disintermediation

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pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

They are therefore positioned as intermediaries that connect multiple users: customers, advertisers, service providers, manufacturers ... and even physical objects’.149 Namely, although these companies promise to do away with middlemen, bottlenecks, impediments and barriers to participation, they are in and of themselves intermediaries of sorts. Counter to what libertarian techno-evangelists would want us to believe, disintermediation does not stop at the level of erasing existing structures and hierarchies. Disintermediation always implies an act of re-intermediation: while eliminating old brokers, digital companies are themselves brokers introducing new higher-level intermediations.150 The ideological function of the discourse of disintermediation is obfuscating this reality of re-intermediation and the power relations that are involved in it. The higher-level intermediation offered by platforms revolves around standardisation: the definition of a number of protocols and rules regulating interactions.

Besides using available commercial platforms, these parties have also developed their own dedicated online participation platforms, which provide a space for members/users to be involved in deliberations and ratifications. This transformation revolves around the attempt of updating the political party to leverage the power of digital technologies. The disintermediation achieved by FAANGs in several areas of information, culture, knowledge, commerce, entertainment, is being translated by digital parties in the promise of a more direct democracy that would disintermediate between voters and representatives. By tapping into the affordances of digital platforms, these parties aim at doing away with the bureaucratic ‘third element’, which – as we discussed at the end of chapter 1 – was considered central to the operation of the mass party and which is now considered not only an unnecessary intermediary but also as a bias factor in projecting the will of the people.

These structural features can be better understood when approaching the functional logic of digital companies and the disintermediation process which lies at their core. Indeed, these companies’ justification narrative revolves around the promise to allow users to do directly things that before had to be mediated by a number of middlemen; for example publishing their thoughts directly on their Facebook wall instead of sending a letter to the local newspaper, or calling a taxi on the Uber app instead of using a mini-cab company. Disintermediation is thereby associated with customisation, convenience and ultimately personal freedom, with the promise of making everyday life easier and more creative.


pages: 430 words: 68,225

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps by Daniel Drescher

bitcoin, blockchain, business process, central bank independence, collaborative editing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, job automation, linked data, machine readable, peer-to-peer, place-making, Satoshi Nakamoto, smart contracts, transaction costs

Hence, the argument that explains the excitement about and the potential of the blockchain is: Purely distributed peer-to-peer systems have a huge com- mercial potential as they can replace centralized systems and change whole industries due to disintermediation. Since purely distributed peer-to-peer systems may use the blockchain for achieving and maintaining integrity, the blockchain becomes important as well. However, the major fact that excites people is the disintermediation. The blockchain is only a means to an end that helps to achieve that. ■ Note The excitement about the blockchain is based on its ability to serve as a tool for achieving and maintaining integrity in purely distributed peer-to-peer systems that have the potential to change whole industries due to disintermediation. Outlook This step explained what peer-to-peer systems are and highlighted their potential to change whole industries due to disintermediation.

The evolution of the Internet and its impact on our society not only confirm that wisdom, but it also shows that estimating long-term effects of technical innovations is hard. However, the following aspects are promising candidates for becoming the long-term accomplishments of the blockchain: • Disintermediation • Automation • Standardization • Streamlining processes • Increased processing speed • Cost reduction • Shift toward trust in protocols and technology • Making trust a commodity • Increased technology awareness Disintermediation The blockchain does not destroy the role of the middleman but instead it establishes itself as a digital and strictly rule-following middleman. Replacing one middleman with another may not be a big deal, but replacing a human organization that relies on the trust of its customers with a software system that encodes trust is a huge achievement.

Hence, the review of existing business processes and redesigning and streamlining them could be another accomplishment of the blockchain that may persist. Increased Processing Speed Disintermediation, standardization, streamlined processes, and automation lead to a significant speed up of processes. Hence, one can expect that the more the blockchain is used, the more timely transactions and interactions between contracting parties will be executed. The speeding up of processes that once involved time-consuming manually performed tasks could be another long-term contribution of the blockchain. Cost Reduction The economic consequence of automation, disintermediation, and standardization is often a reduction of costs.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

The direction of organizational change is especially hard to discern. The 6-Ds present it as a foregone conclusion. Page 28 More Dimensions Similarly, despite talk of disintermediation and decentralization, the forces involved are less predictable and unidirectional than a quick glance might suggest. 32 First, the evidence for disintermediation is far from clear. Organizations, as we shall see, are not necessarily becoming flatter. And second, where it does occur, disintermediation doesn't necessarily do away with intermediaries. Often it merely puts intermediation into fewer hands with a larger grasp. The struggle to be one of those few explains several of the takeovers that we mentioned above.

Each of these examples points not to the dwindling significance but to the continuing importance of mediation on the 'Net (as does the new term infomediary, another case of infoprefixation). Moreover this kind of limited disintermediation often leads to a centralization of control. These two Ds, then, are often pulling not together, but against one another. Not Flatter. Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky conducted a RAND study in 1997 into the relationship between disintermediation, flat organizations, and centralization on behalf of the army. They began by studying the private sector. Here they give little hope for any direct link between information technology and flatter organizations.

Similarly, those who talk about having direct, unmediated access to the news sometimes sound equally oblivious to how news is made. They sound as if to find the "real" news on Russia, for example, they would expect to pick up the phone and get Boris Yeltsin on the other end of the line. But it requires a profoundly naïve belief in "disintermediation" (see chapter 1) to assume that all the links that fall between Yeltsin and the news are somehow interference in the information channel. Rather, it is in these stepsfrom sources to reporters to editors and news organizationsthat news is made. Without them, again, there would be no story. Nonetheless, when information takes center stage and lights dim on the periphery, it's easy to forget these necessary intermediaries.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

News systems are seeing something of a revival now, and those evaluating them can perhaps extract some ideas from this work. Pre-News and Disintermediation The democratization and disintermediation of information is a key part of the explanation of why news is largely reflected in prices before it appears in the newspapers and their electronic outlets. People can do for themselves much of what reporters have traditionally done. News organizations feel the same kind of pressure as brokers from disintermediated customers. People can eliminate the middlemen, and go directly to primary sources. These are the same sources used by reporters to write the “just the facts” stories that have been the mainstay of the news business.

., minutes to hours), and the leakage is even larger for negative surprises. This is an early example of the democratization of information brought about by the Web. The Internet is a threat to people who make their living as intermediaries. Direct market access has disintermediated brokers, many of whom are now in other lines of work. Direct access to primary sources of financially relevant information is disintermediating reporters, who now have to provide more than just a conduit to earn their keep. We would be hard-pressed to find more innovation than we see today on the Web. Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, and their brethren have made more advanced information retrieval and analysis tools available for free than could be purchased for any amount in the notso-distant past.

; Genetic Algorithms; Evolving Financial Models; An Early Lesson; Arbitrage and Predictive Strategies; Maximizing Predictability; Chromosomes for Forecasting Models; Fitness Functions for Forecasting Models; Use of the GA for Coping with a Combinatoric Explosion of Models; Genetically Optimized Forecasting Models in Hindsight; Genetic Algorithm Warning Label Chapter 9: The Text Frontier: AI, IA, and the New Research 203 Ten Pounds of News in a Five-Pound Bag; Pre-News and Disintermediation; More Pre-News on the Internet Contents ix Chapter 10: Collective Intelligence, Social Media, and Web Market Monitors 227 Investing with Crowds; Never Met a Data Vendor I Didn’t Like; Santa Claus Is Coming to Town; Counting Messages; Whisper Numbers—Ruined by Success; Monitoring Web Activity; More Web, More Warnings Chapter 11: Three Hundred Years of Stock Market Manipulations: From the Coffeehouse to the World Wide Web 253 The Power of Manipulation; A Classic Market Manipulation; The Very Model of a Modern Market Manipulator; Bluffing; How Communication Changes Market Manipulation; Anatomy of a Successful Manipulation; The Internet Era; Cyber-Manipulations; It’s Not Just Micro-Caps; Where Are We Headed?


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

A New Middleman New York Times critic Jon Pareles calls the 2000s the disintermediation decade. Disintermediation—the elimination of middlemen—is “the thing that the Internet does to every business, art, and profession that aggregates and repackages,” wrote protoblogger Dave Winer in 2005. “The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power,” says the Internet pioneer Esther Dyson. “It sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people while giving to individuals the power to run their own lives.” The disintermediation story was repeated hundreds of times, on blogs, in academic papers, and on talk shows.

Eliminating the evil middleman sitting between us and what we want sounds good. In a way, disintermediation is taking on the idea of media itself. The word media, after all, comes from the Latin for “middle layer.” It sits between us and the world; the core bargain is that it will connect us to what’s happening but at the price of direct experience. Disintermediation suggests we can have both. There’s some truth to the description, of course. But while enthrallment to the gatekeepers is a real problem, disintermediation is as much mythology as fact. Its effect is to make the new mediators—the new gatekeepers—invisible.

., 7. 58 “distinctive member of a community”: John Dewey, Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany, 1939–1941, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 332. 59 calls the 2000s the disintermediation decade: Jon Pareles, “A World of Megabeats and Megabytes,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 2009, accessed Dec. 11, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/arts/music/03tech.html. 59 Disintermediation—the elimination of middlemen: Dave Winer, Dec. 7, 2005, Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, accessed Dec. 11, 2010, http://scripting.com/2005/12/07.html#. 59 “It sucks power out of the center”: Esther Dyson, “Does Google Violate Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto?


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This form of shadow work provides companies with free market research—and essentially guarantees a certain number of sales, as consumers are nearly certain to buy a product they have helped invent, or customized to their preferences. Disintermediation will also grow as producers sell directly to their customers, eliminating middlemen in venues ranging from farmers’ markets to warehouse stores like Costco. Once inside the stores, customers will deploy their smartphones to become their own salespeople, researching products and their prices without bothering the staff. Retail sales personnel may drop out of the equation, as they have already largely done at big-box stores. Internet commerce makes disintermediation effortless: Consumers buy directly from the site without ever seeing the inside of a store.

No change needed to be made, and there was no tipping. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was performing shadow work. THE KIOSK ARMY Shadow work often comes into play when a technological innovation enables a business, like a restaurant, to remove one or more employees from transactions. It’s a form of disintermediation, a long piece of business jargon that means removing an intermediary—taking out the middleman. Customers can deal directly with the technology instead of an employee. This produces payroll savings for the business, and shadow work for the consumer. The Horn & Hardart Automats used mechanical technology to remove hostesses, waitresses, and cashiers from restaurant dining.

The Horn & Hardart Automats used mechanical technology to remove hostesses, waitresses, and cashiers from restaurant dining. Ingenious as they were, the Automats came into being long before the advent of computers and the information revolution. Today’s digital technologies have opened a far wider range of opportunities for this kind of disintermediation, with a consequent explosion of shadow work. Venues and activities that provide some of our more enjoyable hours—restaurants, travel, and, for many, shopping—are evolving in ways that foster shadow work. Robotics are shaping the service industries, displacing human exchanges with kiosk touchscreens.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

If it is not more valuable, then intermediaries will, in due course, be disintermediated, which means they will be removed from the supply chain in which they work. Just as it is now commonplace for travel arrangements to be made and insurance policies purchased without the involvement of human agents, then so too with professionals—if recipients of their services can secure a more affordable, higher-quality, or more convenient service online, then professionals will face the prospect of being disintermediated. For example, to some extent at least, tax advisers are already being disintermediated by online tax preparation software, lawyers by document assembly systems, doctors by diagnostic apps, teachers by MOOCs, architects by online CAD systems, and journalists by bloggers.

keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448> (accessed 7 March 2015). 92 <https://www.duolingo.com>. 93 Larry Summers, ‘What You (Really) Need to Know’, New York Times, 20 Jan. 2012 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 27 March 2015). 94 Saad Rizvi, Katelyn Donnelly, and Michael Barber, ‘An Avalanche is Coming’, IPPR, 11 Mar. 2013. 95 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), 13. 96 Marc MacWilliams, ‘Techno-Ritualization—The Gohonzon Controversy on the Internet’, Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, 2.01 (2006) <http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/6959/> (accessed 7 March 2015). 97 <https://twitter.com> (accessed 7 March 2015). 98 Bianca Bosker, ‘Hook of Mormon: Inside the Church’s Online-Only Missionary Army’, Huffington Post, 4 Sept. 2014 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk> (accessed 7 March 2015). 99 Rick Gladstone and Vindu Goel, ‘ISIS Is Adept on Twitter, Study Finds’, New York Times, 5 Mar. 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 7 March 2015). 100 Brian Johnson, ‘This Week in the Future: Religion & Tech: A Match Made in Heaven’, Shelly Palmer Blog, 13 Dec. 2012 <http://www.shellypalmer.com/2012/2012/12/twtf-religion-and-tech> (accessed 27 March 2015). 101 We are grateful to Rabbi Gideon Sylvester for this point. Thus, the orthodox rabbi can never be ‘disintermediated’ (see Ch. 3). 102 Heidi Campbell (ed.), Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2013). 103 Heidi Campbell, ‘Considering the Performance of Religious Indentity Online’, Presentation at Faith 2.0: Religion and the Internet, The Royal Society of Arts, 14 Apr. 2011. 104 The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life <https://slangcath.wordpress.com> (accessed 14 April 2015). 105 Heinz Scheifinger, ‘Hindu Worship Online and Offline’, in Digital Religion, ed.

Patterns and trends The end of an era • the move from bespoke service • the bypassed gatekeepers • shift from reactive to proactive • the more-for-less challenge Transformation by technology • automation • innovation Emerging skills and competences • different ways of communicating • mastery of data • new relationships with technology • diversification Professional work reconfigured • routinization • disintermediation and reintermediation • decomposition New labour models • labour arbitrage • para-professionalization and delegation • flexible self-employment • new specialists • users • machines More options for recipients • online selection • online self-help • personalization and mass customization • embedded knowledge • online collaboration • realization of latent demand Preoccupations of professional firms • liberalization • globalization • specialization • new business models • fewer partnerships and consolidation Demystification Many of the patterns and trends that are noted in this chapter challenge mainstream thinking about professional work and professional service.


pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

To succeed and prosper during and after this technological transition, almost every organization along the value chain will have to fundamentally change how they do business. For example, as previously described, almost all producers are manufacturers/wholesalers. u Producers will need new Their sales relationships are with distributors.In a networked television world, the technology allows skills and new infrastructure to for a significant disintermediation of the master take advantage of networked tele- distributors. vision’s new business rules and In a non-linear universe, the broadcast network interactive technology. brands become almost meaningless to consumers. After all, people watch shows, not networks. The programs are the brands, and producers are empowered to become B2C companies.

As a practical matter, the public Internet could not be used instead of the Fox Television Network to watch an NFL football game on a typical Sunday afternoon. Were millions of viewers to attempt to watch it streamed live or even delayed a few minutes so it could be progressively downloaded, the public Internet would go “tilt.” That being said, networked television has the opportunity and the available technology to substantially disintermediate entire distribution verticals. Copyright © 2006, Shelly Palmer. All rights reserved. 161 12-Television.Chap Twelve v3.qxd 3/20/06 7:28 AM Page 162 162 C H A P T E R 1 2 Television Disrupted Content Contact Branded Network Satellite Wireless Telephone Voice Company Studio Content Cabler Video Aggregator Content Operator Viewer Creator Internet Access to Video Service Public Voice Provider Internet Data Analog Unbranded Television Broadcast Broadcast Affiliate Network Digital Television P2P FIGURE 12.1 Consumer Media Choices in the Networked Television Era.

Personal Networked Television One probable future is the advent of a GUI that will enable viewers to easily search for content and automatically create adaptive playlists that relate to personal preferences or behaviors. An interface like this would create the equivalent of personal television networks for each individual viewer. It would combine VOD, DVR, search, P2P and high-speed Internet access to significantly disintermediate the existing cable, telephone and satellite infrastructure. Controlling Access by Limiting Bandwidth To combat this probable future, systems operators who offer Internet access may try to limit bandwidth outside the walled gardens. Limiting bandwidth can have an impact on certain types of P2P networks.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

What’s more, there are plenty of situations in which it’s simply not economically viable for these costly, inefficient institutions to resolve whatever particular trust deficit is preventing people from doing business with each other. So, if we bypass those intermediaries, we will not only save money but also open up previously impossible business models. The Internet put us on this disintermediating path some time ago, well before the blockchain came along. But it’s worth noting that at the heart of each new Internet application that cuts out some incumbent middleman there has typically been a technology that helps humans deal with their perennial mistrust issues. Who would have thought a decade ago that people would feel comfortable riding in the car of some stranger they’d just discovered on their phones?

If the first phases of the Internet created huge opportunities for wealth creation and new business models by helping people jump the fences and get on the playing field, this next one promises to remove the fences altogether. In theory, it means that everyone with access to a device and the Internet can participate directly in the global economy. Thus, the hope is that we will greatly expand the pool of open-source innovation from which all sorts of powerful ideas will emerge. Think of how disintermediation has already transformed the global economy in the earlier Internet era and you get a sense of how sweeping this next phase could be. Consider, for example, how the outsourcing of technical advice, Web design, and even accounting services disrupted jobs in Western countries and fostered economic growth in places like Bangalore, India.

Or think of how Craigslist, which allowed people to post ads for anything at zero cost on a site that had global reach, completely decimated the classified ads business and, ultimately, shuttered hundreds of local newspapers. If blockchain technology lives up to its promise to decentralize and disintermediate so much of our economy, these prior disruptions may seem minuscule by comparison. As we’ll discuss in the pages ahead, there’s still much work to do to get this technology ready for prime time. In fact, it may never be scalable to the size needed to make a difference. Nonetheless, people across every industry are coming to recognize its potential power.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Moreover, conversational bots are designed to be dynamic—able to learn and change—so companies must also determine what boundaries to set as their bots evolve over time. The Curious Incident of the Disintermediated Brand An intriguing effect has emerged as more and more companies have deployed solutions using AI platforms like Siri, Watson, Cortana, and Alexa. It’s a phenomenon called brand disintermediation. Since 1994, Amazon has connected with its customers almost exclusively through their eyes; the company’s easy-to-navigate website, and later its mobile applications, made it simple to find what you needed (or didn’t know you needed) and buy it.

In the past, companies like Domino’s, Capital One, and Delta owned the entire customer experience, but now, with Alexa, Amazon owns part of the information exchange as well as the fundamental interface between the companies and the customer, and it can use that data to improve its own services. Brand disintermediation had taken hold. Disintermediated brands appear in other contexts, too. For instance, Facebook creates no content, yet it brokers content for billions of individuals and thousands of media markets; Uber owns almost no vehicles, yet it is the world’s largest taxi service. In a hyper-networked world where mobile phones, speakers, thermostats, and even exercise clothes are connected to the internet and potentially each other, brands have to learn to play well with each other or give up a certain amount of control to those that own the most popular interfaces.

FUSION SKILL #3: Judgment Integration Definition: The judgment-based ability to decide a course of action when a machine is uncertain about what to do. When a machine is uncertain about what to do, or lacks necessary business or ethical context in its reasoning model, people must be smart about sensing where, how, and when to step in. “With machine learning you are really disintermediating the human judgment, and the human’s fault in the decision-making,” says Adam Wenchel, Capital One’s vice president of data innovation. “You are actually pulling them further and further out, and I think this is part of a shift that has been going on for a while.”8 To bring human judgment back in the loop, Wenchel’s team is applying and developing both statistical and soft skills.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Now that the platform has reached critical mass and that network effects are in full swing, the platform can optimize how much of the excess value delivered to customers can be captured during the core transaction. This may translate into more refined pricing structures and levels. The key things to watch out for at this stage are disintermediation and leakage. For example, Upwork changed its pricing structure in June 2016 to reduce leakage from its most profitable freelancers. Based on their choice of payment method, clients now either pay a processing fee of 2.75% when paying by credit cards, or no processing fee if they choose a low cost payment method like an Automated Clearing House (ACH).

There Table 10.2 Examples of performance metrics at platform maturity New markets and ongoing growth • • • • Product/geographic market coverage (e.g. Airbnb: cities served as % of total universe) Growth of users switching sides Effectiveness of notifications for prompting transactions % of existing users total business (e.g. How much are users multihoming? How much do producers sell through other channels?) • Disintermediation metrics (e.g. measures of repeat business between the same user and producer) Search/match optimization • Proactive and predictive search/match analytics • Individual customization of offers, marketing, etc. Monetization/profitability • Revenue/profit per core transaction, customer lifetime value • Customer acquisition costs • Organic vs paid growth (e.g.

