Juggling Dynamite

Twenty years ago most of us began signing into the world wide web for the first time via dial up connections. Compounding innovation over the next twenty years, is certain to bring  change and solutions that most can’t imagine today.

What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system? Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more — all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when robots and humans will work side-by-side to accomplish things neither could do alone. Here is a direct video link.

Worthwhile discussion on what individuals can do to help move public funding needs and financial advice away from the bankers who abuse our trust and enrich themselves at the expense of municipal, provincial and state solvency.

“Dirty Deals” is the name of a definitive report about Wall Street’s interactions and financing contracts with cities, counties and states nationwide. It’s a gloves-off look at the many ways public entities are forced to acquiesce to abusive usury in their private-bank-capital borrowing practices for public projects and how we can take effective steps to reverse them. Saqib Bhatti, co-director of Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), discusses why these core financing issues are driving governments around the country to consider public banking and in-house financing mechanisms, and why some of them don’t want to.

Listen to the discussion by advancing to 15:00 on the playbar at this direct audio link.

There have been more retail bankruptcies year to date in 2017, than in all of 2016 and the number of retailers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy is now approaching its highest level since the 2008 recession.  There is reason to expect much more consolidation in this heavily bloated sector that ballooned on the consumer debt bubble of the past decade.

It’s not just that consumers are encumbered by weak wage growth and crushing debt, nor is it just the rise of e-commerce taking sales away from bricks and mortar stores.  It’s also that yield-starved investors plowed indiscriminately into this sector the past 8 years, while private equity raiders worked their usual ‘genius’, buying up majority stakes and levering up the balance sheet to suck out cash, leaving the emaciated businesses to implode on workers, landlords, taxpayers and the other investors.

You know tax incentives are perverse and need changing, when non-productive debt and participants are given preferential treatment to grotesquely enrich themselves at the expense of economic stability and productivity.  See Clock’s up on retailers borrowed time:

Some retailers survived the Great Recession only because investors were throwing easy money at them, perhaps unwisely. These retailers incurred sharply higher debt in the years after the financial crisis, a type of financial life support now expediting their demise.

Data show private equity firms targeted certain retailers with low debt loads and then had those companies borrow billions of dollars they now can’t repay. Some of that money went to pay dividends to private equity investors.