your car’s okay.” Marlboro Man and his dad pulled up beside us, and they both hopped out of the pickup. Opening my door, Marlboro Man said, “You guys okay?” “We’re fine,” his mother said. “We just got a little busy talking.” I was Lucille Ball. Lucille Ball on steroids and speed and vodka. I was a joke, a caricature, a freak. This couldn’t possibly be happening to me. Not today. Not now. “Okay, I’ll just go home now,” I said, covering my face with my hands. I wanted to be someone else. A normal person, maybe. A good driver, perhaps. Marlboro Man examined my tires, which were completely torn up. “You’re not goin’ anywhere, actually. You guys hop in the pickup.” My car was down for the count.

It is the custom in Germany for students to pass from one university to another during the course of their studies—a custom, incidentally, which no other country has. But it would be false to assume that this variety in instruction is a safeguard afainst uniformity of outlook, for although the professors of the various universities fight among themselves, they are all, fundamentally and at heart, in complete agreement. I came to realise this clearly through my contacts with the economists. This must have been about 1929. At that time we published a paper on certain aspects of the economic problem. Immediately a whole company of national economists of all sorts, and from a variety of universities, joined forces and signed a circular in which they unaminously condemned our economic proposals. I made one attempt to have a serious discussion with one of the most renowned of them, and one who was regarded by his colleagues as a revolutionary in economic thought Zwiedineck. The results were disastrous! At the time the State had floated a loan of two million seven hundred thousand marks for the construction of a road. I told Zwiedineck that I regarded this way of financing a project as foolish in the extreme. The life of the road in question would be some fifteen years ; but the amortisation of the capital involved would continue for eighty years. What the Government was really doing was to evade an immediate financial obligation by transferring the charges to the men of the next generation and, indeed, of the generation after. I insisted that nothing could be more unsound, and that what the Government should really do was to take radical steps to reduce the rate of interest and thus to render capital more fluid. I next argued that the gold standard, the fixing of rates of exchange and so forth were shibboleths which I had never regarded and never would regard as weighty and immutable principles of economy. Money, to me, was simply a token of exchange for work done, and its value depended absolutely on the value of the work accomplished. Where money did not represent services rendered, I insisted, it had no value at all. Zwiedineck was horrified and very excited. Such ideas, he declared, would upset the accepted economic principles of the entire world, and the putting of them into practice would cause a breakdown of the world's political economy. When, later, after our assumption of power, I put my theories into practice, the economists were not in the least discountenanced, but calmly set to work to prove by scientific argument that my theories were, indeed, sound economy !

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

The first thing to note about Korean industrial structure is the sheer concentration of Korean industry. Like other Asian economies, there are two levels of organization: individual firms and larger network organizations that unite disparate corporate entities. The Korean network organization is known as the chaebol, represented by the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese zaibatsu and patterned deliberately on the Japanese model. The size of individual Korean companies is not large by international standards. As of the mid-1980s, the Hyundai Motor Company, Korea’s largest automobile manufacturer, was only a thirtieth the size of General Motors, and the Samsung Electric Company was only a tenth the size of Japan’s Hitachi.1 However, these statistics understate their true economic clout because these businesses are linked to one another in very large network organizations. Virtually the whole of the large-business sector in Korea is part of a chaebol network: in 1988, forty-three chaebol (defined as conglomerates with assets in excess of 400 billion won, or US$500 million) brought together some 672 companies.2 If we measure industrial concentration by chaebol rather than individual firm, the figures are staggering: in 1984, the three largest chaebol alone (Samsung, Hyundai, and Lucky-Goldstar) produced 36 percent of Korea’s gross domestic product.3 Korean industry is more concentrated than that of Japan, particularly in the manufacturing sector; the three-firm concentration ratio for Korea in 1980 was 62.0 percent of all manufactured goods, compared to 56.3 percent for Japan.4 The degree of concentration of Korean industry grew throughout the postwar period, moreover, as the rate of chaebol growth substantially exceeded the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. For example, the twenty largest chaebol produced 21.8 percent of Korean gross domestic product in 1973, 28.9 percent in 1975, and 33.2 percent in 1978.5 The Japanese influence on Korean business organization has been enormous. Korea was an almost wholly agricultural society at the beginning of Japan’s colonial occupation in 1910, and the latter was responsible for creating much of the country’s early industrial infrastructure.6 Nearly 700,000 Japanese lived in Korea in 1940, and a similarly large number of Koreans lived in Japan as forced laborers. Some of the early Korean businesses got their start as colonial enterprises in the period of Japanese occupation.7 A good part of the two countries’ émigré populations were repatriated after the war, leading to a considerable exchange of knowledge and experience of business practices. The highly state-centered development strategies of President Park Chung Hee and others like him were formed as a result of his observation of Japanese industrial policy in Korea in the prewar period.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.