How can platforms both support rapid user growth and generate revenues with minimum friction to maximize network effects? How can platforms use pricing to ensure the communities are balanced in terms of supply and demand? How do platforms maximize the quality of customer interactions and experiences? How can platforms use pricing models that minimize the risk of ‘disintermediation’ and ‘leakages’ (i.e. transactions moving ‘off-platform’)? How to best transition from one pricing model to another (in particular, transition from free to a paying model)? We’ll review these questions in turn. Let’s start by looking at key pricing governance questions. 140 Platform pricing How to ensure ‘producers’ pricing creates a good customer experience for ‘users’ A platform architect must consider not only the impact of the platform’s own pricing strategies on interactions, but also the impact of producers’ pricing structures.


Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

This mechanism came into play with Bitcoin, and it enables a user to agree on something via a consensus algorithm without the need for a central, trusted third party, intermediary, or service provider. Methods of decentralization Two methods can be used to achieve decentralization: disintermediation and competition (Contest-driven decentralization). These methods will be discussed in detail in the sections that follow. Disintermediation The concept of disintermediation can be explained with the aid of an example. Imagine that you want to send money to a friend in another country. You go to a bank who, for a fee, will transfer your money to the bank in that country. In this case, the bank maintains a central database that is updated, confirming that you have sent the money.

With blockchain technology, it is possible to send this money directly to your friend without the need for a bank. All you need is the address of your friend on the blockchain. This way, the intermediary; that is, the bank, is no longer required, and decentralization is achieved by disintermediation. It is debatable, however, how practical decentralization through disintermediation is in the financial sector due to massive regulatory and compliance requirements. Nevertheless, this model can be used not only in finance but in many different industries as well. Contest-driven decentralization In the method involving competition, different service providers compete with each other in order to be selected for the provision of services by the system.

The first question simply asks you to identify what system is being decentralized. This can be any system, such as an identity system or a trading system. The second question asks you to specify the level of decentralization required by examining the scale of decentralization as discussed earlier. It can be full disintermediation or partial disintermediation. The third question asks developers to determine which blockchain is suitable for a particular application. It can be Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain, or any other blockchain that is deemed fit for the specific application. Finally, a fundamental question that needs to be addressed is how the security of a decentralized system will be guaranteed.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

http://www.automotiveworld.com/analysis/automotive-grade-graphene-clock-ticking/ 7 Sarah Laskow, “The Strongest, Most Expensive Material on Earth”, The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/the-strongest-most-expensive-material-on-earth/380601/ 8 Some of the technologies are described in greater detail in: Bernard Meyerson, “Top 10 Technologies of 2015”, Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, World Economic Forum, 4 March 2015. https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/03/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2015-2/ 9 Tom Goodwin, “In the age of disintermediation the battle is all for the consumer interface”, TechCrunch, March 2015. http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/ 10 K.A. Wetterstrand, “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP)”, National Human Genome Research Institute, 2 October 2015. http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/ 11 Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Watson’s Next Feat?

Many senior executives expect industry convergence to be the primary force impacting their business in the next three to five years.39 Once a customer has established a track record of trust and confidence on the platform, it becomes easy for the digital provider to offer other products and services. Fast-moving competitors provoke a disaggregation of the more traditional industry silos and value chains, and also disintermediate the existing relationship between businesses and their customers. New disruptors can rapidly scale at a much lower cost than the incumbents, generating in the process a rapid growth in their financial returns through network effects. Amazon’s evolution from a bookseller to a $100 billion a year retail conglomerate shows how customer loyalty, combined with insights on preferences and solid execution can lead to selling across multiple industries.

In “The Robot Reality: Service Jobs Are Next to Go”, Blaire Briody, 26 March 2013, The Fiscal Times, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100592545 Shift 16: Bitcoin and the Blockchain The tipping point: 10% of global gross domestic product (GDP) stored on blockchain technology By 2025: 58% of respondents expected this tipping point to have occurred Bitcoin and digital currencies are based on the idea of a distributed trust mechanism called the “blockchain”, a way of keeping track of trusted transactions in a distributed fashion. Currently, the total worth of bitcoin in the blockchain is around $20 billion, or about 0.025% of global GDP of around $80 trillion. Positive impacts – Increased financial inclusion in emerging markets, as financial services on the blockchain gain critical mass – Disintermediation of financial institutions, as new services and value exchanges are created directly on the blockchain – An explosion in tradable assets, as all kinds of value exchange can be hosted on the blockchain – Better property records in emerging markets, and the ability to make everything a tradable asset – Contacts and legal services increasingly tied to code linked to the blockchain, to be used as unbreakable escrow or programmatically designed smart contracts – Increased transparency, as the blockchain is essentially a global ledger storing all transactions The shift in action Smartcontracts.com provides programmable contracts that do payouts between two parties once certain criteria have been met, without involving a middleman.


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Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

You can do decentralized Dropbox, so instead of having all your files stored on a server; you can actually store them in a decentralized network and instead provide them with a token system just like Bitcoin. That’s what we’re working on to do with Ethereum. ‘Bitcoin was an exploration of how can we build a decentralized value system. And if you want to call it money, call it money – but a decentralized money system where we dis-intermediate the government from the generation of money, okay. Ethereum is extracting that and saying what else can we dis-intermediate? Can we remove Dropbox from storage? Can we remove Rackspace and Amazon from hosting? Can we remove Las Vegas from gambling? Can we remove Wall Street from finance? And instead can we run these things in a decentralized way? ‘It’s a continuation of that experiment and we’re seeing how many other things in society we can actually decentralize in nature so that they’re not controlled by any one actor.

‘It’s a continuation of that experiment and we’re seeing how many other things in society we can actually decentralize in nature so that they’re not controlled by any one actor. We want to let people choose and program whatever disintermediation they want.’ It’s revolutionary stuff. The implications to existing internet business models are substantial. What kind of progress has been made? ‘We came up with the idea back in November of last year, there was a white paper drafted by a gentleman named Vitalik Buterin, who is the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and a pretty big figure in the space. And since then we’ve released five proof of concepts and we’re just about ready to begin a sale to fund the project’s development.

‘And so that’s our hope, that’s what we want to do. And the app catalogue is totally decentralized just like the network. So even we don’t control it – so we can’t take apps down or anything and the government can’t take apps down or something like that. So, that’s what we’re trying to do: mainstream this dis-intermediation technology’. The implications of Ethereum – if it takes off – are clearly enormous. For more information about Ethereum, visit ethereum.org. 10 Should You Buy In? You can’t stop things like Bitcoin. It’s like trying to stop gunpowder. It will be everywhere and the world will have to readjust.


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The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Also, unions and government pension plans (for example, CalPERS) and university investment arms wanted higher and higher returns and were willing to dramatically increase their alternative investment portfolios, driving assets from the commercial banking system. To the degree that this disintermediation process was driven by market forces, it is a rational allocation of resources. To the degree that the disintermediation was driven by regulatory policy and politically motivated public employee pension plans, it is unhealthy from an economic perspective. As an observer of the process, I believe that regulatory policy and political allocations were the primary drivers, although I cannot prove this point.

Since the early 1970s, regulated financial institutions have faced dramatically increased costs on a multitude of “politically correct” fronts. These costs have driven commercial banks to focus on areas with higher levels of profits, such as real estate lending, which can also be more risky. Another factor has been the disintermediation of deposits caused by money market mutual funds. These funds often pay higher interest rates on deposits than banks pay. The money market funds also claimed to be as low risk as bank certificates of deposit. Of course, when the financial crisis started, many money funds were under water because in fact they had taken more risk.

., 183 government debt in, 200 manufacturing in, 10, 25–26, 161 market-based pricing in, 34 military spending in, 198 stimulus fund use, 181–182 trade with, 204–205 U.S. investment by, 29, 159 Chrysler, 130, 179–180 Citigroup: bailout of, 50, 104, 130, 177 CDOs of, 125–126 credit decisions, 238 crony capitalism, 6 funding of shadow banking system, 120 long-term debt of, 71 and panic during financial crisis, 163 pragmatism at, 217–218 reason at, 245 “too-big-to-fail” firms, 173 Clearing, 104 Clinton, Bill: lending reforms, 42–44, 56 subprime lending requirements, 58–60 Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 124–126 Colonial Bank, 47–48 Commercial real estate, 11, 97 Common good, 215–216 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 42, 55–57, 59 Compensation, 50, 83–84, 197–198 Confidence, 84–87, 184–185 Conservatives, 108 Consumer compliance, 193 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 26–27 Consumption: borrowing for, 57–58 housing as, 9–12, 54–55, 73–74 Contagion risk, 123 Corporate debt, 107 Counterparty risk, 123, 124 Countrywide: crony capitalism at, 6 and fair-value accounting change, 114, 118 and FDIC insurance, 39, 41, 46 necessary failure of, 159 pick-a-payment mortgages of, 91–93 subprime business at, 99 thrift history of, 98 CPI (see Consumer Price Index) CRA (see Community Reinvestment Act) Creativity, 7, 247 Credit default swaps (CDSs), 126–128 Credit rating agencies (see Rating agencies) Crony capitalism, 6, 102, 129, 179 Cross-guarantor insurance fund, 48–52 Cuba, 34, 247, 252 Cuomo, Andrew, 58 Currency, debasing, 22 Debt, 21–22, 107 Declaration of Independence, 220, 252 Defaults, 90–91, 126–128 Defense spending, 198–199, 227 Deflation, 22 Demand, supply and, 104, 185, 209, 210 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 15, 58 Deposits, disintermediation of, 120–121 Derivatives, 3, 120, 122–124 Disclosure requirements, 150–152 Dodd, Christopher, 7, 46, 61, 63, 64 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: deficiencies of, 193 introduction of, 63–64, 183 as misregulation, 147 results of, 130 and TARP, 173, 174 Dollar, U.S., 77, 188, 229 Durbin amendment, 193 Earnings, operating, 103–106 East Germany, 34, 247 Eastern Europe, 34, 252 Economic cycles, 108, 189–193 Economic health, 159–161 Economic recovery, 1, 207–208 Economy, banking industry in, 67–69 Edison, Thomas, 19, 158–159 Education, 230–235, 247 Egypt, ancient, 230 Elitism, 7 Ely, Bert, 48 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), 82, 149 Enron, 60, 109, 133, 149 Entitlement programs, reforms for, 199–204 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 42, 55 ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), 82, 149 Ethical incentives, lending, 57–58 Euro, 189 European banking crisis, 51–52, 137 Expensing (stock options), 114–117 Experiential learners, 244–245 Fair Housing Act, 55 Fair-value accounting, 103–118 asset valuation in, 106–108 and expensing of stock options, 114–117 and losses on CDSs, 126–127 private accounting systems vs., 177–178 SEC involvement in, 151–152 for selling vs. servicing mortgages, 113–114 Fannie Mae: accounting scandal, 112–113, 149 in current environment, 251 and disintermediation of deposits, 121 failure of, 61–65, 164 and fair-value accounting, 118 in housing policy, 58–61 misallocation of resources by, 14 misleading of rating agencies by, 83 mortgage lending by, 97–101 reforms for, 190–192 selling mortgages to, 113–114 subprime lending by, 58, 99–101 FASB (see Financial Accounting Standards Board) FDIC (see Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) FDIC insurance, 37–52 and bank liquidity, 171 and failing banks, 140 and fractional reserve banking, 68–69 and pick-a-payment mortgages, 91 reform of, 190 and S&L failures, 97 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 37–38 as external auditors, 134 and failing banks, 47–48 misallocation of resources by, 14 and pick-a-payment mortgages, 91 as regulator, 41–48, 143 take over of Washington Mutual, 75–77 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 15, 190–192, 252 Federal Reserve, 22–23, 102, 189 antitrust policy, 174 bailouts by, 120–121, 190, 192 and banking industry reforms, 187–188 as external auditors, 134 and federal debt, 21–22 and leverage, 72 mathematical modeling by, 136 misallocation of resources by, 14, 208 misleading information from, 46, 83, 101, 125 monetary policy of, 17–20, 31–35, 96 overreaction by, 154 stimulus from, 152, 153, 208 and TARP, 165, 167–168, 171 and unemployment, 213 and Washington Mutual, 75 Federal Reserve Board, 18 Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, 31 Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), 37–38, 50, 96 FHA (see Federal Housing Administration) Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), 105, 106, 114–117 Financial crisis (2007-2009), 1–3, 251–254 banking industry in, 70–72 derivatives in, 122–124 Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in, 65 free-market response to, 177–186 and Great Depression, 25 lessons from, 251–252 SEC role in, 154–155 Financial reporting requirements, SEC, 150–152 Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), 32, 61–62 First Horizon, 237 Fitch, John Knowles, 150 Fitch Ratings: investor confidence in, 84–87 misratings by, 82–84, 101, 125, 126 and SEC, 81–82, 149–150 Flat tax, 197 Forbes, Steve, 197 Ford, 179 Foreclosure laws, 77–80 Fractional reserve banking, 69–70 Frank, Barney, 7, 61, 63, 64 Fraud, 109–113 Freddie Mac: accounting scandal, 112–113, 149 current environment, 251 and disintermediation of deposits, 121 failure of, 61–65, 164 in housing policy, 58–61 misallocation of resources by, 14 misleading information from, 83 mortgage lending by, 97–101 reforms for, 190–192 selling mortgages to, 113–114 subprime lending by, 58, 99–101 Free markets: experimentation in, 19 justice in, 92, 177 market corrections in, 157–159 and monetary policy, 31–35 risk taking by banks in, 40–41 wage rates in, 210–211 Free trade, 204–205 Friedman, Milton, 20, 189 FSLIC (see Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation) FSR (Financial Services Roundtable), 32, 61–62 GAAP accounting, 116, 117 Gates, Bill, 216 GDP, 183, 197–199 General Electric, 168, 169 General Motors (GM), 169, 178–180 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 181 Germany, 52 GM (General Motors), 169, 178–180 GMAC, 168, 169, 178–180 Gold standard: and deflation, 25–26 and economic future of U.S., 188–189 Greenspan’s view of, 32 Golden West, 39, 91, 92, 98, 159 Goldman Sachs, 71, 173 as AIG counterparty, 128–129 bailout of, 104, 164, 179 CDSs of, 126 counterparty risk at, 124 crony capitalism at, 6 financial “innovations” of, 101 Government policy: as cause of financial crisis, 1, 5–6, 251 and residential real estate bubble, 6 (See also Housing policy; Policy reforms) Government regulation, 5–8, 41–48, 204 Government spending, 180–183, 197–199 Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), 59, 64–65, 98, 137 (See also Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac) Great Depression: and avoidance of stock market, 74 banking industry in, 70–72 economic policies after, 161 and Federal Reserve, 19–20, 24, 188 and gold standard, 188 and government interference, 170 and Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 205 Great Recession, 1, 251–254 and Federal Reserve, 188 Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in, 65 and interest-rate variation, 33 market corrections and depth of, 160 and monetary policy, 17 and residential real estate, 9–15 Great Society, 6, 55, 96 Greece, 51, 52, 137, 228 Greenspan, Alan, 23–30, 32, 33, 160 Gross domestic product, 183, 197–199 Hamilton, Alexander, 19 Harvard University, 43, 131 Hayek, Friedrich, 31 Health insurance, 201–202 High-net-worth shareholders, 93 Home Builders Association, 60 Home foreclosure laws, 77–80 Homeownership, 53–55 Hoover, Herbert, 24, 161, 205 Housing: as consumption, 9–12, 54–55, 73–74 government support of, 12 Housing policy, 53–65 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 15, 58 Human Action (von Mises), 238 Immigration, 19, 205–206 India, 10, 25, 205 IndyMac, 39, 75, 98 Inflation: CPI as indicator of, 26–27 and fair-value accounting, 103 and Federal Reserve, 21–22 and prices, 24–25 (See also Monetary policy) Initial public offerings, 150 Insurance: bond, 86–87 cross-guarantor, 48–52 FDIC (see FDIC insurance) health, 201–202 private deposit, 48–52 self-insurance at banks, 48–52 unemployment, 212–213 Interest rates, 26–27, 31–35 Inverted yield curves, 27–29 Investment banks: disclosure requirements for, 151 government bailout of, 162 “innovations” of, 101–102 leverage ratios of, 71–72 IPOs, 150 Iran, 198, 199, 227 Iraq, 198 Ireland, 77 Isaac, Bill, 107–108, 161–162 Italy, 51, 52 Japan, 159, 200, 205 Jefferson, Thomas, 19, 220 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 6, 55, 96, 161, 188 JPMorgan Chase, 75 and Bear Stearns, 162 and shadow banking system, 120 as “too-big-to-fail” firm, 173 and Washington Mutual, 163 Keynes, John Maynard, 181 Labor: allocation of, 10–11, 14 minimum-wage laws, 209–212 Lehman Brothers, 71, 76, 101, 104, 129, 164 and Bear Stearns bailout, 162–163 corporate debt at, 107 counterparty risk at, 124 derivatives from, 123 Limited government, 182–183, 195, 231, 253 Liquidity: of banks, 68–69 and FDIC insurance, 171 and financial crises, 70–72 and housing prices, 74–75 and TARP, 171–172 Loan loss reserves accounting, 152–154 Loans: capital standards for, 51–52 qualified, 98 substandard, 140–141 Madoff, Bernie, 149, 225 March of Dimes, 241 Market corrections, 157–165 Federal Reserve’s prevention of, 23, 32 prevention of, 13 residential real estate, 78 and response to financial crisis, 177–180 Market discipline, 21, 38 Market-based monetary policy, 31–35 Market-clearing price, 209 Mathematical modeling: for loan loss reserves, 152–153 by ratings agencies, 82–83 for risk management, 136–138 MBIA, 86 Medicaid, 6, 55, 201 Medicare, 6, 8, 55, 201, 203 Meltdown (Michaels), 35 Merrill Lynch, 101, 124–125 Michaels, Patrick J., 35 Microsoft, 217 Military spending, 198–199, 227 Minimum-wage laws, 209–212 Mises, Ludwig von, 34, 238 Monetary policy, 17–35 of Bernanke, 27–31, 33, 35, 40, 125, 213 and federal debt, 21–22 and Federal Reserve, 17–23 of Greenspan, 23–27 market-based, 31–35 and unemployment, 208–209 Money market mutual funds, bailout of, 120–121, 192 Money supply, 21–22, 24, 189 Moody, John, 83, 150 Moody’s, 81–87 investor confidence in, 84–87 misratings by, 82–84, 101, 125, 126 and SEC, 81–82, 149–150 Morgan Stanley, 71, 101, 124, 173 Mortgage lending, 95–102 by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 97–101 and investment bank innovations, 101–102 prime, 59, 97–99 by private banks, 97–99 savings and loan industry in, 95–97 subprime, 43, 56–57, 99–101 Mortgages: by BB&T Corporation, 97–98 jumbo, 62 pick-a-payment (see Pick-a-payment mortgages) selling vs. servicing, 113–114 Mozilo, Angelo, 46 Multiplier effect, 181 Naked shorting, 127–128, 151 Nationally recognized statistical rating organizations, 82 Negative real interest rates, 26–27 Neo-Keynesian response to financial crisis, 185–186 Neutral taxes, 197 New Deal, 53, 170, 232 Nixon, Richard, 96, 161, 188 North Korea, 34, 198, 227, 247, 252 NRSROs, 82 Obama administration, 142–144: and Dodd-Frank Act, 64 economic policies of, 15, 161 healthcare bill, 183, 201 and Patriot Act, 45 stimulus plan, 181–182 Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), 40, 154 Office of Thrift Supervision, 40, 41, 45–46 Operating earnings, 103–106 OTS, 40, 41, 45–46 Panics, 137–138, 161–165 Patriot Act, 45, 46, 48, 133–136, 147 Paulson, Henry: in 2008 panic, 164, 167 and AIG bailout, 128, 129 credibility of, 164 development of TARP, 76, 168–170, 172 Pick-a-payment mortgages, 89–93 borrowers using, 90–91 and FDIC, 91 and rise of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, 98 Policy reforms, 195–206 for entitlement programs, 199–204 and free trade, 204–205 and government regulations, 204 for government spending, 197–199 for immigration, 205–206 for political system, 206–207 and tax rate, 196–197 Politics: in banking regulation, 42–46 and crony capitalism, 129 and failure of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, 59–62 and Federal Reserve appointments, 18 policy reforms for, 206–207 Poor, Henry Varnum, 150 Portugal, 51 Price fixing, 31, 193 Price setting, 31–32 Prime lending, 59, 97–99 Prince, Charlie, 217 Principles-based accounting, 109 Privacy Act, 133, 135 Private accounting systems, 177–178 Private banks, 97–99, 187–188 Private deposit insurance, 48–52 Public schools, 228, 233–235 Racial discrimination (in lending), 42–45 Raines, Frank, 59 Rand, Ayn, 225, 231 Rating agencies, 81–87 investor confidence in, 84–87 mathematical modeling by, 136 and subprime mortgage bonds, 82–84 and “too-big-to-fail” firms, 173 and SEC, 81–82, 149–150 Real estate: commercial, 11, 97 residential (see Residential real estate market) Recessions, 28, 29, 160 Recovery (see Economic recovery) Reforms: banking industry (see Banking industry reforms) government policy (see Policy reforms) Regions Bank, 237 Regulation: of banking industry (see Banking regulation) by government (see Government regulation) Reporting, financial, 150–152 Reserve currency, U.S. dollar as, 77, 188, 229 Residential real estate market: economics of, 73–74 misinvestment in, 9–15 Residential real estate market bubble, 73–80 and government policy, 6 international impact of, 77 and job creation, 80 and state home foreclosure laws, 77–80 Risk: contagion, 123 counterparty, 123, 124 with derivatives, 122–124 diversification of, 67–69 and economic cycles, 189–193 and FDIC insurance, 38–41 and government regulation, 50–51 liquidity, 68–70 mathematical modeling for, 136–138 and “originate and sell” model, 100 systemic, 50–51 RMBS (residential mortgage-backed securities), 81 Roman empire, fall of, 230 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 24, 37, 103, 161 Rules-based accounting, 109 Russia, 198 Samuelson, Paul, 238 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 133–134 and fair-value accounting, 106 and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, 99 misregulation by, 48, 147 and SEC, 150 violations of, 136 SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports), 136 Satchwell, Jack, 57 Savings and loan (S&L) industry, 95–97, 110, 191 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 149–155 capital ratio guidelines, 71–72 and complexity of accounting rules, 116–117 and expensing of stock options, 114, 115 loan loss reserves accounting for, 152–154 misallocation of resources by, 14 and rating agencies, 81–82, 149–150 requirements for shorting stock, 127–128, 151 and rules-based accounting, 109, 110 and Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 150 Self-insurance, 48–52 Selgin, George, 189 Senate Banking Committee, 46 Shadow banking system, 119–131 and AIG bailout, 128–130 credit default swaps in, 126–128 and derivatives, 122–124 Federal Reserve’s role in, 30 losses from, 131 S&L industry, 95–97, 110, 191 Small businesses, 144–147, 183–184 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 205 Social Security, 8, 199–204 South Financial, 237 South Korea, 247 Soviet Union, 34, 195–196, 252, 254 S&P (see Standard & Poor’s) Spain, 51, 52, 77 Spitzer, Eliot, 71, 134–135, 151 Stagflation, 181, 208 Standard & Poor’s (S&P), 81–87 investor confidence, 84–87 misratings by, 82–84, 101, 125, 126 and SEC, 81–82, 149–150 Standard of living, 6–7, 10, 161, 177 Start-up banks, 38–39 State home foreclosure laws, 77–80 Stimulus plan, 181–182 Stock options, expensing of, 114–117 Stocks, shorting, 127–128, 151 Stress tests, banks, 171 Subprime lending: and CRA, 56–57 by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 99–101 and racial discrimination in lending study, 43 Subprime mortgage bonds, 82–87 Substandard loans, 140–141 SunTrust, 152, 237 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), 136 Tails (mathematical models), 137 TARP (see Troubled Asset Relief Program) Tax rate, 196–197 Tea Party Movement, 218, 231 Technology industry, 5 “Too-big-to-fail” firms, 130, 173, 193 Trader principle, 92, 223–224 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 167–175 and 2008 panic, 165 and FDIC, 37 Underwriters Laboratories, 117, 150 Unemployment, 207–213 in economic recovery, 207–208 and minimum-wage laws, 209–212 and misinvestment in residential real estate, 10–11 and monetary policy, 208–209 Unemployment insurance, 212–213 Unions, 179, 180, 212 United Auto Workers, 179, 180 United States: demographic problem in, 228 economic future of, 8, 227–230, 252–253 educational system of, 230–235 founding concepts of, 219–220 as free trade zone, 204–205 GDP of China vs., 183 mixed economy of, 5–6 public schools of, 233–235 university system of, 230–233 United Way, 224, 241 University system, 230–233 U.S.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

