Juggling Dynamite

Anat Admati’s presentation here is a good review of where we are 10 years after the last financial crisis.  The bottom line: in the words of JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon “Financial crisis is something that happens every 5, 7 or 10 years.”  It’s now been 10, we should be expecting the next.  Alas, few are prepared.

At a June 20 2018 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Associates meeting, Anat Admati reflects on what has been learned about financial regulations, the relationship between corporations and the government, and the role that economists can play in the ten years since the Great Recession. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at the Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at SIEPR. Here is a direct video link.

A company that grows algae using carbon dioxide captured from the emissions of an Ontario cement plant says that it’s making inroads to the animal feed and high-value ingredient market. A look at the technology and opportunity, with Steve Martin, CEO of Pond Technologies. Here is a a direct video link.

We recently watched the three-part Ken Burns PBS documentary “Prohibition” (available on Netflix) and found it a fascinating historical glimpse into how social norms and mores can dramatically shift.  The events are interesting context for our present time, when conceptions about morality, politics, acceptable business practices and what is deemed socially acceptable are once more on the move. It’s fair to say that the pendulum of human behavior and thinking is constantly swinging from one extreme to the other.  While balance and moderation are optimal, it’s important to note that they tend to be rare and always at risk.

PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

Prohibition was intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. But the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality. Here is a direct video link to the trailer.