48 Nguyên Tắc Chủ Chốt Của Quyền Lực (Tái bản lần 9) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Jean-philippe Jean-philippe jeanphilipe — Economist Raghuram Rajan was one of the prescient ones: at a central bankers' conference (honoring Alan Greenspan no less) in 2005, he delivered a paper asking "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" His answer was yes. Events proved him correct. Here, he uses a wide-angle lens to examine the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and why we're nowhere near out of danger. A stint as chief economist at the IMF means his perspective is global; understanding growth patterns and rates in developing countries, and financial crises such as the Asian meltdown of 1997, help us understand what's happening in the U.S. He argues that interest rates were kept very low - credit very loose - in order to help the lower class get a leg up. Since their income had stagnated, and since better education to pull them into the middle and upper classes is a very long-term solution and thus extremely difficult to achieve politically, policymakers helped low-income Americans achieve a higher standard of living by allowing them to buy homes and pull equity out of their homes. Needless to say, this went on too long, and the real estate bubble was created. Americans overconsumed, took on onerous debt, and thus enabled the countries we were buying from, mainly Germany, Japan, and China, to shortchange their own economies by relying too much on growth from exports. If we had a stronger safety net in the U.S., Rajan argues, we wouldn't need to rely on fiscal and monetary policies to provide stimulus to the poor and/or unemployed. When the Fed, the Treasury, and politicians use stimulus this way during jobless recoveries, whether by keeping interest rates extremely low or passing legislation to pump billions into the economy, it has unintended and damaging consequences: it creates bubbles, it advantages debtors and disadvantages savers, it's a gigantic giveaway to the banks, it artificially props up the housing market and housing prices, and it warps incentives in the financial sector. Rajan urges reforms in two areas: the financial sector, and the safety net. In the financial sector, incentives are dangerously aligned with taking on risk. Wall Street assumes that certain institutions will be bailed out if they fail, and they are correct in this. Rajan uses the phrase "too systemic to fail" rather than "too big to fail," because it's not size but interconnectedness that determines when government will step in and rescue. Government rescues must stop, because they distort the entire financial sector. Financial institutions should know what their risk exposures are, and this information should be made available to the markets on a regular basis; during the financial crisis, many companies had no idea how much risk they had taken on. If this information is widely known, it can be used to prevent institutions from becoming "systemic." He proposes that financial institutions have a "living will:" in the event that they are going to fail, such a "will" would involve regulators in quickly winding down (resolving) the company without massive, systemic damage. In order to more properly align individual risk-taking with compensation, he proposes holding a significant chunk of a financial company's bonuses in escrow, to be paid out only after it is clear that trading positions have been profitable. He also suggests phasing out bank deposit insurance, since a money-market fund invested in Treasury bills is just as safe as guaranteed bank deposits. Reforming the safety net needs to be another top priority. Recessions have changed, in that the last few recoveries have been jobless, and our current system of unemployment benefits is inadequate in the face of extended periods of joblessness. Politicians respond to the needs of the unemployed in ad hoc ways, and as we've seen recently, they have held benefit extensions hostage to the passage of other, unrelated legislation. Rajan suggests that we tie benefits to a formula which would take into account the extent of overall job losses, "the proportion of jobs created to jobs lost, and the time elapsed since the recession began." He also proposes a system of universal healthcare, given that job loss nearly always comes with a loss of health insurance as well. I enjoyed Fault Lines. I found it highly readable. There are some areas where, although clearly informed, Rajan seems a little out of his element (the discussion of healthcare, perhaps). He also is overly wedded to the notion that Fannie and Freddie and the affordable housing mandate are to blame for most of the mortgage crisis: "It is difficult to reach any other conclusion than that this was a market driven largely by government, or government-influenced, money." Indubitably Fannie and Freddie have to take some of the blame, but as others have demonstrated, it was Wall Street which created the intense and insatiable demand for subprime mortgages; Fannie and Freddie were actually latecomers to the subprime frenzy. As Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera showed in All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, Fannie and Freddie raced to get involved in subprime mortgages because they feared being left behind by their private sector competition.

Chariz Santos chasantos — Years ago, there was a band called Culturcide that had a song called "Consider Museums as Concentration Camps". It was dedicated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The mysterious Clark Flood has written Clerk Fluid in a similar vein. This book is an attack on various parts of the Houston art scene. Many of the articles originally appeared as part of the Glasstire blog series "Objects in the Mirror". One point that is returned to many times is that artwork that is collected in museums is often an uninspired attempt to seem edgy. A related gripe is about how many of Houston's top corporate art sponsors such as Chevron, Halliburton and Kinder Morgan behave in the real world. There are also several places where Flood satirizes "how to" guides for artists, art show call for entries and non-profit mission statements. Flood's attitude towards museums in general can be gleaned from this quote: "I used to think that my work had some internal integrity that would persist whether it was hung in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art or used as a urinal cake at Poison Girl [a Houston bar]. Now I understand that it would lose something very important if it were ever exhibited at MoMA." Specific people and institutions are referred to with unflattering nicknames. For example, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is referred to here as the "Center for Useless Mediocrity" amongst other things. The CAMH is mocked many times in Clerk Fluid. Flood yearns for the days when "the Center accidentally hired a radical director". I am not sure how funny or understandable these articles would be to non-Houstonians but it is certainly a different perspective from typical art writing.