The financial markets allow people with money and people who need money to contract directly with each other using financial instruments and thus reduce or avoid one-sided financial contracts with a bank intermediary. Perhaps believing that the profits of balance sheet intermediation were ordained by God, bankers coined an especially ugly The Financial Market Made Simple word—‘‘disintermediation’’—some thirty years ago to describe the process by which large and sophisticated corporate borrowers bypass them altogether to obtain funds from the public. In fact, over the last two generations or more, the story of finance in the United States and in the broader global economy has been one of the gradual but accelerating shift of financial contracting from banks to tradable financial instruments or contracts whose value (or lack thereof) is established in the market.

Even these needed commitment from banks to lend them the money to pay off their paper to get top ratings. Most of us have no idea what commercial paper is, but it was the most important financial instrument in bringing about our current financial crisis. It did so in two ways. First, it supercharged bank disintermediation. Big credit-worthy companies found it much cheaper 41 42 FINANCIAL MARKET MELTDOWN and easier to obtain the money they needed directly from the market using CP than by borrowing from banks. This led banks to search for new ways to make money. Twenty-five years of searching had gotten the banks to the poor position they are today, many of them circling the drain.

Because banking is a business in which you can never lose your job for doing 151 152 FINANCIAL MARKET MELTDOWN what all the other boys and girls are doing. Wriston was a conspicuous success. So was his bank. No big-time banker could ‘‘just say no’’ to the sovereign lending and be certain of keeping his job. DISINTERMEDIATION BITES One of the reasons that the largest U.S. banks turned to the Euromarkets for profit growth in the 1960s and 1970s was simply that the 3-6-3 business back home was getting killed. This was occurring for two reasons. First, Wall Street had made a comeback in the post-war decade and with it came more corporate bonds and equity financing for big companies.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Instead, the client is hidden behind the interface of the platform. Delivery drivers may re-encounter some of the same customers, but those interactions tend to be fleeting. It therefore makes little sense for clients and workers to attempt to disintermediate the platform – repeating their interaction, but without the platform connecting to them. Ride-hail drivers may have long stretches of time with some customers, but – for them too – it makes little sense to attempt to disintermediate the operation of the platform. It is precisely the multi-sided nature of the platform (connecting workers and clients with many potential matches) that is of value to both clients and workers in that case.

It is precisely the multi-sided nature of the platform (connecting workers and clients with many potential matches) that is of value to both clients and workers in that case. With domestic and care work there is an entirely different calculation, however. Here there are both extended interactions between workers and clients and repeated interactions between those same workers and clients: leading to the danger of disintermediation for platforms. For those reasons, platforms such as Homejoy in the US have struggled. Yet some platforms in this line of work still thrive by reducing transaction costs and offering a mechanism for trust to be built between worker and client. Degree of explicit coordination We then see that geographically tethered platforms tend to exert a high degree of control over their workforce.

Gereffi, G., Humphrey, J. and Sturgeon, T. (2005) The governance of global value chains. Review of International Political Economy, 12(1): 78–104. Goodwin, T. (2015) The Battle Is for the Customer Interface. TechCrunch, 3 March. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/ Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007) Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain. Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(1): 118–33. Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Allen Lane. Graham, M. and Anwar, M.A. (2018) Digital labour.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The speeches—or the “conversation,” to use the digitally correct term—were all variations upon a single theme. What can help us create a better world in the digital age? everyone at FOO Camp asked. The Internet was the answer, they all agreed, because it “democratized” media, giving a voice to everyone, thereby making it more diverse. By “disintermediating” traditional media, FOO Campers all agreed, Web 2.0 companies like YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and Wikipedia circumvented what they pejoratively called “the gatekeepers”—those guys like Larry Kay, my old boss at Fi, who had historically controlled the printing presses, recording studios, and movie studios.

In Spain, eighteen thousand people used Twitter in May 2014 to post tweets with a hateful anti-Semitic hashtag after a Madrid team was beaten by Maccabi Tel Aviv in the final of the European basketball tournament.32 It wasn’t, of course, supposed to turn out this way. According to Internet evangelists like Jay Rosen, Tim O’Reilly, and the FOO Camp unestablishment, the Internet’s so-called disintermediation of media gatekeepers would inspire a democratic enlightenment in which anyone could voice their opinion online through free networks like Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. The old media, they said, was parochial, self-interested, and sexist; new media, in contrast, would reflect a broad diversity of opinion outside the stuffy old elites at the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN.

Back then, you’ll remember, it was believed that networked technology could enable anyone to become the owner of a vast record store. Now, with 3-D printers, we can supposedly set up factories in our own homes and, with the appropriate software, create anything we like. Technology is once again the great liberator. And, inevitably, Chris Anderson has written a book hyping a revolution that supposedly “empowers” us to “disintermediate” the industrial factory and manufacture our own products. In his 2012 manifesto, Makers, Anderson, spouting an unholy mashup of libertarianism and Marxism, argues that this “new industrial revolution” democratizes the tools of invention and production. Now that the digital revolution has “reached the workshop, the lair of Real Stuff,” Anderson breathlessly promises us, it will have “its greatest impact yet.”63 Makers of the world unite!


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The repo market emerged in the 1980s when traditional banks lost market share because of a process called “disintermediation.”6 Banks, as intermediaries, traditionally sit in the middle of someone else’s prospective business, connecting borrowers and lenders, for example, and charging fees for doing so. Before disintermediation, banks engaged in what was often called “3-6-3 banking”: they would borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6 percent, and hit the golf course by 3 p.m. It was safe, steady, and dull. But as financial markets became more deregulated in the 1980s, large corporations began to use their own cash reserves, lending them to one another directly—they disintermediated—bypassing banks and squeezing bank profits.

But if the whole system had melted down as was feared, the immediate cost could have been the sum of those bank assets, some 61 percent of GDP, which does not factor in the secondary costs in lost output, unemployment, and the damage that you can do with 70 million handguns. The crisis started in America because this system had become too big to fail. Banking was transformed from its sleepy 3-6-3 origins. Disintermediation, securitization, and the rise of repo markets made funding cheaper and lending more plentiful but riskier. Those risks were supposed to be controlled by financial derivatives and risk-management tools, but instead these technologies seemed to amplify and spread, rather than reduce and control, the risk in the system.

The End of Banking The story of the crisis reconstructed in chapters 2 and 3 can, and perhaps should, be seen in a bigger context. At the end of the Bretton Woods era, when the United States finally went off gold in 1971, states around the world had to adjust to what Eric Helleiner has called “the reemergence of global finance.”3 Floating exchange rates, deregulation, disintermediation, and the rest, which made finance the most profitable sector of the American and British economies by the 2000s, was the new order of things. But what was it all really based upon? After all, finance is most properly thought of as a part of the information system of the economy: linking borrowers and lenders while sitting in the middle collecting a fee.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

With more vibrant public spaces, people also have less need to live in huge private spaces. People living in community depend less on externally produced entertainment and have more occasion to share and assist each other. All of that means a decrease in money-mediated activity. DISINTERMEDIATION AND THE P2P REVOLUTION Another source of economic shrinkage is the disintermediation that the internet has made possible. Disintermediation refers to the elimination of intermediaries: agents, brokers, middlemen, and so forth. Consider the example of Craigslist, which according to one estimate has destroyed $10 billion of annual revenue from classified ads, replacing it with only $100 million of its own revenues.5 Google has also made advertising more efficient (cheaper), not only seizing ad revenue from existing media but also reducing total industrywide advertising expenditures.

The same is true of travel agency, stock brokerage, and many other industries where brokers and agents are no longer necessary. All of these factors contribute to economic deflation. Disintermediation and open source software are both part of a more general phenomenon: the peer-to-peer (P2P) revolution. The older hierarchical and centralized structures of distribution, circulation, and production required a lot of money and human effort to administer. Moreover, their very nature isolated people from each other within narrow specialties, making gift exchange impossible. Disintermediation is even affecting the credit system and subverting banks’ traditional role as financial intermediaries connecting investors and borrowers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Author’s Note Introduction PART I: THE ECONOMICS OF SEPARATION Chapter 1: The Gift World Chapter 2: The Illusion of Scarcity Chapter 3: Money and the Mind Chapter 4: The Trouble with Property Chapter 5: The Corpse of the Commons Cultural and Spiritual Capital The Strip-Mining of Community The Creation of Needs The Money Power Chapter 6: The Economics of Usury An Economic Parable The Growth Imperative The Concentration of Wealth Wealth Redistribution and Class War Inflation More for You Is Less for Me Chapter 7: The Crisis of Civilization Chapter 8: The Turning of the Age Money: Story and Magic Humanity’s Coming-of-Age Ordeal PART II: THE ECONOMICS OF REUNION Chapter 9: The Story of Value Chapter 10: The Law of Return Chapter 11: Currencies of the Commons Chapter 12: Negative-Interest Economics History and Background Modern Application and Theory The Debt Crisis: Opportunity for Transition Thinking for the Future More for Me Is More for You Chapter 13: Steady-State and Degrowth Economics Sustainability Reconsidered Transition to Steady-State: Bump or Crash? Shrinking Money, Growing Wealth Disintermediation and the P2P Revolution Chapter 14: The Social Dividend The Paradox of Leisure The Obsolescence of “Jobs” The Will to Work Who Shall Remove the Garbage? Chapter 15: Local and Complementary Currency The Catch-22 of Local Currency Experiments in Local Money Reclaiming the Credit Commons Chapter 16: Transition to Gift Economy Chapter 17: Summary and Roadmap 1.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Locating central bank digital currency (CBDC). No matter how beneficial it might be to society, CBDC has two well-understood problems that are identified in figure 10. The first is that it would disintermediate banks, and the second is that it might destroy banks (because bank deposits would be traded for zero-risk central bank money). Central bankers, being naturally somewhat conservative, do not want to either disintermediate or destroy banks in the same way that Bitcoiners do; so, they will look for what are generally called two tier solutions, in which the central bank creates and monitors the digital money but commercial banks manage it.

Either way, the shift towards digital fiat will restructure the financial system, and therefore it needs careful planning. If people start using digital fiat instead of banknotes and move money from their (to a certain extent risk-free) bank accounts to their central bank digital fiat balances, then this could set in motion a disintermediation of the banking sector as a whole. This is why economists distinguish between digital fiat that substitutes for banknotes and digital fiat that substitutes for bank deposits. As you can see from figure 11, bank deposits account for almost half of bank funding requirements in the eurozone, and at low cost.

If you take these away, you have to have a plan for the banks. As Lael Brainard, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, pointed out in an October 2019 speech, population-scale public or private digital currencies challenge current commercial bank business models and could both disintermediate the role of banks in payments and affect their sources of funds (Brainard 2019). Moreover, the widespread use of such currencies would reduce the visibility of transactions data for banks, thereby hindering their ability to price risk. This is an issue that has long been recognized in China, where the rise of non-bank mobile app payments at the expense of credit and debit cards has restricted commercial banks’ access to customer data: access that is crucial to emerging business models (Wildau 2016).


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Saifedean Ammous, the author of The Bitcoin Standard, contends: “The fact that Ethereum could be rolled back means that all blockchains smaller than Bitcoin’s are essentially centralized databases under the control of their operators.”5 The key difference between the bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains is that bitcoin focuses on security and simplicity while Ethereum focuses on capability and functionality. Ethereum’s superior functionality is transforming a number of industries. As Buterin puts it, “The Internet tended to displace workers doing routine work on the edge of the system; the blockchain tends to disintermediate executives in the center.” Smart contracts may disintermediate lawyers, accountants, and bankers who do not get aboard. As Buterin says, “The Internet displaced the jobs of taxi drivers; the blockchain may displace Uber.” Indeed, an Ethereum company called Swarm is attempting to enable cab-drivers to transact directly with their customers through a cooperative scheme on the blockchain.

Put together these projects failed to reach Google’s modest target of five million subscribers. Google began as an Internet company crawling the World Wide Web with its miraculous search capabilities. Today, as Eric Schmidt declares, it is moving from “search” to “suggest,” using artificial intelligence to disintermediate the Web. Rather than being referred to a Web page by Google’s system, you are increasingly provided with Google’s own targeted response honed by its deep learning systems, its super-intelligent adaptation to your every whim. All these Google ambitions depend on the rapid expansion of bandwidth through 5G and other ventures that are going to entail hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

The premise of the cryptocurrency movement is the recognition that the old bureaucracies of socialism and crony-capitalism have failed. That is the problem, not the solution. A source of the confusion is Stinchcombe’s notion, fostered by the crypto-movement itself, that smart contracts and global currencies are something entirely new. He implies that the disintermediation of trusted third parties is a radical departure fostered by a blockchain apocalypse. But every advance for mechanization and industry, from the loom to the sewing machine, the linotype, the metal cutter, the telephone switch, and the Internet router to the World Wide Web, has required relinquishing some measure of human control to machine languages of various kinds.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

COUNTERANTIDISINTERMEDIATION On her blog, Wendy M. Grossman writes, “‘Disintermediation’ was one of the buzzwords of the early 1990s. The Net was going to eliminate middlemen by allowing us all to deal with each other directly.” Today, the landscape is dominated by many fewer, much larger ISPs whose fixed connections are far more trackable and controllable. We thought a lot about encryption as a protector of privacy and, I now think, not enough about the unprecedented potential for endemic wiretapping that would be enabled by an increasingly centralized Internet. The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before.

Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and protection into our other organizing work. We can’t let reputation management become disaggregated from the platforms on which workers get work. So build a better mousetrap. We should take a lesson from Dave’s union too, and build organizations that can evolve as the technology work evolves. 12. COUNTERANTI-DISINTERMEDIATION DMYTRI KLEINER In Chapter 33 of Capital, Karl Marx introduces us to the character of Mr. Peel, recounted from E. G. Wakefield’s England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations. Although Mr. Peel’s story is one of early nineteenth-century colonialism, it helps us understand what has become of the Internet and the so-called sharing economy.

The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we want to think more about the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the cause of this centralizing. The Internet was colonized by capitalist platforms; centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be built to capture profit. The flaw was, to some degree, a result of the architecture of the early Internet. The systems that people used in the early Internet were mainly cooperative and decentralized, but they were not end-to-end.


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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As far as intermediaries go, this sounds very impressive: a single Californian company makes decisions over what counts as hate speech and profanity for some of the world’s most popular sites without anyone ever examining whether its own algorithms might be biased or excessively conservative. Instead of celebrating the mythical nirvana of disintermediation, we should peer inside the black boxes of Impermium’s spam algorithms. The belief in the emancipatory potential of disintermediation is most pronounced in the vast literature on the future of book publishing, a field that is itself constantly defying the trends it predicts (someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing).

,” Slate, March 5, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/03/apple_vs_google_the_war_over_third_party_cookies_.html. 164 “in a world of user tracking”: ibid. 165 easily one of the ugliest words in the English language: I’ve discussed the myth of disintermediation in a Slate column, from which this section partly draws. See Evgeny Morozov, “Muzzled by the Bots,” Slate, October 26, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/10/disintermediation_we_aren_t_seeing_fewer_gatekeepers_we_re_seeing_more.html . 165 The company claims to have developed a technology: Mark Risher, “The Dark Side of Social: Protect Your Brand from Abusive Social Spam,” The Allied Front (Impermium’s corporate blog), October 10, 2012, http://www.impermium.com/blog/2012/10/10/the-dark-side-of-social-protect-your-brand-from-abusive-social-spam. 166 “is chock-full of books”: Jeff Bezos, “The Power of Invention,” SEC.gov, April 2012, http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312512161812/d329990dex991.htm. 167 The Shock of the Old: David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2011), 35. 167 A study by a team of Scandinavian researchers: Karl-Erik Sveiby, Pernilla Gripenberg, and Beata Segercrantz, eds., “The Unintended and Undesirable Consequences: Neglected by Innovation Research,” in Challenging the Innovation Paradigm (London: Routledge, 2012). 168 “The innovator was a heretic”: Benoit Godin, “Kοτομία: An Old Word for a New World, or the De-Contestation of a Political and Contested Concept,” in ibid., Challenging the Innovation Paradigm, 37. 168 “Innovation got a positive hearing”: ibid., 53. 169 “Depending on what is created”: Allen Buchanan, Tony Cole, and Robert O.