Samsung still needed to refashion its brand image. There was a worrisome phrase floating around the business world in the 1990s, the “Korea discount.” This term, more politely called the “emerging market discount,” meant either that Korean companies were undervalued on the stock exchange or that Korean commercial goods had to be sold at a cut rate in order to be competitive on the global market.

in Ward One, run by medical students, childbed fever raged and 29% of women died. In Ward Two, run by midwifery pupils, 3% of women died. In an experiment, the two groups exchanged wards and the mortality rates were reversed.

His gaze was frankly warm as he looked at Joanna. “There is a matter Royce and I need to discuss.” Royce nodded, looking serious yet pleased, as though it were all quite clear to him. It was not to Joanna. “And what would that be?” she asked. The two men exchanged a glance. “The marriage settlement,” Royce reminded her gently. “Oh…oh!” How suddenly her cheeks could heat and how surprising, all things considered. “Well, as to that, I hate to quibble, but I haven’t actually received a proposal.” It was very bad of her, as she knew, but still enjoyable. Instantly, her brother’s countenance changed. Gone was any hint of relaxed good humor. In its place was all the stern authority of the Lord of Hawkforte. “You haven’t?” he inquired, and looked to Alex. Who swiftly moved to make amends. There in the ancient hall of Hawkforte, where so many generations of lords and ladies had lived and loved, the proud Prince of Akora knelt, took his beloved’s hand in his, and bid her be his wife. There she, heedless of her brother, who at any rate looked on kindly, sank to her knees beside the man she could cherish through all eternity and joyfully pledged her heart. And in that moment, it was as though the great hall thronged with a ll those who had gone before and found in the blessing of love life everlasting.

In January 1971 he startled the newsman Howard K. Smith by telling him, "I am now a Keynesian in economics," and in August he jolted the nation by announcing a New Economic Policy. This entailed fighting inflation by imposing a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices. Nixon also sought to lower the cost of American exports by ending the convertibility of dollars into gold, thereby allowing the dollar to float in world markets. This action transformed with dramatic suddenness an international monetary system of fixed exchange rates that had been established, with the dollar as the reserve currency, in 1946.

dying fish industry brought attention to the plight of the disappearing generations-old industry in the San Francisco Bay. Cole wrote about street gangs in Chinatown, the proposed needle exchange program in the Tenderloin, and the alarming increase in the suicide rate among Hispanic youth. But the article that got the most attention was “The Path of the Pedophile.” Granted, Cole’s brush with death at the hands of his subject, Terry Kosciuszko, brought a bit more publicity than Cole would have preferred. The reaction in hate mail was far stronger

The gold standard created what economists have called a “golden straitjacket.” Debtor nations would exchange control over their monetary policy for capital mobility and stable exchange rates. Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.

from, The Siamese Collectors: He needed a jolt. A drastic change. An explosion of old habits. He wanted to drop a hot grenade into his broken life. So he cooked up Barcelona and Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong and sent flurries of e-mails with resumes. And finally, when the only offer arrived in a beaten yellow envelope bearing exotic stamps, his father insisted he take it. At first he refused. Thailand to him was third rate, tainted by ideas of the Golden Triangle, white slavery, sleazy tourists and terrorism. But he only had two choices and neither he nor his father lingered when action was needed. So they said a quick goodbye on the porch, blinking at the crisp noon sun and sweating as the taxi idled. His father said, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them anything.” His plane arrived sometime in the middle of the night. A lone policeman dipped in leather boots and wearing a motorcycle helmet with a loose chinstrap stood guard in the Bangkok airport. Treece slipped his passport into a pocket and watched a dark-eyed Thai girl half-asleep on her arm inside a little glass money exchange booth. A moment later in the open lobby, he nodded to a man behind a walrus tooth moustache holding a piece of cardboard that said: Mike Treece.

Do you feel any guilt or remorse for the livestock you consume? Have you ever thought about how those animals become the food you eat? ...Your reaction isn't very rational. If you don't like the things you saw just now, I'm afraid you're missing the big picture. Humans chose livestock to be food. In exchange, they're fed, allowed to reproduce and protected from predators all their lives. Cows, pigs, and chickens have a much higher rate of survival in captivity, more than they would in the wild. So you see, the relationship is mutually beneficial for both parties.

The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929–30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India’s money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency would cause losses to the British from a corresponding decline in the sterling value of their assets in India. So Britain insisted that the Indian rupee stay fixed at 1 shilling sixpence, and obliged the Indian government to take notes and coins out of circulation to keep the exchange rate high. The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from some 5 billion rupees in 1929 to 4 billion in 1930 and as low as 3 billion in 1938. Indians starved but their currency stayed high, and the value of British assets in India was protected.

importance of the interaction of interest rate and exchange rate movement see B. S. Bernanke, “Federal Reserve Policy in an International Context,” IMF Economic Review 65.1 (2017), 5–36.

the IMF, those institutional bastions of belief in the free market system, believe that governments should not intervene in the exchange rate,

The United States was no longer the overwhelming military power in the world, no longer sure of never losing wars. no longer confident of having learned how to maintain employment and to check inflation, no longer reveling in resource independence, technological supremacy, favorable exchange rates, and the privileged life abroad. (xiii)

There is basically nothing new in the calls to protect Western steel producers from Chinese imports or to subsidize domestic low-carbon energy generation to substitute for imports of oil, gas and coal. The emphasis by populist politicians on the negative effect of free trade, and the need to put up different types of walls to prevent the free movement of goods and labour, also gestures back to the mercantilist era, with emphasis more on getting the prices right (including exchange rates and wages) than on making the investments needed to create long-run growth and higher per capita income.

By keeping borrowing costs down, it rewards those just starting out in life—younger people who do the bulk of the borrowing—much more than it does those who are willing to do the lending in exchange for a decent interest rate on their money.

Friend! There’s a subtle feature of speculative behaviour which reflects the public attitude to money itself. When money is in its right place, fulfilling its proper function, men’s minds are fixed upon the goods and services which money can help them to exchange. In such an economic environment the producers of real wealth are seen to earn a fitting reward for their labours and expertise, and in fact productive and community endeavour are portrayed universally as almost the sole means whereby the individual can get himself a goodly share of the world’s riches. Let there just be a change in the emphasis however. Raise the interest rates. Exacerbate the debt structure. Turn money into a commodity which can be bought and sold at a profit. Then you create a breed of men who live by their dexterity at the exchanges. When these men are seen to prosper more considerably than the producers of goods and services, there is a desire amongst the ordinary plodding citizenry to command a share of the action, and to participate in what are seen as easily made profits. Many a fond illusion was wiped out in the collapse of Wall Street share values during the crash of 1929. Whole volumes have been written about its causes and repercussions, and about the sinister shift in real estate ownership which took place during the spate of liquidations and forced sales which followed. But we shall content ourselves meanwhile with the comment that it was just one of a chain of events that were set in motion way back in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Bank was formed to lend money to the Government.

The average poverty line in the fifty countries where most of the poor live is 16 Indian rupees per person per day. 2 People who live on less than that are considered to be poor by the government of their own countries. At the current exchange rate, 16 rupees corresponds to 36 U.S. cents. But because prices are lower in most developing countries, if the poor actually bought the things they do at U.S. prices, they would need to spend more—99 cents. So to imagine the lives of the poor, you have to imagine having to live in Miami or Modesto with 99 cents per day for almost all your everyday needs (excluding housing). It is not easy—in India, for example, the equivalent amount would buy you fifteen smallish bananas, or about 3 pounds of low- quality rice. Can one live on that? And yet, around the world, in 2005, 865 million people (13 percent of the world’s population) did.

After all, millions of people in India live on less than a dollar a day, converted at the PPP exchange rate of about 22 rupees per dollar, and the whole point of these exchange rates is to equalize purchasing power across countries. So if people can live in India on 22 rupees a day—and be far from the worst off—why can’t people in the United States live on a dollar a day?

The Moffat Tunnel is a cathedral to engineering. Its simplicity occludes its sophistication, with the creation of nothing from something—the deliberate absence of rock amid incalculable weight. The finalized engineering marvel has a ventilation system that performs a complete air exchange within the tunnel in 18 minutes. The seemingly endless stone archway has intricately designed and perfectly positioned “umbrellas” to disperse alpine lake seepage to either side of the tracks. During construction, on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress stalled 1,100 feet directly under Crater Lake as 1,800 gallons per minute of water began flowing into the tunnel. At the suggestion of electrician K.S. Weston, crews ventured to the lake, cut through three feet of ice, and poured in 10 pounds of chloride of lime. Shortly thereafter, the presence of lime was detected inside of the tunnel. In an attempt to close the seam, a stick of dynamite was tossed into the lake, and the flow rate dropped drastically to 150 gallons per minute and then slowed to a trickle. Multiple times per day, the visceral vibration of mechanical thunder reverberates through the bowels of the earth.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

grew up in East Berlin and we could literally cross the street and we were in West Berlin and in a completely different world. The luxury of Coca-Cola, oranges, chocolate, and vegetables; you could buy all of this with your East money, you only had to put up with the exchange rate.