“Down with the Gatekeepers!” . . . Say the Gatekeepers Faith in the neutrality, objectivity, and self-evidence of filters and algorithms is not the high point of cybernaïveté, though. That dubious honor goes to the widespread belief that “the Internet” is ridding us of gatekeepers and intermediaries. “Disintermediation”—easily one of the ugliest words in the English language—is often heralded as the defining feature of the digital age. Thanks to innovative new technologies, middlemen of all stripes are believed to be going the way of the dodo. Once editors, publishers, and bookstores wither, the story goes, our public life will finally be liberated from their biases, inefficiencies, and hidden agendas.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

When the internet first began to boom in the 1990s, internet theorists proclaimed that the networked world would lead to a wave of what they called “disintermediation.” They described how, by removing the need for “in-between” services, the internet would disrupt all sorts of longstanding industries. Disintermediation soon remade realms ranging from retail stores (courtesy of Amazon) and taxi companies (courtesy of Uber) to dating (courtesy of Tinder). Athar’s tale showed how the business of information gathering had undergone the same kind of disintermediation. No longer did a reporter need to be a credentialed journalist working for a major news organization.

lang=en. 54 Twitter follower count jumped: Steve Myers, “How 4 People and Their Social Network Turned an Unwitting Witness to bin Laden’s Death Into a Citizen Journalist,” Poynter, May 3, 2011, http://www.poynter.org/2011/how-4-people-their-social-network-turned-an-unwitting-witness-to-bin-ladens-death-into-a-citizen-journalist/130724/. 54 Local journalists sped: Mullen, “Whatever Happened to Guy?” 54 only way that Athar: Ibid. 54 “disintermediation”: Robert Gellman, “Disintermediation and the Internet,” Government Information Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1996): 1–8. 55 just 6 percent: “Internet Users (Per 100 People): Pakistan,” UNdata, http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=WDI&f=Indicator_Code%3AIT.NET.USER.P2. 55 “Secrets now come”: Authors’ interview with CIA official, northern Virginia, September 10, 2016. 55 “Welcome to America”: “George Allen Introduces Macaca,” YouTube video, 01:02, uploaded by zkman, August 15, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

See information data localization, 89 Dawkins, Richard, 189, 190 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 121 deaths Chicago gangs, 13–14 Duterte’s “drug war,” 15 Gaza City, 194, 196 ISIS and, 153 Nairobi’s Westgate mall, 235 Russia and Ukraine, 201–2, 204 Turkey coup, 91–92 deep fakes, 253 deep learning, 249, 250, 256 deep web, 52 democracy (vs. trolls), 211, 241, 262–63, 265–66 Denver Guardian (fake newspaper), 132 Dewey, Caitlin, 137 Digital Forensic Research Lab, 138 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 225–26 digital trail, 60–61, 66 digital wildfires, 137 digital world war, 172 DigitaShadow, 213 diplomacy, 15, 202 discrediting anti-vaxxers, 124–25 campaigners, 116 of information, 123 journalists and activists, 15, 114 of truth, 140 See also trolls and trolling disinformation, 103–14, 137 botnets, 141–47 cybersecurity, 241 dangers of, 261 Russian botnets, 144–45 See also fake news; propaganda disintermediation, 54–55 diversity, 101 Dixson, Angee, 138–39, 140 Dogood, Silence, 29 Domino’s Pizza, hack, 195 Donbass News International (DNI), 108 Dorsey, Jack, 48 dot-com bubble, 44 Drew, Lori, 227–28 Ducca, Lauren, 116 Dumbledore’s Army, 172 Dupin, C. Auguste, 110 Durov, Pavel, 94 Duterte, Rodrigo, 15 E eBay, 41 Egypt, revolution in, 85 8chan, 191–92 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 259 El Salvadoran drug gangs, 14, 136 elections botnets, 142 future of, 264 interference in, 242 in Iran, 84 U.S. midterm (2006), 55–56 U.S. midterm (2010), 142 U.S. midterm (2018), 58 U.S. presidential election (2016), 111–14, 119, 128, 135 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 83 Eliot, T.


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Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

Okay, maybe not a full-blown stream, but a revenue trickle; when these microcareers are knit together, your curated knowledge can evolve from a hobby to an avocation to one of the many gigs that pay the rent, keep your kitty in cat food, or help you save for a college tuition. Which is to say, curation is about something different than disintermediation. In fact, it’s about re-mediation. It’s about adding quality back into the equation and putting a human filter between you and the overwhelming world of content abundance that is swirling around us every day. Curation replaces noise with clarity. And it’s the clarity of your choosing; it’s the things that people you trust help you find.

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM Every formerly powerful editorial structure, it seems, is having a fit over loss of its centralized control: how dare people without history degrees pick what they like, or how dare those without journalism degrees share what they know! The nerve! If you are wondering why there’s so much hand-wringing over the future of journalism in a curated world and less Sturm and Drang over, for example, how Etsy is disintermediating the local arts and crafts fair, there’s a simple answer. Journalists who see themselves as victims of technology have the currently dominant media outlets to broadcast kvetching. Clay Shirky is the ideal observer of all this noisy change. An actual adult who’s almost preter-naturally youthful, he teaches at New York University’s interactive telecommunications program (ITP).

And Jeff Jarvis, the founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, has pretty strong feelings about TV as well. Jarvis sees the “exploding” of TV in a number of critical ways. First, he proclaims, “At some point, soon, content producers will get rid of all middlemen,” and there’s lots of reasons to believe this is true. After all, the Web is disintermediating lots of businesses that used to have middlemen. But Jarvis goes on to connect all this to Madison Avenue, seeing a battle ensuing between old-media companies moving online and emerging complete new-media outlets. Says Jarvis, “What excites me most is that reduced cost of production. That’s really what drove Weblogs: history’s cheapest publishing tool reduced the barrier to entry-to-media and allowed anyone to produce and distribute text content.


pages: 254 words: 14,795

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

Johnson Carter was working with most of the biggest retailers in the country. This included supermarkets, drugstores, and discount chains—all of which were willing to sell soap and shampoo products made in China. The factory wanted access to these players; at the same time, retailers also got it in their heads that they could disintermediate or remove the importer. When disintermediation took place, it tended to benefit the Chinese company more often. An importer who was purchasing a product at $2.25, for example, might have sold that product to a retailer for $4.40. The retailer then got the idea: I’ll go around the importer, straight to his supplier, and I’ll pick up the same product for $2.25.

Chinese factories could take any product and move it quickly into production (“All we need is your sample”), and they showed an incredible willingness and enthusiasm for getting a relationship started. Many of those new importers streaming into China did not necessarily have prior experience in international trade. They were in some cases retailers and distributors who decided to disintermediate those agents who had previously sourced merchandise for them. Others were coming from completely unrelated industries. Many were leaving professional careers to jump into the trade game. To do business in China required no special business license or certification. China manufacturing required no tests or qualifications, and traders were arriving—and often staying—on simple tourist visas that could be extended without difficulty.

Johnson Carter had customers that were looking to go around it to purchase direct, but the importer held a key advantage that its customers did not; it had buying power. In the area of private label soap and shampoo products, Johnson Carter bought in larger volumes than any one of its customers. Companies that disintermediated the middleman quite often suffered, if only because they did not have as much volume. Manufacturers naturally welcomed the possibility of customers losing buying power because it gave them the chance to charge more for their products. Manufacturers entered into business relationships where they earned almost no profit, knowing that they could find a profit opportunity down the road.


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Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

or Baila Reggaeton or Rock Classics, the more streaming comes to mimic radio. The difference is that with radio there were thousands of DJs deciding what to play, including many that were passionate about breaking new local talent. With streaming, just one faceless global giant programs each channel. This trend threatens to disintermediate artists and labels, just as Amazon sought to disintermediate publishers by encouraging writers to publish direct. Liz Pelly has been warning of this danger for years: “A music culture dependent on playlists is dependent on Spotify, whereas a music culture dependent on albums is dependent on record labels.”9 Passive listeners are less likely to form connections with the musicians who make it or seek out their gigs.

The strategy was obvious to writers like Charlie Stross as far back as 2012: “By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis, the publishers handed Amazon a monopoly on their customers—and thereby empowered a predatory monopsony.”27 Once publishers saw the trap they’d fallen into, they became desperate to get out. Amazon had already been demanding ever greater concessions as its grip over the physical book market grew tighter, and publishers knew it would do the same with ebooks. They also feared that Amazon might “disintermediate” them from the equation altogether, by negotiating directly with authors and agents for rights and selling books directly to the public.28 Indeed, as we’ll show, this is exactly what happened! Publishers became fixated on raising prices from $9.99, which they thought was devaluing their products, undercutting physical sales, and threatening the viability of their non-Amazon sellers.

Not even the biggest publisher thought it could force Amazon’s hand alone. Amazon got wind of the deal shortly before the Apple agreements were actually signed. It retaliated straight away, announcing that authors who self-published via Kindle would now get 70 percent royalties in the US market, about double their previous cut.29 This was the disintermediation push publishers had feared. Traditional publishing usually pays authors about 10 percent on physical copies and 25 percent on ebooks, and they knew 70 percent royalties would lure away some of their most profitable authors. Nonetheless, those five of the Big Six publishers went ahead and signed agency agreements with Apple.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Beyond these situations in which a public interest must transcend governmental power structures, other industry sectors and classes can be freed from skewed regulatory and licensing schemes subject to the hierarchical power structures and influence of strongly backed special interest groups on governments, enabling new disintermediated business models. Even though regulation spurred by the institutional lobby has effectively crippled consumer genome services,3 newer sharing economy models like Airbnb and Uber have been standing up strongly in legal attacks from incumbents.4 In addition to economic and political benefits, the coordination, record keeping, and irrevocability of transactions using blockchain technology are features that could be as fundamental for forward progress in society as the Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone.

Users can trust the system of the public ledger stored worldwide on many different decentralized nodes maintained by “miner-accountants,” as opposed to having to establish and maintain trust with the transaction counterparty (another person) or a third-party intermediary (like a bank). The blockchain as the architecture for a new system of decentralized trustless transactions is the key innovation. The blockchain allows the disintermediation and decentralization of all transactions of any type between all parties on a global basis. The blockchain is like another application layer to run on the existing stack of Internet protocols, adding an entire new tier to the Internet to enable economic transactions, both immediate digital currency payments (in a universally usable cryptocurrency) and longer-term, more complicated financial contracts.

The blockchain is fundamentally a new paradigm for organizing activity with less friction and more efficiency, and at much greater scale than current paradigms. It is not just that blockchain technology is decentralized and that decentralization as a general model can work well now because there is a liquid enough underlying network with the Web interconnecting all humans, including for disintermediated transactions: blockchain technology affords a universal and global scope and scale that was previously impossible. This can be true for resource allocation, in particular to allow for increasingly automated resource allocation of physical-world assets and also human assets. Blockchain technology facilitates the coordination and acknowledgment of all manner of human interaction, facilitating a higher order of collaboration and possibly paving the way for human/machine interaction.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Favor banks and LETS systems are great for those who are willing to work and keep working, but does escaping the growth trap mean that regular people lose any ability to invest and accumulate capital for the long term? Initially, it appeared that digital technologies would be a boon for the individual investor—the little guy. The net would make markets more transparent, spread financial information more democratically, and let people trade for themselves, just like the pros. It should provide a way to disintermediate the bankers and brokers—cutting out the middlemen and keeping more autonomy and cash for oneself. Digitally powered trading seems to be further along an ever-improving continuum of agency for individual investors. But for all this to be true, we have to accept the underlying premise that individuals taking charge of their own future security is a winning proposition.

In others, early backers pay a premium in return for a souvenir, a token of thanks, or some other confirmation of their participation in the project. They get the satisfaction of driving production—of tastemaking and participation—instead of simply pulling from the consumption side of things. They have a share in the greater enterprise. From a business perspective, the lender has been disintermediated. Instead of pitching their ideas to a banker, creators get to pitch directly to their audiences. (Yes, it helps to have an audience in the first place—but more than a few talents and products have been discovered through these platforms, which let users spread news of worthy campaigns easily on social media.)

Startups funded by venture capital do about the reverse, with more than 90 percent of fully funded enterprises failing.59 The same crowdsourcing dynamics that Upwork or 99designs* use to shift risk onto freelancers can also shift risk off the table altogether. The less risk, the less money is owed to the risk taker. So, used appropriately, the net disintermediates the funder, eliminates the need to abandon ongoing productivity in favor of a quick exit, spares the marketplace from having to pay back investors, keeps cash in circulation instead of being extracted, and gives regular people the opportunity to put their money toward what they want to see happen.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Critics of such a system advocate a horizontal arrangement. Proudhon’s proposal for a Bank of the People is a good example. His arguments are intriguing because they touch upon one of the most prominent and controversial themes in contemporary discussions of financial regulation and monetary reform, namely, the issue of disintermediation. Proudhon proposed his scheme for two banks—a Bank of Exchange and a Bank of the People—in Solution of the Social Problem, completed one year after the 1848 revolutions in France. Although he had participated in those revolutions, Proudhon had misgivings about the provisional government, which he believed was neglecting vital economic questions.

At around the same time, Nick Szabo developed the notion of “bit gold” (Szabo 2008), widely seen as the precursor to Bitcoin. Like B-money, bit gold sought to use secure cryptography that made it possible to combine anti-inflationary monetary creation (it would be strictly limited and controlled) with the principle of disintermediation. In other words, bit gold as Szabo conceived it would consist of valuable electronic bits (created through a “proof of work” generated from a public string of bits, called a challenge string) that cannot be forged, and whose creation is both finite and independent of any third party such as government or a central bank.

The very feature of Bitcoin that renders it attractive as an open and democratic monetary system that is free from asymmetrical power structures—the software that controls exactly how many Bitcoins will be produced—undermines its operation as a form of money. Reflecting some of these concerns, a new variant of Bitcoin is under development, which exploits its perceived virtue of disintermediation while specifically seeking to avoid hoarding.40 This is Freicoin, which is essentially Bitcoin plus demurrage. The new currency is being promoted through the Freicoin Foundation, which is linked to Occupy Wall Street. Although having such an organization at the “center” of a P2P currency seems odd, its organizers claim that there is no other way of dispersing coins across society.41 Freicoin uses a combination of organizational modes: vertically, the foundation distributes coins through grants; horizontally, the coins are mined through a network of rigs.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

It was largely overlooked at the time that automated AdSense cut out the advertising middleman. Or as Wojcicki told me, “It changed the way content providers think about their business. They know they can generate revenues without having their own sales team.” In the online world, Google was potentially dis-intermediating not just the media buying agency but the sales forces of content companies. AdWords and AdSense would solve the mystery of how Google could monetize its search engine. For the first time, in 2001, Google turned a profit: $7 million on revenues of $86 million. The next year, revenues more than quadrupled to $439 million, and profits jumped to $100 million.

While Google warily watched Facebook, a real skirmish broke out between Google and the bear that is the advertising industry. Ad executives had been uneasy for some time that Google would displace media-buying agencies. But there were additional concerns. How many more ad dollars would Google siphon from traditional media companies? Would Google disintermediate the sales forces of these companies? Might Google bypass advertising agencies and develop a direct relationship with advertisers? If Google’s automated auction system brought the cost efficiencies Larry Page touted, would it not inevitably lower old media’s advertising rates as well as the fees ad agencies charged clients?

“We want an open network where we can ensure quality,” he said. “Google’s vision of Android is Microsoft’s vision of owning the operating system in every PC,” Seidenberg said. “Guys like me want to make sure that there is a distribution of platforms and devices. Is it in Google’s interest to disintermediate us? Yeah.” He let his voice trail off, not wanting to engage in verbal warfare. But he said his job is to “make sure we are never out-positioned,” never a “captive.” Neither Seidenberg’s power nor Schmidt’s skepticism deterred Google from plunging ahead. (In late 2008, T-Mobile ordered two million units in the hope that its Google-powered smart phone could rival iPhone.)


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This harkens back to an important policy debate about whether a public institution such as a central bank should even be in the business of doing something that the private sector is perfectly capable of doing well. Thus, a CBDC inevitably raises a thorny and ineluctable set of questions about the appropriate role of the state in the economy. Disintermediation of Banks A central bank could pay interest on its retail CBDC accounts. After all, if a CBDC can be subject to a negative interest rate in difficult times, it can equally well provide a positive interest rate in normal times. This would put the CBDC in direct competition with bank deposits, in turn threatening the viability of commercial banks.

This allows financial institutions to compete and innovate on the technological aspects of e-CNY-based transactions. Holders of the e-CNY receive no interest from the central bank unless the money is deposited into a bank account, where it earns the normal rate. Thus, the e-CNY does not compete with commercial bank deposits, reducing the risk of disintermediation of the banking system. In more technical terms, the e-CNY constitutes “a full reserve system with no derivative deposits or money multiplier effects.” To promote the broad use of the e-CNY and to further allay concerns about privacy, it is based on a “loosely coupled” design that allows fund transfers without the need for a bank account.

There are ways to attain the benefits of a CBDC while avoiding many of the undesirable side effects. The dual-layer (or two tiered) approach, in which the central bank creates the digital version of its currency but leaves the distribution of that currency and the maintenance of CBDC wallets to existing financial intermediaries, has many virtues. This approach lessens the risk of disintermediation of banks, allows the private sector to build innovations on top of the CBDC infrastructure managed by the central bank, and keeps the central bank removed from direct involvement in managing the front-end of payments or creating credit. The intermediaries can also handle regulatory issues such as know-your-customer requirements, alleviating concerns that the CBDC accounts can be used for illicit purposes, such as money laundering.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

During the first stage of Internet-driven disruption, many business commentators predicted that the biggest impact of the new information and communication technologies would be widespread disintermediation—the elimination of middlemen, or intermediate layers, from industries, establishing direct connections between producers and consumers. Experts pointed to the decline of traditional businesses like travel agents and insurance brokers, as consumers learned to shop for airline tickets and insurance policies without intermediaries. The same process of disintermediation was expected to sweep many other industries over time. The reality has proven to be somewhat different. Across numerous industries, platforms have repeatedly re-intermediated markets, introducing new kinds of middlemen rather than simply eliminating layers of market participants.

Bill Gurley, “A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy,” Above the Crowd, April 18, 2013, http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/04/18/a-rake-too-far-optimal-platformpricing-strategy/. 2. Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery, and Naseem Dahod, “HubSpot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0,” Harvard Business School Case 509-049, 2009. 3. Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface,” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/. CHAPTER 2: NETWORK EFFECTS 1. Aswath Damodaran, “Uber Isn’t Worth $17 Billion,” FiveThirty- EightEconomics, June 18, 2014, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/uber-isnt-worth-17-billion/. 2. Bill Gurley, “How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size,” Above the Crowd, July 11, 2014, http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/07/11/how-to-miss-by-a-mile-an-alternative-look-at-ubers-potential-market-size/. 3.