Keynes’s second major contribution to the post-war order was his part in establishing the Bretton Woods system. This was unfinished business left over from the collapse of the old order. Even in his Tract period Keynes was not a currency floater. He wanted a ‘managed’ exchange-rate system – something consistent with de facto stability of exchange rates for long periods.

According to Ivar, he and Dr Glowacki reached a final agreement on July 2, 1925, just days before the new participating preferred shares were to be sold. Ivar’s assistant, Karin Bökman, said she witnessed the signatures to the secret deal; she certified the translation of the original contract, as did a Polish notary. Dr Glowacki signed on behalf of the “Treasury of the Polish State,” and Ivar signed on behalf of International Match Corporation.32 Ivar apparently didn’t need to use the stamp he had prepared with a facsimile of Dr Glowacki’s signature. Like the B Shares, this contract was a marvel of financial innovation. First, the agreement provided for the creation of a new Dutch company called N.V. Maatschappij Garanta, or Garanta for short. Garanta would be incorporated in Amsterdam, and its shares would be owned by Polish citizens nominated by Dr Glowacki. Garanta would take over the entire match industry in Poland, from production to sale. Garanta also would assume “certain exchange losses which have been sustained by International Match Corporation in connection with financial transactions in Poland. This item is to be carried as an asset on the books of Garanta.”33 Apparently, Ivar had continued gambling on foreign exchange rates during 1925. This time, though, he had used International Match’s money, and this time he had lost. The secret agreement shifted those losses from International Match to Garanta. Durant and Berning were unaware of these losses, or their transfer.

Your role today must be as a trusted advisor for your clients vs just selling property or quoting interest rates. The point is to remain connected, keeping the emotional bond and value exchange alive so when they are considering buying or selling, you’re the obvious choice. Sending banana bread recipes isn’t going to get you there.

In August, 1956, a Swedish bank teller cheerfully changed a $500 Confederate banknote for an enterprising customer, at the same favorable rate of exchange commanded by Federal currency in that season. His mistake was discovered only when it was much too late.

change /ʃɑ̃ʒ/ I. nm 1. (taux) exchange rate • ~ fixe/flottant or flexible | fixed/floating exchange rate • hausse/baisse du ~ | rise/fall in the exchange rate • le ~ ne nous est pas favorable | the exchange rate is not in our favour GB 2. (opération) (foreign) exchange • gagner/perdre au ~ | (lit) to make/to lose money on the exchange; (fig) to make/to lose on the deal • en quittant son emploi précédent il a gagné or il n'a pas perdu au ~ | when he left his previous job it was a change for the better 3. (de bébé) • ~ (complet) | disposable nappy (GB)ou; diaper (US) II. Idiome • donner le change à qn | to pull the wool over sb's eyes

The Chancellor would accept no connection between printing money and its depreciation. Indeed, it remained largely unrecognised in Cabinet, bank, parliament or press. The Vossische Zeitung of August 16 declared that the opinion that the flood of paper is the real origin of the depreciation is not only wrong but dangerously wrong … Both private and public statistics have long shown that for the last two years the interior depreciation of the mark is due to the depreciation of the rate of exchange … It should be remembered today that our paper circulation, although it shows on paper a terrifying array of milliards, is really not excessively high … We have no ‘dangerous flood of paper’ but, on the contrary, our total circulation is at least three or four times as small as in peace time. Lord D’Abernon described these remarkable views as ‘far from exceptionally retrograde’, and in fact typical of enlightened Berlin opinion. The Berliner Börsen Courier a couple of days later showed greater concern for the social consequences but no more awareness about the reasons. It regretted that the German mark at one-three-hundredth of its par value was now in the same class as the Hungarian korona. The proletariate was becoming restless, said the newspaper, and the State whose taxation estimates were based on an average exchange rate of 500 to the dollar was helpless.

Sterling had returned to gold at an unrealistically high exchange rate, leaving British goods expensive and difficult to sell in the world market.

Having made the mistake of fixing sterling at too high an exchange rate, Britain had no alternative but to continue its policy of deflation, however painful that might be.

His focus on this transcended economics into a kind of spiritualism. The exchange rate was a spirit in a waterhole; to lay the spirit required acolytes to teach it, and priests to pray over it.