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257, 283 department stores, 264, 287 designers, graphic, 66, 72, 106, 118–19, 267 design structure matrices, 57–58 diabetes, 269–70 diamond industry, 208–9 digital currency, 171, 274–78 digital message deliveries, 94–95 digital real estate, 174–75, 216 digital rights management (DRM), 31 Diners Club, 84 direct-to-consumer channels, 264 discounts, 22, 25–26 disintermediation, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 disk defragmentation, 200 dispute resolution, 169–70 Djankov, Simeon, 238, 239 doctors, 263, 268, 269, 271, 279 Dorsey, Jack, 97 dot-com bubble, x, 22, 79, 80, 113, 288 Dribbble, 37, 66, 118–19 driverless cars, 284 driver ratings, 254, 264 driving records, 232–33, 277 Dropbox, 32, 102, 109 Drucker, Peter, 210 drug trafficking, 162 Duhigg, Charles, 146 Duracell, 162 DVDs, 63, 111, 139 e-commerce, 56, 91, 111, 124–25, 145, 204–5 Earth Class Mail, 94–95 eBay, vii, ix, 2, 3, 17, 24, 36, 38, 40, 83–84, 85, 91, 93, 111, 112–13, 125, 135, 161–62, 163, 169–71, 172, 173, 196n, 205, 206, 207, 215, 262 economics, 72, 78, 230, 234–39 economies of scale, 18–20, 206 Edison, Thomas, 19, 284 editors, 7, 10, 68, 72, 93, 129–30, 262 education, 7–8, 77, 96, 111, 122, 124, 212, 233, 261, 263, 265–68, 269, 288, 289 education platforms, 96, 111, 265–68, 289 Eisenmann, Thomas R., ix, 130 electric lighting, 19, 285 electric power, 19, 69, 247, 284–85 Electronic Arts (EA), 94, 124, 240 electronic health records, 270 electronics, 75, 178, 206 email, 81, 85, 101–4, 185 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10–11 encyclopaedias, 10–11, 129–30, 133, 149–51 Endomondo, 75 end-to-end design principle, 52–54 energy: efficiency of, 254, 284–85, 286 industry for, 261, 272–74, 289 resources of, 69–70, 254, 272–74 enhanced access, 112, 118, 119–21, 126, 127, 296 enhanced curation, 121–22, 126–27 enhanced design, 223–24 enterprise management, 173–75 enterprise resource planning (ERP), 11 entrepreneurs, 79–83, 86, 96, 111, 205, 282 environmental issues, 62, 70–71, 233, 237, 272, 274 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974), 243–44 Equity Bank, 277–78 e-readers, 178 eToys, 22 Etsy, 65, 73, 149, 212, 262, 299 European Union (EU), 242, 247–48 events listings, 112–15, 126 Excel, 216 excess inertia, 241, 296 exclusive access, 213–15 expert networks, 30, 36, 68, 93, 96, 99, 117–18 extension developers, 141, 142–45, 147, 148–49, 153–54 external networks, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 105 Facebook, 3, 12, 20, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41–50, 66, 90–91, 98–103, 104, 112, 121, 126, 131–35, 132, 133, 145, 151, 159, 163, 168, 181, 184, 185, 197, 204, 216–18, 221, 226, 245, 251–52, 267, 270–71 Fair Credit Reporting Act (1970), 175 fairness, 179–81, 230 fair use doctrine, 259 farm prices, 42–44, 60 FarmVille, 221 Fasal, 42–44 Federal Reserve, 174 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 242, 243–44, 245 FedEx, 61, 249–50, 278 feedback loops, 21, 28, 45–46, 68, 71, 72, 100–101, 108, 139, 167–70, 218–19, 223, 296 feet on street (FOS) sales forces, 43–44, 91 files, 63, 166 encryption of, 200 formats for, 29–30 film industry, 9, 66, 138–39, 163, 178, 259, 267 filters, 38–41, 42, 59, 133, 295, 296–97 financial crash of 2008, 178, 230 financial services industry, 11, 16–18, 33, 164, 171–73, 178, 230, 261, 274–78, 289 fitness and sports activities, 74–76, 245, 270–71 five forces model, 207–10, 212, 213, 221 500px, 37, 47 Fiverr, 116, 193 fixed costs, 9–10, 209, 224–25, 278 follow-the-rabbit strategy, 89–91, 105 food industry, 76, 254, 255, 278 Ford, Henry, 19, 32 Ford Motor Co., 19 Fortune 500, 65 Foursquare, 97, 98 fragmented industries, 131, 262, 265, 268–69, 289 fraud, 175, 196–97, 255, 257, 276 Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Anderson), 22 freelancers (independent contractors), 21, 36, 37, 64, 65, 117–18, 193–94, 196, 210, 213, 233–34, 249–51, 279, 280, 287, 297, 299 free trade, 205, 206, 235 Friedersdorf, Conor, 236 Friendster, 98 FuelBand, 74, 75 full-time employees, 249–50 FUSE Labs, 252–53 games, gaming, 94, 103, 124, 132, 159, 163, 178, 211, 212, 217, 221, 240 “Gangnam Style,” 84, 147 gatekeepers, 7–8, 151–52, 171–73, 243, 253, 262, 265, 268, 275–76, 281, 289, 298 Gawer, Annabelle, 58, 178–79 Gebbia, Joe, 1–2 General Electric (GE), 4, 13, 19, 76, 78, 86, 110, 201, 204, 208, 247, 284 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, 238–39 geographic focus, 98–99, 271 Germany, 96–97, 161, 205 Gillette, King, 109–10 Global 500, 209–10 Go-Jek, 278 Goldberg, Whoopi, 23 Goodwin, Tom, 11–12 Google, vii, 3–7, 21–25, 30–33, 49–50, 55, 58, 64, 72, 111, 112, 120, 121, 125, 134, 137, 140–41, 148, 153–54, 159, 198–99, 214–17, 226, 240, 242, 250, 267, 270–71 Google AdWords, 72, 120, 121, 125 Google Maps, 49–50, 55, 148, 200 Google Play, 154 government platforms, 261, 281–83, 289 graphical processing units (GPUs), 56, 57, 58 graphic design, 67, 226 Great Britain, 160, 205 gross domestic product (GDP), 160, 161 Grossman, Nick, 253, 254, 255, 256 Guardian, 144–45 Gurley, Bill, 16–18, 21 Haber-Bosch process, 19 Hachette Book Group, 251 Haier Group, vii, 76, 125, 198–99, 222 Halo, 94, 240 Halo: Combat Evolved, 94 Hammurabi, Code of, 274 hard drives (HDs), 56, 57, 58 hardware, 56, 57–58, 136, 152–53, 178–79 Harvard University, 98–99, 266 hashtags, 58, 104 Havas Media, 11–12 health care, 32–33, 35, 69, 71, 77, 200, 233, 234, 238, 245, 261, 263, 265, 268–72, 277, 280, 289 health insurance, 234, 263, 271–72, 277, 280 Heiferman, Scott, 113–14, 126 heirlooms, 161–62 Here, 49–50 Hertz, 9 heuristics, 123–24 Hilton Hotels, 8, 64 Hipstamatic, 100 homeowners’ insurance, 175, 232 horizontal integration, 33, 74–76, 208 hospitals, 69, 71, 233, 270, 271–72 hosting sites, 88, 198, 223–24 hotel industry, 1–2, 8–9, 10, 12, 64, 67, 101, 111, 142–43, 198, 224, 229–33, 236, 253, 287 Hotmail, 103, 104 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 204, 208, 225 HTTP, 177 Huffington Post, 90 human resources, 14, 39 human rights, 159, 160–61 hypercompetition, 209–10, 213 IBM, x, 137, 152, 179, 284 iCloud, 75 identity theft, 244 InCloudCounsel, 279 income streams, 139–41, 143, 144, 215 India, 73, 91 Indiegogo, 96, 124 Indonesia, 278 Industrial Awakening, 285–86 industrial development, 205–10, 224–25, 268 industrial-era firms, 19, 32, 34, 256, 285, 288 Industrial Revolution, 288 Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), 58 information, 40, 42 agencies for, 243–44 age of, 253, 256, 260 asymmetries of, 161–62, 164, 181, 182, 220, 228, 258–59, 262–63, 265, 269, 281, 289 exchange of, 36, 37, 39, 41, 47–48, 51, 134 intensive need for, 262–63, 265, 268, 281, 289 mis-, 129–30 platforms for, 190, 200, 287 units of, 296–97 initial public offerings (IPOs), ix, 91, 204–5 Instagram, 3, 13, 32, 46, 47, 66, 85, 100, 102–3, 104, 204, 217, 218, 299 instant messaging, 131, 198, 211 insurance industry, 9, 62, 71, 142, 164, 175–76, 232, 268, 277 integrated systems, 33, 74, 131 Intel, vii, x, 57–58, 89, 137, 178–81, 270–71, 284 Intel Architecture Labs (IAL), 179–81 intellectual property (IP), 33, 57, 167, 174–75, 180, 258 interaction failures, 190, 192, 196–97 Interbrand, 198–99 interest rates, 170, 244, 276 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 93 internal transparency, 176–79 International Financial Reporting Standards, 238–39 Internet, 24–25, 32, 60–63, 76–79, 95–96, 107–13, 121, 167, 201, 204, 205, 209, 244, 249, 250, 263, 264, 283–89, 299 Internet of things, 76, 201, 204, 283–86, 289 inventory, 9, 11–12, 25, 42, 141, 184, 186, 262 investment, ix, 16, 63, 164, 168–69, 184–86, 209, 278 iPads, 95 iPhone, 3, 6–7, 72, 131, 140, 147, 148, 178, 211, 213–14, 222 iStockphoto, 167–68, 173 iTunes, 75, 131, 142, 153, 164, 214, 231 Japan, 66, 205–6 Jassy, Andrew, 177–78 Java programming language, 140 Jawbone, x, 77, 245 job listings, 39, 49, 50, 51, 63, 111, 118–19, 120, 131, 133–34, 137, 184–86, 196, 201, 218 Jobs, Steve, viii, 53, 131, 214 joint venture model, 137, 138 judiciary, 237, 238, 250 JVC, 138–39 Kalanick, Travis, 18, 62 Kelley, Brian P., 157 Kenya, 277–78 Kercher, Meredith, 129–30, 149–50 Keurig Green Mountain, 143, 157–58, 159, 181 Kickstarter, 40, 92, 96, 102, 111 Kindle, 7, 10, 67, 140, 154, 243 Kindle Fire, 140 Knox, Amanda, 129–30, 149–50 Korengold, Barry, 61 Kozmo, 22–23 Kretschmer, Tobias, 257 Kuraitis, Vince, 270, 271 labor: child, 164 division of, 280 market for, 39, 49, 50, 51, 63, 111, 118–19, 120, 131, 133–34, 137, 196, 201, 218, 235 platforms for, 200, 201, 213, 233–34, 248–51, 279–81, 289 regulation of, 230, 249–51, 260, 288 self-employed, 21, 36, 37, 64, 65, 117–18, 193–94, 196, 210, 213, 233–34, 249–51, 279, 280, 287, 297, 299 unions for, 280, 288 Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 235, 237 law firms, 8, 204, 279 laws and legal systems, 88, 164–70, 182, 230, 247–49, 257, 258, 260, 281 lead generation, 113, 117 Lean Analytics (Croll and Yoskovitz), 191, 196 lean startups, 199, 201–2 Lee Kuan Yew, 160–61 LegalZoom, 204, 225 Lending Club, 77, 275, 276 Lessig, Lawrence, 164–65, 166 Levchin, Max, 79–81 Lexis, 204, 225 liability coverage, 175, 232 libertarianism, 79, 80, 236, 238 licensing fees, 61, 131, 258–59 licensing model, 136–37, 138, 139, 214, 235, 296 lightbulbs, 284–85 linear value chains (pipelines), 6, 183–84, 297, 298 LinkedIn, 39, 41–42, 48, 50–51, 103, 111, 119, 170, 173, 184, 197, 218–19, 223, 226, 245 Linux, 137, 138, 154, 200 liquidity, 189–91, 193, 194–95, 201–2, 297 local content regulations, 246–47 logos (icons), 82, 83 “long tail” (software adoption), 216–17, 219 Lyft, 49, 50–51, 67, 213, 227, 250–51, 297 Ma, Jack, 125, 206, 215 MacCormack, Alan, 57 magazines, 72, 151, 197, 244, 264, 275 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 69, 71 mail, 63, 94–95, 171 MailChimp, 109 Malaysia, 160 Management Science (MacCormack and Baldwin), 57 mandis (market-makers), 42–44 Manghani, Ravi, 273–74 manufacturing efficiencies, 208, 209, 261 MapMyFitness, 75 mapping services, 49–50, 55, 148, 200 marginal economics, 72, 78 Marini, Rick, 184–85 marketing, 14, 19, 25, 52–53, 72, 73–74, 84–85, 100, 101, 105, 183–84, 209–10, 267 Marketplace Fairness Act (2013), 249 marketplaces, 60, 91, 190, 204, 249 markets: access to, 87–88, 98, 194, 215, 218, 220 aggregation of, 68–69, 72–73, 78, 262, 297 controls for, 164–65 data on, 42–44 emerging, 210–11 entry barriers to, 207–8, 215, 219–20 expansion of, 4, 20, 31–32 failure of, xiii, 161–63, 164, 170–71, 182, 234–35, 256, 257, 258–59, 263, 289 free, 149, 161–65, 173–76, 180, 182, 234–36 frictionless entry into, 25–26, 34, 81, 107–8, 111, 117, 124–25, 130, 168, 206, 297 incumbent advantage in, 86, 218, 261, 263 late-mover problem in, 87–88, 98 liquidity of, 171, 196 local, 70–71, 117–18, 264 manipulation of, 238, 251–53, 260, 287 micro-, 98–99, 105 multi-sided, 159, 164 new entrants to, 207–10, 262, 296 niche, 88, 216, 223–24, 228, 300 one-sided, 157–58, 159 share of, 16–22, 33, 53, 60–62, 65, 81, 87–88, 112–13, 131–33, 132, 133, 137–40, 152–53, 157, 222–26, 260, 287 strategy for, viii, xi, 10, 16–18, 20, 21, 31–32, 33, 42–44, 57–58, 69–73, 77, 78, 89, 111, 124, 173, 210–11, 272–74, 278 supply and demand in, 69–71, 173, 210–11, 272–74, 278 “thickness” of, 164, 171, 173 two-sided, 81, 89, 93, 110, 119, 175, 196, 215, 218, 295, 298 winner-take-all, viii, 224–27, 228, 279–80, 300 marquee strategy, 94–95, 105 Marriott Hotels, 8–9 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 266–67 mass media, 40, 63, 72, 77, 262, 264 MasterCard, 226, 275 matching services, 17, 47–48 Matharu, Taran, 4–5 McCormick Foods, 76 McGraw-Hill, 204, 208 Mechanical Turk, 249, 280 Medicare, 250 Medicast, 269, 279 Medium, 71–72 Meetup, 113–15, 126 Megaupload, 87–88 membership fees, 123, 125 Mercateo, 96–97 mergers and acquisitions, 208, 216, 220–21, 228 Metcalfe, Robert, 20, 297 Metcalfe’s law, 20, 21, 295, 297 metering tools, 272–73 Microsoft, vii, x, 3, 13, 20, 29, 33, 52–53, 94, 103–4, 110, 124, 131, 140, 152–53, 179, 181, 200, 211, 216, 226, 240, 241, 252, 267, 270–71 Microsoft Outlook, 103–4 Microsoft Vista, 52–53 Microsoft Windows, 30, 53, 140, 152–53, 200, 222, 240 Microsoft Windows XP, 53 middlemen, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 Minerva Project, 268 mining, 225, 263 mislabeled bargains, 161–62, 170–71 MIT, ix–x, xi, 214, 266, 267 MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, ix–x MIT Platform Strategy Summit, xi, 214 moderators, 151–52 modular design, 54–57, 221 monetary policy, 159, 173–74 monetization, 38, 63, 106–27, 188, 215 MonkeyParking, 233, 234 monopolies, 18–19, 162, 163, 172–73, 182, 208–9, 227, 237, 238, 240–41, 242 Monster, 218–19, 223, 226 mortgages, 237, 243, 263 Mount, David, 285–86 MP3 players, 178 multidirectional platforms, 272–74 multihoming, 213–15, 223–28, 250–51, 297, 300 multinational corporations, 246–48 multi-sponsor decision-making, 139–40 multi-user feedback loop, 46, 100–101 music industry, 63, 71, 75, 87, 111, 134–35, 147, 178, 213, 226, 231, 258, 287, 297 MyFitnessPal, 75, 245 Myspace, 87, 92, 98, 125–26, 131–34, 132, 133, 135, 143, 204, 221, 226 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 171–73 Nalebuff, Barry J., 212 NASDAQ, ix, 80 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 237 navigation tools, 191, 297 NBC, 204, 225 negative cross-side effects, 30–32, 34, 295 negative externalities, 163, 229–34, 257, 287 negative feedback, 28, 157–58, 166–67 negative network effects, 17, 26–32, 34, 47, 49, 51, 68, 112–15, 120, 121, 123, 126, 151, 229–34, 287, 298 negative same-side effects, 30, 298 Nest, 204, 225 Netflix, 63, 163, 204, 225 Netscape, 62, 110 network matching, 26–28 network orchestrators, 32 News Corp., 126 news feeds, 121, 168, 251–52 newspapers, 63, 144–45, 264, 287 New York City, 61, 113, 123, 229–30, 231, 258–59 New York State, 69–70, 274 New York Stock Exchange, 55, 171 New York Times, 205 NeXT, 53 Nigeria, 247 Nike, 4, 74–76, 78, 205, 271 9/11 attacks, 113 99designs, 66, 106 Nintendo, 94, 211, 240 noise, 28, 114, 120, 199, 200 Nokia, 49–50, 64, 131, 226 Novel Writing Month, 4–5 NTT, 89 oDesk, 201 oil and gas industry, 225, 235, 259, 263, 272 OkCupid, xi, 26–28, 30, 195–96 oligopolies, 209, 238 on-boarding effect, 90–91, 97 online courses, 96, 111, 265–68, 289 Open Data, 282 “open in” vs.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

For example, anyone with an internet connection could build a website in minutes and at no cost using pure HTML, and even faster using a platform like GeoCities. A single version of this site was (or at least could be) accessed by every device, browser, and user connected to the internet. In addition, no user or developer needed to be disintermediated—they could produce content for, and speak to, anyone they wanted. The use of common standards also meant that it was easier and cheaper to hire and work with outside vendors, integrate third-party software and apps, and repurpose code. The fact that so many of these standards were free and open-source meant that individual innovations often benefited the entire ecosystem, while placing competitive pressures on paid, proprietary standards, and helping to check the rent-seeking tendencies of platforms sitting between the web and its users (e.g., device manufacturers, operating systems, browsers, and ISPs).

“Sidechains,” meanwhile, allow tokens to be moved on and off of Ethereum as needed, serving a bit like a petty cash drawer versus a locked safe. Some argue that Layer 2s are a patchwork solution—that developers and users would be better off working on higher performance Layer 1s. They might be right. Yet it’s significant that a developer can use a Layer 1 to jumpstart their own blockchain, and then disintermediate that Layer 1 from its users, developers, and network operators by using, or even building, a Layer 2 blockchain. What’s more, the trustless and permissionless programming of Layer 1s mean that competing Layer 1s can “bridge” into it, enabling developers and users to forever shift their tokens to another blockchain.

In addition, Samsung had become increasingly aggressive with its alterations to the “stock” version of Android, producing and marketing its own interface (TouchWiz), while also preloading its devices with its own suite of apps, many of which competed with those offered by Google. Samsung even added its own mobile app store. Samsung’s success as an Android manufacturer is inarguably connected to these investments, but their approach is not dissimilar from “forking” it. Regardless, Samsung’s de facto TouchWiz OS threatened to disintermediate Google from its developers and users, while also serving as the true “reference device.” The arc of Android is important to any understanding of the future of the Metaverse. The Metaverse offers the opportunity to disrupt today’s gatekeepers, such as Apple or Google, but many fear that we’ll just end up with new ones—maybe Roblox Corporation, or Epic Games.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. One natural consequence of Web-based technologies was supposed to be the elimination of middlemen, or “disintermediation.” “The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power,” the influential technologist Esther Dyson said. “It sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people while giving to individuals the power to run their lives.”26 The problem, though, is that disintermediation has not lived up to its potential. Instead, it has facilitated the rise of a new generation of mediators that are sometimes difficult to see.

Instead of lifetime employment, the new system valorized adaptability, mobility, and risk; in the place of full-time employment, there were temporary contracts and freelance instability. In this context, the wish for expressive, worthwhile work, the desire to combine employment and purpose, took on a perverse form. New-media thinkers, with their appetite for disintermediation and creative destruction, implicitly endorse and advance this transformation. The crumbling and hollowing out of established cultural institutions, from record labels to universities, and the liberation of individuals from their grip is a fantasy that animates discussions of amateurism. New technologies are hailed for enabling us to “organize without organizations,” which are condemned as rigid and suffocating and antithetical to the open architecture of the Internet.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

The central question is: can the blockchain give us Trust 2.0, a better form of trust that does not always depend on central intermediaries who may have become too big to fail, too bureaucratic to see risk, or too slow to change? Here are seven principles that we will need to believe in, if we are to believe in the future of decentralized trust: It would be inaccurate to label blockchains as a tool for the disintermediation of trust. In reality, they only enable a re-intermediation of trust. Blockchains enable a degree of trust unbundling. The blockchain challenges the roles of some existing trust players and reassigns some of their responsibilities, sometimes weakening their authority. The blockchain does not eliminate trust.

At the risk of not naming all of them, here are the largest segments that will affected: Bonds Swaps Derivatives Commodities Unregistered/Registered securities Over-the-counter markets Collateral management Syndicated loans Warehouse receipts Repurchase market STRATEGIC QUESTIONS FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES Theme 1: Blockchains Touch the Core of Banking, Can They React? In Chapter 2, we introduced the word ATOMIC as a way to remember the programmability aspect of blockchains along six interrelated areas: Assets, Trust, Ownership, Money, Identity, Contracts. Add to these concepts the fact the blockchain is about decentralization, disintermediation, and distributed ledgers, and you quickly realize that these subjects are very much part of the core of banking. When a single technology touches almost every core part of your business model, you need to pay attention, as it will be a challenging encounter. Banks will be required to apply rigorous thinking to flush out their plans and positions vis-à-vis each one of these major blockchain parameters.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The protocols also include a method for reclaiming disk space so that all nodes can efficiently store the full blockchain. Finally, the blockchain is public. Anyone can see transactions taking place. No one can hide a transaction, and that makes bitcoin more traceable than cash. Satoshi sought not only to disintermediate the central banking powers but also to eliminate the ambiguity and conflicting interpretations of what happened. Let the code speak for itself. Let the network reach consensus algorithmically on what happened and record it cryptographically on the blockchain. The mechanism for reaching consensus is critical.

“That’s really cool,” he said, “because I could actually pay you for the pen right now, you would see the money instantly, you would put the pen in the mail, and I could get a verification of that. It’s much more likely that we can do business.” The law profession is slowly plugging into this opportunity. Like everyone in the middle, lawyers may become subject to disintermediation and will eventually need to adapt. Expertise in smart contracts could be a big opportunity for law firms that want to lead innovation in contract law. However, the profession isn’t known for breaking new ground. Legal expert Aaron Wright, coauthor of a new book about the blockchain, told us, “Lawyers are laggards.”21 Multisignature: Smart Complex Contracts But, you say, wouldn’t the costs of complex and time-consuming negotiations of smart contracts outweigh the benefits of open boundaries?

Why do those people wait in line to send money via a physical point of sale using decades-old technology instead of what they have at their fingertips? Dollars are a lot less data intensive than HD video. In fact, according to Skype, video calling consumes 500 kilobits per second.43 Sending one bitcoin takes about 500 bits, or roughly one one-thousandth the data consumption of one second of video Skype! By disintermediating traditional third parties and radically simplifying processes, blockchain can finally enable instant, frictionless payments, so that people don’t wait in line for an hour or more, travel great distances, or risk life and limb venturing into dangerous neighborhoods at night just to send money.


pages: 454 words: 134,482

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

Rather than reduce banks’ likelihood of failure, deposit-rate ceilings have tended to have just the opposite effect by limiting their ability to bid for funds when threatened by a disintermediation or other liquidity crisis. This was dramatically evident in the 1960s, when banks and later thrifts were racked by a series of disintermediation crises. The trouble started in October 1959, when (as a result of slowly mounting inflation) Treasury bill rates rose to 5 percent—well above the 3 percent Regulation Q limits on time deposits. Banks then faced a disintermediation crisis that was a portent of further troubles to come. As inflation and short-term money rates continued to rise (in part as a result of the escalating costs of theVietnam War), the Fed found it necessary to allow one-step increases in rate ceilings on certificates of deposit for every year from 1962 to 1965 to avoid a recurrence of the 1959 crisis.

Finally, in August 1966, the Fed reversed its monetary policy again, this time to “rescue” the banks from its own misguided policies. The banking crisis of 1966—the first “financial crisis” (to adopt the conventional, hyperbolic vernacular) in the United States since the Great Depression—was a direct consequence of Regulation Q restrictions combined with erratic Fed monetary policy. This was also true of later disintermediation crises, including the thrift crisis of 1969. If rate restrictions had been absent then as they are today, these crises would not have happened and there would not have been any need for last-resort lending by the Fed. Deposit Insurance. The absence of crises is, however, not necessarily evidence of a strong banking system.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

All that, of course, assumes that I have an abundance of money. I don’t. Oh, well. The First Bank of Google: Markets minus middlemen Banking is the ultimate middleman business, pooling money and need and profiting on the connections. In small ways—as in small is the new big—the internet is already disintermediating the industry by making direct connections. Take peer-to-peer lending. At Prosper.com, as of 2008, 750,000 members had borrowed and lent more than $150 million in amounts as small as $50, supporting anything from launching new businesses to paying off college loans to getting out from under credit card debt.

I’m sure lawyers and PR people—like real-estate agents—will be glad to tell me where I’m wrong and I welcome that discussion on my blog: Let’s have at it, and if there are ways to Googlify these trades, then congratulations. In the meantime, both fields need to watch out, for the tools of Google and the internet enable others to disintermediate, undercut, and expose them. The law and its execution are aided by obfuscation. The internet can fix that. A small number of volunteers could, Wikipedia-like, publish simple, clear, and free explanations of laws and legal documents online. All it takes is one generous lawyer—not an oxymoron—to ruin the game for a thousand of them.

Patents are online now, and Google has made them searchable (go to google.com/patents and, for entertainment, look up pooper scooper—aka “Apparatus for the sanitary gathering and retention of animal waste for disposal” or “perpetual motion machine” or Google itself). Laws, regulations, and government documents are prime meat for Google’s disintermediation. Sometimes lawyers are employed merely to intimidate—but now the internet’s power to gather flash mobs enables those targeted by attorneys to return the intimidation. I’ve seen many cases of bloggers pleading openly for help against big organizations that are threatening or suing them. They received offers of pro bono representation from lawyers, often thanks to the Media Bloggers Association.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

The major political parties, along with labor unions, are part of the hierarchical framework of American politics that is under great pressure in the digital era. Even as traditional hierarchies are breaking apart, powerful, consolidated interests still play a disproportionate role in politics, especially in America. Strong brands still have it in their power to make or break candidates. As in the commercial space, the Internet often causes first disintermediation, then reintermediation. The forums are slightly different in the digital age and modestly more diverse. Cable networks like Fox and CNN have expanded the group of networks with the power to influence elections; people like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, and Arianna Huffington and her colleagues at the Huffington Post are giving the mainstream newspapers a run for their money in the online text media world; and even small bloggers and video creators can become stars with the power to move discussions in elections.

See also Net Geners activism by attention in education by attention spans of brains of civic engagement by cognitive differences of communication culture of Digital Immigrant accent and educational methodologies for information skills of participatory media and politics and reflection and as students thinking patterns in “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” (Prensky) Digital piracy Digital production Digital singularity Discman Disintermediation Distributed parallel-processing computers DNS Doom (video game) Dot-com collapse Dot-com dropouts DoubleClick Dougherty, Dale Dove Drudge, Matt eBay E-commerce development of dot-com collapse growth of as pyramid scheme social interaction displaced by Education attention and computer games for by Digital Immigrants Digital Natives in Digital Natives methodologies for freedom and legacy and future content in Net Geners and Wales, J., on Edwards, John Eliot, T.

Hypertext minds IBM Ibuka, Masaru Icebox ICQ Identity Individualism Industrial Revolution Information architecture Information cascades Infosys Technologies Innovation, Net Geners and Instant messaging Instapundit Institute for the Future of the Book Integrity Intel Intellectual technologies Interactivity Internet academic scholarship and activism on advertising on brain impact from cognition and collaboration through commerce displacing social interaction on creation of as direct-marketing platform disintermediation and reintermediation through do-it-yourself mentality and evolving rule systems and freedom through grassroots campaigns on interactivity and isolation and in Kenya loneliness and mainstream culture and medium absorbed by participatory media and participatory nature of political media and politics and post-Gutenberg economics and radio stations on reading and research skills and Sleeper Curve and social interaction channels in social side effect of social value of teen use of television series fan sites on time spent using traditional media changed by transparency and as universal medium Wikipedia impact on Internet Explorer Internet Project Kosovo (IPKO) Interruption science iPhone iPhoto IPKO.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

For a while UCS was the darling of the world, swiftly popularizing new courier systems such as the Silver Retriever, a six-legged “packbot” that could be deployed from larger couriers to carry goods across uneven ground or up and down stairs, and the Storks, copters that specialized in time-sensitive deliveries. Yet less than two decades after it was founded, UCS itself had become obsolete. Deliverbot manufacturers began to directly rent their vehicles to customers using an open-delivery protocol, and then even the vehicle designs were open-sourced. Just as UCS had disintermediated shipping, open standards disintermediated UCS. 11    THE CONVERSATION BROKERS Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2024 I can’t go outside without being streamed. I can’t visit a shop without people downvoting me. At home I get all sorts of mail through the door, and now you’re telling me I can’t even have a private conversation in a restaurant?

UCS’s success in fulfilling those contracts attracted more business, and before long they were offering subscription plans across North America and Europe. People were becoming positively affectionate toward the bright yellow vehicles. But UCS’s vehicles were only part of the picture. What UCS delivered wasn’t merely goods but the disintermediation of supply. Before deliverbots, getting goods to customers was too costly for most producers. Instead, they had to work with middlemen such as distributors, shops, supermarkets, and warehouses, all of whom took fees that increased the sale price. UCS changed that world completely by giving producers a direct route to their customers’ front door, at a lower cost than ever.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Apparently, I’d rather spend my time thinking about freedom in the abstract, talking to nice, safe hippies about the dreams some of them had once and what happened to them. I don’t regret my decision to write myself out of this story, to decline the invitation to Reykjavik. It turns out I’m not any kind of revolutionary. The hopes that many held for the redemptive potential of the internet lay in the fact that the internet was a disintermediating force. The many-to-many communications environment would allow individuals to bypass outmoded cultural gatekeepers and to smash corrupt institutions. The assumption was twofold – that those institutions would be unable to fight back, and that the ordinary people at the bottom of society, the edges of the network, were somehow worthier than the centralised elites at the top.

Just as the Screen Actors Guild and Equity stipulate that no two of their members may have the same stage name to avoid confusion, Facebook and Twitter make sure no two of their users have the same handle or identifying code, meaning you can always find the exact Ethan Zuckerman or Becky Hogge you’re looking for. What all this means is that although the rhetoric behind the ’net was one of radical decentralisation, disintermediation and the chance at a truly plural public sphere, the reality of it pens us into what are essentially a handful of corporate pseudo-public spaces. “It’s terrifying,” says Ethan. “And the reason it’s terrifying is that much of the thinking that we’ve done about the internet is thinking about open standards, autonomous agents, all able to make our own decisions.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The sale by former bank borrowers of commercial paper, a trend that developed swiftly from the early 1960s on, was the first wave of disinter-mediation, induced by securitization, to wash away a part of the banks’ traditional lending base. Securitization has been particularly prevalent in the mortgage market, where there was roughly $6.2 trillion in mortgage-related securities outstanding as of June 2006 compared to $9.3 trillion in home mortgages outstanding. Subsequent to this first wave of disintermediation and the securitization trend that induced it, and thanks in part to the trend seen both domestically and worldwide toward deregulation—a trend that made capital markets freer and securities issuance ever easier—other waves of disintermediation followed, each wave further eroding the banks’ lending base.

Since that time, this volume grew exponentially; then it tapered off (Figure 21.1), especially beginning in 1984 when the Federal Reserve said that it would no longer accept bankers’ acceptances as collateral for the repurchase agreements it uses in its daily open market operations. Other factors have also contributed to the decline in the market for bankers’ acceptances, including the shift to alternative financing vehicles, decreased market liquidity, and disintermediation, among other factors, which are discussed in more detail later in the chapter. FIGURE 21.1 Bankers’ acceptances outstanding (in billions of dollars) THE INSTRUMENT A bankers’ acceptance (BA) is a time draft; that is, an order to pay a specified amount of money to the acceptance holder on a specified date.

Borrowers have many more choices for financing their international transactions, their inventory investments, or whatever, and are now able to obtain financing through a wider variety of channels, many of which are in the banking sector. The vast majority of the financing, however, is now done outside the banks. This disintermediation has increased over the years, with institutional borrowers opting for funding in the commercial paper (CP) market where funding costs are lower and the borrowing process is far less cumbersome than it is for BAs. We show in Figure 21.1 the decline in the amount of BAs outstanding. In contrast, Figure 21.5 shows the very large growth that has occurred in the CP market.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Global norms have achieved a new reach, and individual aspirations and expectations have been turbo-charged by social media, fiber optics, satellite dishes, and smartphones. It is as if a political centrifuge had taken the elements that constituted politics as we knew it and scattered them across a new and broader frame. Here are a few of its key effects. Disintermediating Parties For centuries, politics operated on the premise that it channels the interests of the masses (expressed through votes, or asserted by rulers) into coherent outcomes. Representative government meant the channeling of the public will up from the neighborhood or town level, through regions or provinces, and, ultimately, to the sovereign state.

It also means the bypassing of the traditional diplomatic establishment—foreign ministries, embassies and their staff, national aid agencies, and other bilateral services—that has controlled the terms of engagement across borders. Diplomats were once the gatekeepers and guardians of certain norms of interaction. Now they have been disinter-mediated, and the advantages of traditional statecraft blunted, in a landscape of small-country initiatives, promotion by nonstate actors, and channels of direct access to overseas public opinion. The edifice of cooperation and deterrence built in the last seven decades has been strong enough to see through decolonization, ward off invasions and conquests, and limit secessions.

As Tom Munnecke, head of Uplift Academy and a pioneer in new philanthropy, put it to a British newspaper: “Instead of having to go to one big, centralized bureaucracy such as the Red Cross or Oxfam, we can now go to the edge and take control.”35 At the edge, donors forged in Silicon Valley–style venture capitalism apply a broad range of tools from that milieu to vet projects, while would-be recipients make their proposals in the knowledge that they are competing with peers around the world. The boards and program officers of the big foundations and bureaucrats of large aid agencies have seen their influence lessened—whether by the new tools that aim to disintermediate them or by the celebrity activists, such as U2 frontman Bono or Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who have used global media and communications platforms to advance their own views and priorities. That said, the lines are not completely rigid, and the traditional players are capable of adapting—or at least trying to adapt.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Unit banking and the restrictions and prohibitions of the fifty years following the Great Depression had allowed banks to profit modestly by keeping their balance sheets focused on deposits and loans. But suddenly, technological advances, financial innovation, capital markets, and commercial paper markets started to offer safe and enticing alternatives to banks. Banks started hemorrhaging customers, a process called disintermediation, which means cutting out the middleman. Deposits went directly to high-yield markets and sidestepped highly regulated banks.99 Concerns about banks’ waning profitability led to growing pressure on the government to deregulate banks and allow them to compete more freely with other institutions.

For example, a central tenet of Professor Muhammad Yunus’s microcredit model is that “credit is a fundamental right.” See, e.g., Randeep Ramesh, “Credit is a Basic Human Right,” Guardian, January 5, 2007, accessed March 19, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/05/outlook.development. 99. Disintermediation describes the elimination of financial intermediaries, such as banks, resulting from high inflation rates and stagnant interest offered by banks (due to regulatory caps). Depositors can get better returns by investing in mutual funds or securities and thus, banks lose customers and revenue. 100.

See also Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Deposit interest rates, deregulation of, 52 Deposits, 13–14, 231nn12,13 Depression. See Great Depression Deregulation, 7, 52–63, 64, 91–94, 146 Derivatives, 246n101 Desjardins, Alphonse, 65–66 Dickens, Charles, 107 DiLorenzo, Thomas, 156 Discrimination, 49, 50–52, 284n35, 290n86. See also credit access, inequality in; redlining Disintermediation, 52, 245n99 Disparate impact, 50–51 Distrust, of banks, 190, 191, 202, 203, 218 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 147–148 DOJ (Department of Justice), 50, 127–129, 160, 290n86 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 107 Douglas, Paul, 145, 146 Douglas Amendment, 145 Douglass, Frederick, 81, 82–83, 185 Dual plan, 96, 262n164 Du Bois, W.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

And these are just technology companies. Well-known hacks at Target, Marriott, Home Depot, and JPMorgan, among others, have taken user data and put it in the hands of those who try to use that information for nefarious purposes. Blockchain technology is promising in that it has the ability to disintermediate various industries, many perhaps quite quickly. Some experimentation has already begun. Industries including technology, finance, jobs, and gaming are ripe for disruption. The technical “scaffolding” is being built today for users to have more control over their data. The ultimate realization of this idea is the concept of self-sovereign identity, where individuals generate their own unique identifiers and store and control access to their own personal information, using public/private key pairs.

Byzantine agreement, Other Concepts for Consensus Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement, RippleHotStuff algorithm, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains C Cardano, Blockchains to Watch Casper algorithm (proof-of-stake), Ethereum Scaling CCXT (CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library), Open Source Trading Tech cell phone porting attacks, Security Fundamentals central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Central Bank Digital Currencies centralizationcaused by proof-of-work consensus on Bitcoin, Ripple and Stellar decentralization versus, Decentralization Versus Centralization distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors Libra's centralization challenge, Novi centralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts, The Role of Exchanges, Jurisdictiondecentralized exchanges versus, Decentralized Versus Centralized Exchanges-Scalabilitycustody and counterparty risk, Custody and counterparty risk exchange rate, Exchange rate infrastructure, Infrastructure Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Know your customer scalability, Scalability token listing, Token listing infrastructure differences from decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation Chainalysis, Analytics channels (Lightning), Lightning Chaum, David, DigiCash Chia, Alternative methods Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), partnership with Royal Mint, The Royal Mint China, central bank cryptocurrency, China Coburn, Zachary, Skirting the Laws Coin ATM Radar website, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin Coinbase, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial, Custody Coinbase Pro, ExchangesAPI example, BTC/USD ticker call, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots arbitrage trading on, Arbitrage Trading-Float Configuration 3 custody solutions, robust, Counterparty Risk example order book, Slippage coinbase transaction, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, The Coinbase TransactionBitcoin Genesis block, Achieving Consensus Coincheck, Coincheck CoinDesk, Information coins, DigiCash Coinye, More Altcoin Experiments cold storage wallets, Counterparty Risk cold wallets, Wallet Type Variations collisions, cryptographic hashes and, Hashes colored coins, NXT, Colored Coins and Tokens Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), Wash Trading Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation conferences on blockchain industry, Information confidential assets, Liquid confirmations, Confirmations confirmed transactions, Transactionsconfirmed by miner, Transaction life cycle confirmed by network on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle consensus, Consensus-Alternative methodsAvalanche mechanism, Avalanche in Bitcoin network, Compelling Components-Generating transactions Corda, Corda consensus in decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized Libra mechanism for, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains, How the Libra Protocol Works other concepts for, Other Concepts for Consensus proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-Stake proof-of-work, Proof-of-Work-Confirmationsblock discovery, Block discovery confirmations by miners of block to include in blockchain, Confirmations mining process on Bitcoin, The mining process transaction life cycle, Transaction life cycle SCP protocol, Stellar XRP Consensus Protocol, Ripple ConsenSys, ConsenSysTruffle Suite tools for smart contracts, Authoring a smart contract contentious hard forks, Understanding Forks-Replay attacksreplay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks Corda, Corda-Corda languageconsensus, Corda consensus how it works, How Corda works ledger, Corda ledger network, The Corda network programming language, Corda language Counterparty blockchain, Counterparty counterparty risk, Counterparty Riskon centralized versus decentralized exchanges, Custody and counterparty risk reduced, on decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts cross-shard communication complexity, Other Altchain Solutions crypto laundering, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering-The Evolution of Crypto Launderinghow funds are laundered, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency Fundamentals-Summaryadditional, Mastercoin introducing notion of, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts backing DAI multi-collateral token, DAI and blockchain, leading to new platforms for the web, Web 3.0 blockchain systems and unit of account, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks consensus, Consensus-Alternative methodsother concepts for, Other Concepts for Consensus proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-Stake proof-of-work, Proof-of-Work-Confirmations cryptographic hashes, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys custody, Custody: Who Holds the Keys-Security Fundamentals ICOs or fundraising for projects, Use Cases: ICOs illegal uses of, Catch Me If You Can methods of buying and selling, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin mining, Mining-Block Generation privacy-focused, Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrencies public and private keys in systems, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems-Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems regulatory bodies in the US, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation security, Security Fundamentals-Recovery Seed stablecoins based on, Crypto-Based Stablecoins-Tether stakeholders in ecosystem, Stakeholders-Informationanalytics services, Analytics brokerages, Brokerages custody solutions, Custody exchanges, Exchanges information services, Information theft from ownersexchange hacks, Exchange Hacks-NiceHash other hacks, Other Hacks-Summary transactions in, Transactions-Bitcoin Transaction Security UTXO model for Bitcoin transactions, The UTXO Model-The UTXO Model cryptocurrency ATMs, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library (CCXT), Open Source Trading Tech cryptographyBitcoin's use on transactions, Introducing the Timestamp Server cryptographic hashes, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys ECDSA encryption, signing and verifying transactions, Signing and Validating Transactions enabling proof-of-work on Hashcash, Hashcash public/private key, Bitcoin's use of, Public/private key cryptography-Generating keys use by DigiCash, DigiCash CryptoKitties, ERC-721-ERC-777causing scaling problems on Ethereum, Challenges in Developing Dapps digital cats as nonfungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens CryptoLocker and ransomware, CryptoLocker and Ransomware CryptoNote protocol, Monero currencies, exchanges for, Exchanges(see also exchanges) custodial wallets, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial(see also wallets) custody, Custody: Who Holds the Keys-Security Fundamentalscounterparty risk with exchanges, Counterparty Risk, Custody and counterparty risk crypto custody solutions, Custody custody providers, Counterparty Risk cyberbucks, DigiCash D DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), DAGs DAI stablecoin, DAIsavings rates for, Savings Dai, Wei, B-Money DAML, DAML DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations-Other Ethereum forks, Important DefinitionsThe DAO project on Ethereum, Initial Coin Offerings dapps (see decentralized applications) Dash, Dash database management systems (DBMSs), Databases and Ledgers databasesbackend/database differences between centralized exchanges and Uniswap, Infrastructure and ledgers, Databases and Ledgers decentralizationversus centralization, Decentralization Versus Centralization decentralizing the web, Web 3.0 distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors decentralized applications (dapps), Ether and Gas, Decentralized Applications (Dapps)-Challenges in Developing Dappsbuilding decentralized web frameworks, Web 3.0 challenges in developing, Challenges in Developing Dapps Corda, Corda language running on top of a blockchain, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum use cases, Use Cases decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations-Other Ethereum forks, Important DefinitionsThe DAO project on Ethereum, Initial Coin Offerings decentralized exchange contracts, Decentralized Exchange Contracts-Summary decentralized exchanges, The Role of Exchanges, Decentralized Exchanges-Scalabilityversus centralized exchanges, Decentralized Versus Centralized Exchanges-Scalabilitycustody and counterparty risk, Custody and counterparty risk exchange rate, Exchange rate infrastructure, Infrastructure Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Know your customer scalability, Scalability token listing, Token listing decentralized finance (DeFi), Decentralizing Finance and the Web-Derivativesflash loans, Flash Loans-The Fulcrum Exploitcreating the flash loan smart contract, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the contract, Deploying the Contract executing a loan, Executing a Flash Loan-Executing a Flash Loan Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit important definitions, Important Definitions privacy and information security, Privacy-Ring Signaturesring signatures, Ring Signatures Zcash, Zcash zero-knowledge proof, Zero-Knowledge Proof zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs redistribution of trust, Redistribution of Trust-Naming Servicesidentity and dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking naming services, Naming Services services, DeFi Services-Derivativesderivatives, Derivatives lending, Lending savings, Savings stablecoins, Stablecoins-KYC and pseudonymity traditional versus decentralized financial system, Decentralizing Finance DeFI Pulse website, DeFi Services delegated proof-of-stake, Alternative methods deposit contracts, Ethereum Scaling depth charts, Depth Chartssell wall on, Whales derivatives, Derivativesin decentralized finance, Derivatives derivatives exchanges, The Role of Exchanges desktop wallets, Wallet Type Variations DEXes (see decentralized exchanges; exchanges) dictionary attacks on passwords, Zero-Knowledge Proof difficulty of discovering valid block hash, Block discovery DigiCash, DigiCash digital bonds, Banking digital money, Bitcoin Predecessors(see also cryptocurrencies) creation of, in B-Money, B-Money use of hashing to limit double spend, Hashcash digital signaturesmultisignature system, Hash Time Locked Contracts, Lightning Schnorr algorithm, Privacy signing transactions, Signing and Validating Transactions Digix, Digix directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), DAGs disintermediation, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking distributed ledger technology (DLT), Databases and Ledgers distributed systems, Decentralized Applications (Dapps)Bitcoin, Compelling Components distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors Dogecoin, More Altcoin Experiments Domain Name System (DNS), decentralized version of, Altcoins dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet?


pages: 328 words: 77,877

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers by Rennay Dorasamy

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, continuous integration, DevOps, digital divide, disintermediation, fault tolerance, if you build it, they will come, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, Lyft, market fragmentation, microservices, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, optical character recognition, platform as a service, pull request, ride hailing / ride sharing, speech recognition, the payments system, transaction costs, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, web application

One of the most significant risks faced by banks is disintermediation. Third-party providers may reduce the bank’s role, potentially leading to partial loss of customer relationships, which could in turn lead to loss of revenue. Open Banking, like ATM, online or app-based banking, is a channel that a customer uses to interact with the bank. A strong bank-customer relationship will help establish loyalty and trust. Banks can use customer data and activity, via any channel, to better understand behavior to provide personalized products and services. The potential of disintermediation could be viewed as motivation for banks to raise their game to retain the customer relationship.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

The government certainly didn’t know, not even the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board. So everyone was forced to do business with banks, on the banks’ terms. The monopoly was broken in the 1970s, but that didn’t mean information hoarding went away. Today it is done by a variety of institutions in different ways. Competition, also known as disintermediation, has brought costs down dramatically. For example, in the 1960s an individual would typically pay 3 percent more interest on a mortgage loan than he could earn on his savings account backed by mortgage loans. The difference was net revenue to the bank. It was protected by information hoarding.

The slices are instead pasted together with other slices, more like making plywood than cutting vegetables. Logs in a sawmill are bathed before thin veneers for plywood are cut with a lathe. So “bathed and lathed” makes more sense than “sliced and diced.” I can also live with “hewed and glued” or “plied and dried.” Securitization takes the institution out of finance—disintermediation is the technical term. Providers and users of capital are linked directly. The reason that requires financial engineering is most providers of capital want to provide a different type of capital than most users need. Providers want diversified, liquid instruments that pay off cash at predictable times.

See Bayesians/Bayesian concepts; Frequency vs. degree of belief Demon of Our Own Design, A, (Bookstaber) Derivatives/derivative money: capital creation and clearinghouses definition derivative money energy sector and exposure from derivatives liquidity and as the new money numeraire and spread trade and as store of value Derivatives Models on Models (Haug) Derman, Emanuel Desrosières, Alain Dexter, Andrew Diogenes Disintermediation Dissertation (Brown) Dorner, Dietrich Drobny, Steven Druckenmiller, Stanley Duffie, Darrell Earle, Timothy Economic Function of Futures Markets, The (Williams) Economics of Risk and Time, The (Gollier) Econophysics Education of a Speculator, The (Niederhoffer) Efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) Efficient markets theory: empirical evidence equilibrium price and father of efficient markets generally market inefficiencies and misrepresentations and myth about Efron, Brad Eichengreen, Barry Einhorn, David Eisenhower, Dwight Emergence of Probability, The (Hacking) EMH.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Here, as in the earlier example of tax avoidance we described as Apple shifted profits to Ireland, there was a total absence of a corporate conscience: Though its own growth rested on technologies developed or financed by the US government, Apple, like the banks, was willing to take but not to give, even as it made a huge pretense of corporate responsibility. To me, the first element of corporate social responsibility is to pay your taxes. More disintermediation Even beyond failing to perform its traditional role of intermediation, bringing money from the household sector to the corporate sector, the financial sector today is doing just the opposite, taking money from the corporate sector and bringing it to the household sector, so the rich can enjoy more of their wealth now.

., 226–28 Constitution of the United States collective action reference in preamble, 138–39 economic changes since writing of, 227 “General Welfare” in Preamble, 242 individual liberties vs. collective interest in, 229 and minority rights, 6 as product of reasoning and argumentation, 229 three-fifths clause, 161 consumer demand, See demand consumer surplus, 64 cooperatives, 245 Copenhagen Agreement, 207 copyright extensions, 74 Copyright Term Extension Act (1998), 74 corporate taxes, 108, 206, 269n44 corporate tax rates, globalization and, 84–85 corporate welfare, 107 corporations and labor force participation, 182 and money in politics, 172–73 as people, 169–70 rights as endowed by the State, 172 corruption, 50 cost-benefit analysis, 146, 204–5 Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), xii credit, 102, 145, 186, 220 credit cards, 59–60, 70, 105 credit default swaps, 106 credit unions, 245 culture, economic behavior and, 30 customer targeting, 125–26 cybersecurity, 127–28 cybertheft, 308n35 Daraprim, 296n72 data exclusivity, 288n40 data ownership, 129–30 Deaton, Angus, 41–42 debt, 220; See also credit DeepMind, 315n1 defense contractors, 173 deficits, See budget deficits deglobalization, 92 deindustrialization early days of, xix effect on average citizens, 4, 21 facilitating transition to postindustrial world, 186–88 failure to manage, xxvi in Gary, Indiana, xi globalization and, 4, 79, 87 place-based policies and, 188 deliberation, 228–29 demand automation and, 120 and job creation, 268n41 Keynesian economics and, xv market power’s effect on, 63 demand for labor, technological suppression of, 122 democracy, 159–78 agenda for reducing power of money in politics, 171–74 curbing the influence of wealth on, 176–78 fragility of norms and institutions, 230–36 inequality as threat to, 27–28 maintaining system of checks and balances, 163–67 need for a new movement, 174–76 new technologies’ threat to, 131–35 and power of money, 167–70 as shared value, 228 suppression by minority, xx Trump’s disdain for, xvii voting reforms, 161–63 democratic institutions, fragility of, 230–36 Democratic Party gerrymandering’s effect on, 159 and Great Recession, 152 need for reinvention of, 175 popular support for, 6 renewal of, 242 and voter disenfranchisement, 162 demographics, xx, 181 “deplorables,” 4 deregulation, 25, 105, 143–44, 152, 239; See also supply-side economics derivatives, 80, 88, 106–7, 144 Detroit, Michigan, 188 Dickens, Charles, 12 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 320–21n32 disadvantage, intergenerational transmission of, 199–201 disclosure laws, 171 discourse, governance and, 11 discrimination, 201–4; See also gender discrimination; racial discrimination by banks, 115 and economics texts, 23 forms of, 202 under GI Bill, 210 and inequality, 40–41, 198–99 and labor force participation, 183 means of addressing, 203–4 and myths about affirmative action, 225 reducing to improve economy, 201–4 diseases of despair, 42–43 disenfranchisement, 27, 161–62 disintermediation, 109 Disney, 65, 74 dispute resolution, 56–57, 309n40 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 70, 102, 107 driverless cars, 118 drug overdoses, 42 Durbin Amendment, 70 East Asia, 149 economic justice historical perspectives, 241–42 intergenerational justice, 204–5 racial justice and, 176, 203–4 tax system and, 205–8 economics, assumptions about individuals in, 29–30, 223 economic segregation, 200 economies of scale, 72 economies of scope, 347–48n15 economy and collective action, 153–54 decent jobs with good working conditions, 192–97 deterioration since early 1980s, 32–46 failure’s effect on individuals and society, 29–31 failure since late 1980s, 3–5 government involvement in, 141–42, 150–55 intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage, 199–201 reducing discrimination in, 201–4 restoring fairness to tax system, 205–8 restoring growth and productivity, 181–86 restoring justice across generations, 204–5 restoring opportunity and social justice, 197–201 social protection, 188–91 “sugar high” from Trump’s tax cut, 236–38 transition to postindustrial world, 186–88 education equalizing opportunity of, xxv–xxvi, 219–20 improving access to, 203 returns on government investment in, 232 taxation and, 25 undermining of institutions, 233–34 Eggers, Dave, 128 Eisenhower, Dwight, and administration, 210 elderly, labor force growth and, 181–82 election of 1992, 4 election of 2000, 165–66 election of 2012, 159, 178 election of 2016, xix, 132, 178 elections, campaign spending in, 171–73 elite control of economy by, 5–6 and distrust in government, 151 and 2008 financial crisis, 5 promises of growth from market liberalization, 21–22 rules written by, 230 employers, market power over workers, 64–67 employment, See full employment; jobs; labor force participation End of History, The (Fukuyama), 3 Enlightenment, the, 10–12 attack on ideals of, 14–22 and standard of living, 264n24 environment carbon tax, 194, 206–7 and collective action, 153 economic growth and, 176 economists’ failure to address, 34 markets’ failure to protect, 24 and true economic health, 34 environmental justice, economic justice and, 176 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 267n38 epistemology, 10, 234 equality as basis for well-running economy, xxiv–xxv economic agenda for, xxvii as shared value, 228 Equifax, 130 equity value, rents as portion of, 54 ethnic discrimination, 201–4 Europe data regulation, 128–29 globalization, 81 infrastructure investment, 195–96 privacy protections, 135 trade agreements favoring, 80 unity against Trump, 235 European Investment Bank, 195–96 evergreening, 60 excess profits, as rent, 54 exchange rate, 89, 307n28, 307n32 exploitation in current economy, 26 in economics texts, 23 financial sector and, 113 market power and, 47–78 reducing, 197 as source of wealth, 144–45 wealth creation vs., 34 and wealth redistribution, 50 exports, See globalization; trade wars Facebook anticompetitive practices, 70 and Big Data, 123, 124, 127–28 competition for ad revenue, 56 and conflicts of interest, 124 market power in relaxed antitrust environment, 62 as natural monopoly, 134 and preemptive mergers, 60, 73 reducing market power of, 124 regulation of advertising on, 132 fact-checking, 132, 177 “Fading American Dream, The” (Opportunity Insights report), 44–45 “fake news,” 167 family leave, 197 Farhi, Emmanuel, 62 farmers, Great Depression and, 120 fascism, 15–16, 18, 235 Federal Communication Commission (FCC), 147 Federal Reserve Board, 70, 112 Federal Reserve System, 121, 214–15 Federal Trade Commission, 69 fees bank profits from, 105, 110 credit card, 60, 70, 105 for mergers and acquisitions, 108 mortgages and, 107, 218 “originate-to-distribute” banking model, 110 private retirement accounts and, 215 fiduciary standard, 314n21, 347n10 finance (financial sector); See also banks and American crisis, 101–16 contagion of maladies to rest of economy, 112 disintermediation, 109 dysfunctional economy created by, 105–9 gambling by, 106–8 and government guarantees, 110–11 history of dysfunctionality, 109–12 as microcosm of larger economy, 113 mortgage reform opposed by, 216–18 private vs. social interests, 111–12 and public option, 215–16 shortsightedness of, 104–5 stopping societal harm created by, 103–5 and trade agreements, 80 financial crisis (2008), 101; See also Great Recession bank bailout, See bank bailout [2008] China and, 95 deregulation and, 25, 143–44 as failure of capitalism, 3 government response to, 5 housing and, 216 as man-made failure, 153–54 market liberalization and, 4 and moral turpitude of bankers, 7 regulation in response to, 101–2 as symptomatic of larger economic failures, 32–33 and unsustainable growth, 35 financial liberalization, See market liberalization First National Bank, 101 “fiscal paradises,” 85–86 fiscal policy, 121, 194–96 fiscal responsibility, 237 food industry, 182 forced retirement, 181–82 Ford Motor Company, 120 Fox News, 18, 133, 167, 177 fractional reserve banking, 110–11 fraud, 103, 105, 216, 217 freedom, regulation and, 144 free-rider problem, 67, 155–56, 225–26 Friedman, Milton, 68, 314–15n22 FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), 58 Fukuyama, Francis, 3, 259n1 full employment, 83, 193–94, 196–97 Galbraith, John K., 67 gambling, by banks, 106–7, 207 Garland, Merrick, 166–67 Gates, Bill, 5, 117 GDP elites and, 22 as false measure of prosperity, 33, 227 financial sector’s increasing portion of, 109 Geithner, Tim, 102 gender discrimination, 41, 200–204 gene patents, 74–75 general welfare, 242–47 generic medicines, 60, 89 genetically modified food (GMO), 88 genetics, 126–27 George, Henry, 206 Germany, 132, 152 gerrymandering, 6, 159, 162 GI Bill, 210 Gilded Age, 12, 246 Glass-Steagall Act, 315n25, 341n39 globalization, 79–100 budget deficits and trade imbalances, 90 collective action to address, 154–55 effect on average citizens, 4, 21 in era of AI, 135 failure to manage, xxvi false premises about, 97–98 and global cooperation in 21st century, 92–97 and intellectual property, 88–89 and internet legal frameworks, 135 and low-skilled workers, 21, 82, 86, 267n39 and market power, 61 pain of, 82–87 and protectionism, 89–92 and 21st-century trade agreements, 87–89 and tax revenue, 84–86 technology vs., 86–87 and trade wars, 93–94 value systems and, 94–97 GMO (genetically modified food), 88 Goebbels, Joseph, 266n35 Goldman Sachs, 104 Google AlphaGo, 315n1 antipoaching conspiracy, 65 and Big Data, 123, 127, 128 conflicts of interest, 124 European restrictions on data use, 129 gaming of tax laws by, 85 market power, 56, 58, 62, 128 and preemptive mergers, 60 Gordon, Robert, 118–19 Gore, Al, 6 government, 138–56 assumption of mortgage risk, 107 Chicago School’s view of, 68–69 debate over role of, 150–52 and educational system, 220 failure of, 148–52 in finance, 115–16 and fractional reserve banking, 111 and Great Depression, 120 hiring of workers by, 196–97 increasing need for, 152–55 interventions during economic downturns, 23, 120 lack of trust in, 151 lending guarantees, 110–11 managing technological change, 122–23 and need for collective action, 140–42 and political reform, xxvi pre-distribution/redistribution by, xxv in progressive agenda, 243–44 public–private partnerships, 142 regulation and rules, 143–48 restoring growth and social justice, 179–208 social protection by, 231 government bonds, 215 Great Britain, wealth from colonialism, 9 Great Depression, xiii, xxii, 13, 23, 120 “great moderation,” 32 Great Recession, xxvi; See also financial crisis (2008) deregulation and, 25 diseases of despair, 42 elites and, 151 employment recovery after, 193 inadequate fiscal stimulus after, 121 as market failure, 23 pace of recovery from, 39–40 productivity growth after, 37 and retirement incomes, 214–15 weak social safety net and, 190 Greenspan, Alan, 112 Gross Fixed Capital Formation, 271n4 gross investment, 271n4 growth after 2008 financial crisis, 103 in China, 95 decline since 1980, 35–37 economic agenda for, xxvii failure of financial sector to support, 115 and inequality, 19 international living standard comparisons, 35–37 knowledge and, 183–86 labor force, 181–82 market power as inimical to, 62–64 in post-1970s US economy, 32 restoring, 181–86 taxation and, 25 guaranteed jobs, 196–97 Harvard University, 16 Hastert Rule, 333n31 health inequality in, 41–43 and labor force participation, 182 health care and American exceptionalism, 211–12 improving access to services, 203 public option, 210–11 in UK and Europe, 13 universal access to, 212–13 hedonic pricing, 347n13 higher education, 219–20; See also universities Hispanic Americans, 41 hi-tech companies, 54, 56, 60, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 152, 266n35 Hobbes, Thomas, 12 home ownership, 216–18 hours worked per week, US ranking among developed economies, 36–37 House of Representatives, 6, 159 housing, as barrier to finding new jobs, 186 housing bubble, 21 housing finance, 216–18 human capital index (World Bank), 36 Human Development Index, 36 Human Genome Project, 126 hurricanes, 207 IA (intelligence-assisting) innovations, 119 identity, capitalism’s effect on, xxvi ideology, science replaced by, 20 immigrants/immigration, 16, 181, 185 imports, See globalization; trade wars incarceration, 161, 163, 193, 201, 202 incentive payments for teachers, 201 voting reform and, 162–63 income; See also wages average US pretax income (1974-2014), 33t universal basic income, 190–91 income inequality, 37, 177, 200, 206 income of capital, 53 India, guaranteed jobs in, 196–97 individualism, 139, 225–26 individual mandate, 212, 213 industrial policies, 187 industrial revolution, 9, 12, 264–65n24 inequality; See also income inequality; wealth inequality benefits of reducing, xxiv–xxv and current politics, 246 in early years after WWII, xix economists’ failure to address, 33 education system as perpetuator of, 219 and election of 2016, xix–xxi and excess profits, 49 and financial system design, 198 growth of, xii–xiii, 37–45 in health, 41–43 in opportunity, 44–45 in race, ethnicity, and gender, 40–41 and 2017 tax bill, 236–37 technology’s effect on, 122–23 in 19th and early 20th century, 12–13 20th-century attempts to address, 13–14 tolerance of, 19 infrastructure European Investment Bank and, 195–96 fiscal policy and, 195 government employment and, 196–97 public–private partnerships, 142 returns on investment in, 195, 232 taxation and, 25 and 2017 tax bill, 183 inheritance tax, 20 inherited wealth, 43, 278n38 innovation intellectual property rights and, 74–75 market power and, 57–60, 63–64 net neutrality and, 148 regulation and, 134 slowing pace of, 118–19 and unemployment, 120, 121 innovation economy, 153–54 insecurity, social protection to address, 188–91 Instagram, 70, 73, 124 institutions fragility of, 230–36 in progressive agenda, 245 undermining of, 231–33 insurance companies, 125 Intel, 65 intellectual property rights (IPR) China and, 95–96 globalization and, 88–89, 99 and stifling of innovation, 74–75 and technological change, 122 in trade agreements, 80, 89 intelligence-assisting (IA) innovations, 119 interest rates, 83, 110, 215 intergenerational justice, 204–5 intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage, xxv–xxvi, 199–201, 219 intermediation, 105, 106 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 217 International Monetary Fund, xix internet, 58, 147 Internet Explorer, 58 inversions, 302n10 investment buybacks vs., 109 corporate tax cuts and, 269n44 and intergenerational justice, 204 long-term, 106 weakening by monopoly power, 63 “invisible hand,” 76 iPhone, 139 IPR, See intellectual property rights Ireland, 108 IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 217 Italy, 133 IT sector, 54; See also hi-tech companies Jackson, Andrew, 101, 241 Janus v.

., 34 and wealth redistribution, 50 exports, See globalization; trade wars Facebook anticompetitive practices, 70 and Big Data, 123, 124, 127–28 competition for ad revenue, 56 and conflicts of interest, 124 market power in relaxed antitrust environment, 62 as natural monopoly, 134 and preemptive mergers, 60, 73 reducing market power of, 124 regulation of advertising on, 132 fact-checking, 132, 177 “Fading American Dream, The” (Opportunity Insights report), 44–45 “fake news,” 167 family leave, 197 Farhi, Emmanuel, 62 farmers, Great Depression and, 120 fascism, 15–16, 18, 235 Federal Communication Commission (FCC), 147 Federal Reserve Board, 70, 112 Federal Reserve System, 121, 214–15 Federal Trade Commission, 69 fees bank profits from, 105, 110 credit card, 60, 70, 105 for mergers and acquisitions, 108 mortgages and, 107, 218 “originate-to-distribute” banking model, 110 private retirement accounts and, 215 fiduciary standard, 314n21, 347n10 finance (financial sector); See also banks and American crisis, 101–16 contagion of maladies to rest of economy, 112 disintermediation, 109 dysfunctional economy created by, 105–9 gambling by, 106–8 and government guarantees, 110–11 history of dysfunctionality, 109–12 as microcosm of larger economy, 113 mortgage reform opposed by, 216–18 private vs. social interests, 111–12 and public option, 215–16 shortsightedness of, 104–5 stopping societal harm created by, 103–5 and trade agreements, 80 financial crisis (2008), 101; See also Great Recession bank bailout, See bank bailout [2008] China and, 95 deregulation and, 25, 143–44 as failure of capitalism, 3 government response to, 5 housing and, 216 as man-made failure, 153–54 market liberalization and, 4 and moral turpitude of bankers, 7 regulation in response to, 101–2 as symptomatic of larger economic failures, 32–33 and unsustainable growth, 35 financial liberalization, See market liberalization First National Bank, 101 “fiscal paradises,” 85–86 fiscal policy, 121, 194–96 fiscal responsibility, 237 food industry, 182 forced retirement, 181–82 Ford Motor Company, 120 Fox News, 18, 133, 167, 177 fractional reserve banking, 110–11 fraud, 103, 105, 216, 217 freedom, regulation and, 144 free-rider problem, 67, 155–56, 225–26 Friedman, Milton, 68, 314–15n22 FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), 58 Fukuyama, Francis, 3, 259n1 full employment, 83, 193–94, 196–97 Galbraith, John K., 67 gambling, by banks, 106–7, 207 Garland, Merrick, 166–67 Gates, Bill, 5, 117 GDP elites and, 22 as false measure of prosperity, 33, 227 financial sector’s increasing portion of, 109 Geithner, Tim, 102 gender discrimination, 41, 200–204 gene patents, 74–75 general welfare, 242–47 generic medicines, 60, 89 genetically modified food (GMO), 88 genetics, 126–27 George, Henry, 206 Germany, 132, 152 gerrymandering, 6, 159, 162 GI Bill, 210 Gilded Age, 12, 246 Glass-Steagall Act, 315n25, 341n39 globalization, 79–100 budget deficits and trade imbalances, 90 collective action to address, 154–55 effect on average citizens, 4, 21 in era of AI, 135 failure to manage, xxvi false premises about, 97–98 and global cooperation in 21st century, 92–97 and intellectual property, 88–89 and internet legal frameworks, 135 and low-skilled workers, 21, 82, 86, 267n39 and market power, 61 pain of, 82–87 and protectionism, 89–92 and 21st-century trade agreements, 87–89 and tax revenue, 84–86 technology vs., 86–87 and trade wars, 93–94 value systems and, 94–97 GMO (genetically modified food), 88 Goebbels, Joseph, 266n35 Goldman Sachs, 104 Google AlphaGo, 315n1 antipoaching conspiracy, 65 and Big Data, 123, 127, 128 conflicts of interest, 124 European restrictions on data use, 129 gaming of tax laws by, 85 market power, 56, 58, 62, 128 and preemptive mergers, 60 Gordon, Robert, 118–19 Gore, Al, 6 government, 138–56 assumption of mortgage risk, 107 Chicago School’s view of, 68–69 debate over role of, 150–52 and educational system, 220 failure of, 148–52 in finance, 115–16 and fractional reserve banking, 111 and Great Depression, 120 hiring of workers by, 196–97 increasing need for, 152–55 interventions during economic downturns, 23, 120 lack of trust in, 151 lending guarantees, 110–11 managing technological change, 122–23 and need for collective action, 140–42 and political reform, xxvi pre-distribution/redistribution by, xxv in progressive agenda, 243–44 public–private partnerships, 142 regulation and rules, 143–48 restoring growth and social justice, 179–208 social protection by, 231 government bonds, 215 Great Britain, wealth from colonialism, 9 Great Depression, xiii, xxii, 13, 23, 120 “great moderation,” 32 Great Recession, xxvi; See also financial crisis (2008) deregulation and, 25 diseases of despair, 42 elites and, 151 employment recovery after, 193 inadequate fiscal stimulus after, 121 as market failure, 23 pace of recovery from, 39–40 productivity growth after, 37 and retirement incomes, 214–15 weak social safety net and, 190 Greenspan, Alan, 112 Gross Fixed Capital Formation, 271n4 gross investment, 271n4 growth after 2008 financial crisis, 103 in China, 95 decline since 1980, 35–37 economic agenda for, xxvii failure of financial sector to support, 115 and inequality, 19 international living standard comparisons, 35–37 knowledge and, 183–86 labor force, 181–82 market power as inimical to, 62–64 in post-1970s US economy, 32 restoring, 181–86 taxation and, 25 guaranteed jobs, 196–97 Harvard University, 16 Hastert Rule, 333n31 health inequality in, 41–43 and labor force participation, 182 health care and American exceptionalism, 211–12 improving access to services, 203 public option, 210–11 in UK and Europe, 13 universal access to, 212–13 hedonic pricing, 347n13 higher education, 219–20; See also universities Hispanic Americans, 41 hi-tech companies, 54, 56, 60, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 152, 266n35 Hobbes, Thomas, 12 home ownership, 216–18 hours worked per week, US ranking among developed economies, 36–37 House of Representatives, 6, 159 housing, as barrier to finding new jobs, 186 housing bubble, 21 housing finance, 216–18 human capital index (World Bank), 36 Human Development Index, 36 Human Genome Project, 126 hurricanes, 207 IA (intelligence-assisting) innovations, 119 identity, capitalism’s effect on, xxvi ideology, science replaced by, 20 immigrants/immigration, 16, 181, 185 imports, See globalization; trade wars incarceration, 161, 163, 193, 201, 202 incentive payments for teachers, 201 voting reform and, 162–63 income; See also wages average US pretax income (1974-2014), 33t universal basic income, 190–91 income inequality, 37, 177, 200, 206 income of capital, 53 India, guaranteed jobs in, 196–97 individualism, 139, 225–26 individual mandate, 212, 213 industrial policies, 187 industrial revolution, 9, 12, 264–65n24 inequality; See also income inequality; wealth inequality benefits of reducing, xxiv–xxv and current politics, 246 in early years after WWII, xix economists’ failure to address, 33 education system as perpetuator of, 219 and election of 2016, xix–xxi and excess profits, 49 and financial system design, 198 growth of, xii–xiii, 37–45 in health, 41–43 in opportunity, 44–45 in race, ethnicity, and gender, 40–41 and 2017 tax bill, 236–37 technology’s effect on, 122–23 in 19th and early 20th century, 12–13 20th-century attempts to address, 13–14 tolerance of, 19 infrastructure European Investment Bank and, 195–96 fiscal policy and, 195 government employment and, 196–97 public–private partnerships, 142 returns on investment in, 195, 232 taxation and, 25 and 2017 tax bill, 183 inheritance tax, 20 inherited wealth, 43, 278n38 innovation intellectual property rights and, 74–75 market power and, 57–60, 63–64 net neutrality and, 148 regulation and, 134 slowing pace of, 118–19 and unemployment, 120, 121 innovation economy, 153–54 insecurity, social protection to address, 188–91 Instagram, 70, 73, 124 institutions fragility of, 230–36 in progressive agenda, 245 undermining of, 231–33 insurance companies, 125 Intel, 65 intellectual property rights (IPR) China and, 95–96 globalization and, 88–89, 99 and stifling of innovation, 74–75 and technological change, 122 in trade agreements, 80, 89 intelligence-assisting (IA) innovations, 119 interest rates, 83, 110, 215 intergenerational justice, 204–5 intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage, xxv–xxvi, 199–201, 219 intermediation, 105, 106 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 217 International Monetary Fund, xix internet, 58, 147 Internet Explorer, 58 inversions, 302n10 investment buybacks vs., 109 corporate tax cuts and, 269n44 and intergenerational justice, 204 long-term, 106 weakening by monopoly power, 63 “invisible hand,” 76 iPhone, 139 IPR, See intellectual property rights Ireland, 108 IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 217 Italy, 133 IT sector, 54; See also hi-tech companies Jackson, Andrew, 101, 241 Janus v.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

It is that the financial markets have failed in their basic task of recycling the savings, making sure that the savings are used productively. This function is referred to as “intermediation”—intermediating between savings and investment. Financial systems in both Europe and America have failed to perform this key role well. Indeed, in the United States, the financial sector has been engaged in disintermediation, taking money out of the corporate sector, resulting in fewer funds available for investment. Huge amounts, for instance, are leaving firms in the form of share buybacks—in 2014, some 4 percent of GDP, and in 2015, 3.5 percent. Moreover, much of the savings is being done by “long-term savers,” those saving for their retirement or money put aside by countries in their sovereign wealth funds.

., 266 Camdessus, Michel, 314 campaign contributions, 195, 355 Canada, 96 early 1990s expansion of, 209 in NAFTA, xiv railroad privatization in, 55 tax system in, 191 US’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 capital, 76–77 bank, 284–85 human, 78, 137 return to, 388 societal vs. physical, 77–78 tax on, 356 unemployment increased by, 264 capital adequacy standards, 152 capital budget, 245 capital controls, 389–90 capital flight, 126–34, 217, 354, 359 austerity and, 140 and labor flows, 135 capital flows, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27–28, 40, 116, 125, 128, 131, 351 economic volatility exacerbated by, 28, 274 and foreign ownership, 195 and technology, 139 capital inflows, 110–11 capitalism: crises in, xviii, 148–49 inclusive, 317 capital requirements, 152, 249, 378 Caprio, Gerry, 387 capture, 158–60 carbon price, 230, 260, 265, 368 cash, 39 cash flow, 194 Catalonia, xi CDU party, 314 central banks, 59, 354, 387–88 balance sheets of, 386 capture of, 158–59 credit auctions by, 282–84 credit creation by, 277–78 expertise of, 363 independence of, 157–63 inequality created by, 154 inflation and, 153, 166–67 as lender of last resort, 85, 362 as political institutions, 160–62 regulations and, 153 stability and, 8 unemployment and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147, 153 CEO compensation, 383 Chapter 11, 259–60, 291 childhood poverty, 72 Chile, 55, 152–53 China, 81, 98, 164, 319, 352 exchange-rate policy of, 251, 254, 350–51 global integration of, 49–50 low prices of, 251 rise of, 75 savings in, 257 trade surplus of, 118, 121, 350–52 wages controlled in, 254 as world’s largest economy, 318, 327 chits, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–389 Citigroup, 355 climate change, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 Clinton, Bill, xiv, xv, 187 closing hours, 220 cloves, 230 cognitive capture, 159 Cohesion Fund, 243 Cold War, 6 collateral, 364 collective action, 41–44, 51–52 and inequality, 338 and stabilization, 246 collective bargaining, 221 collective goods, 40 Common Agricultural Policy, 338 common regulatory framework, 241 communism, 10 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 360, 382 comparative advantage, 12, 171 competition, 12 competitive devaluation, 104–6, 254 compromise, 22–23 confidence, 95, 200–201, 384 in banks, 127 in bonds, 145 and structural reforms, 232 and 2008 crisis, 280 confirmation bias, 309, 335 Congress, US, 319, 355 connected lending, 280 connectedness, 68–69 Connecticut, GDP of, 92 Constitutional Court, Greek, 198 consumption, 94, 278 consumption tax, 193–94 contract enforcement, 24 convergence, 13, 92–93, 124, 125, 139, 254, 300–301 convergence criteria, 15, 87, 89, 96–97, 99, 123, 244 copper mines, 55 corporate income tax, 189–90, 227 corporate taxes, 189–90, 227, 251 corporations, 323 regulations opposed by, xvi and shutdown of Greek banks, 229 corruption, 74, 112 privatization and, 194–95 Costa, António, 332 Council of Economic Advisers, 358 Council of State, Greek, 198 countercyclical fiscal policy, 244 counterfactuals, 80 Countrywide Financial, 91 credit, 276–85 “divorce”’s effect on, 278–79 excessive, 250, 274 credit auctions, 282–84 credit bubbles, 122–123 credit cards, 39, 49, 153 credit creation, 248–50, 277–78, 386 by banks, 280–82 domestic control over, 279–82 regulation of, 277–78 credit default swaps (CDSs), 159–60 crisis policy reforms, 262–67 austerity to growth, 263–65 debt restructuring and, 265–67 Croatia, 46, 331, 338 currency crises, 349 currency pegs, xii current account, 333–34 current account deficits, 19, 88, 108, 110, 120–121, 221, 294 and exit from euro, 273, 285–89 see also trade deficit Cyprus, 16, 30, 140, 177, 331, 386 capital controls in, 390 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 “haircut” of, 350, 367 Czech Republic, 46, 331 debit cards, 39, 49 debtors’ prison, 204 debt restructuring, 201, 203–6, 265–67, 290–92, 372, 390 of private debt, 291 debts, xx, 15, 93, 96, 183 corporate, 93–94 crisis in, 110–18 in deflation, xii and exit from eurozone, 273 with foreign currency, 115–18 household, 93–94 increase in, 18 inherited, 134 limits of, 42, 87, 122, 141, 346, 367 monetization of, 42 mutualization of, 242–43, 263 place-based, 134, 242 reprofiling of, 32 restructuring of, 259 debt-to-GDP ratio, 202, 210–11, 231, 266, 324 Declaration of Independence, 319 defaults, 102, 241, 338, 348 and debt mutualization, 243 deficit fetishism, 96 deficits, fiscal, xx, 15, 20, 93, 96, 106, 107–8, 122, 182, 384 and balanced-budget multiplier, 188–90, 265 constitutional amendment on, 339 and exit from euro, 273, 289–90 in Greece, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 limit of, 42, 87, 94–95, 122, 138, 141, 186, 243, 244, 265, 346, 367 primary, 188 problems financing, 110–12 structural, 245 deficits, trade, see trade deficits deflation, xii, 147, 148, 151, 166, 169, 277, 290 Delors, Jacques, 7, 332 democracy, lack of faith in, 312–14 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), xiii democratic deficit, 26–27, 35, 57–62, 145 democratic participation, xix Denmark, 45, 307, 313, 331 euro referendum of, 58 deposit insurance, 31, 44, 129, 199, 301, 354–55, 386–87 common in eurozone, 241, 242, 246, 248 derivatives, 131, 355 Deutsche Bank, 283, 355 devaluation, 98, 104–6, 254, 344 see also internal devaluation developing countries, and Washington Consensus, xvi discretion, 262–63 discriminatory lending practices, 283 disintermediation, 258 divergence, 15, 123, 124–44, 255–56, 300, 321 in absence of crisis, 128–31 capital flight and, 126–34 crisis policies’ exacerbation of, 140–43 free mobility of labor and, 134–36, 142–44, 242 in public investment, 136–38 reforms to prevent, 243 single-market principle and, 125–26 in technology, 138–39 in wealth, 139–40 see also capital flows; labor movement diversification, of production, 47 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 355 dollar peg, 50 downsizing, 133 Draghi, Mario, 127, 145, 156, 158, 165, 269, 363 bond market supported by, 127, 200, 201 Drago, Luis María, 371 drug prices, 219 Duisenberg, Willem Frederik “Wim,” 251 Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium model, 331 East Asia, 18, 25, 95, 102–3, 112, 123, 202, 364, 381 convergence in, 138 Eastern Europe, 10 Economic Adjustment Programme, 178 economic distortions, 191 economic growth, xii, 34 confidence and, 232 in Europe, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 lowered by inequality, 212–13 reform of, 263–65 and structural reforms, 232–35 economic integration, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50 euro and, 46–47 political integration vs., 51–57 single currency and, 45–46 economic rents, 226, 280 economics, politics and, 308–18 economic security, 68 economies of scale, 12, 39, 55, 138 economists, poor forecasting by, 307 education, 20, 76, 344 investment in, 40, 69, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 electricity, 217 electronic currency, 298–99, 389 electronics payment mechanism, 274–76, 283–84 emigration, 4, 68–69 see also migration employment: central banks and, 8, 94, 97 structural reforms and, 257–60 see also unemployment Employment Act (1946), 148 energy subsidies, 197 Enlightenment, 3, 318–19 environment, 41, 257, 260, 323 equality, 225–26 equilibrium, xviii–xix Erasmus program, 45 Estonia, 90, 331, 346 euro, xiv, 325 adjustments impeded by, 13–14 case for, 35–39 creation of, xii, 5–6, 7, 10, 333 creation of institutions required by, 10–11 divergence and, see divergence divorce of, 272–95, 307 economic integration and, 46–47, 268 as entailing fixed exchange rate, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 143, 193, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 as entailing single interest rate, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 and European identification, 38–39 financial instability caused by, 131–32 growth promised by, 235 growth slowed by, 73 hopes for, 34 inequality increased by, xviii interest rates lowered by, 235 internal devaluation of, see internal devaluation literature on, 327–28 as means to end, xix peace and, 38 proponents of, 13 referenda on, 58, 339–40 reforms needed for, xii–xiii, 28–31 risk of, 49–50 weakness of, 224 see also flexible euro Eurobond, 356 euro crisis, xiii, 3, 4, 9 catastrophic consequences of, 11–12 euro-euphoria, 116–17 Europe, 151 free trade area in, 44–45 growth rates in, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 military conflicts in, 196 social models of, 21 European Central Bank (ECB), 7, 17, 80, 112–13, 117, 144, 145–73, 274, 313, 362, 368, 380 capture of, 158–59 confidence in, 200–201 corporate bonds bought by, 141 creation of, 8, 85 democratic deficit and, 26, 27 excessive expansion controlled by, 250 flexibility of, 269 funds to Greece cut off by, 59 German challenges to, 117, 164 governance and, 157–63 inequality created by, 154–55 inflation controlled by, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 250, 256, 266 interest rates set by, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 Ireland forced to socialize losses by, 134, 156, 165 new mandate needed by, 256 as political institution, 160–62 political nature of, 153–56 quantitative easing opposed by, 151 quantitative easing undertaken by, 164, 165–66, 170, 171 regulations by, 249, 250 unemployment and, 163 as unrepresentative, 163 European Commission, 17, 58, 161, 313, 332 European Court of Human Rights, 45 European Economic Community (EEC), 6 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 30, 335 European Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), 336 European Free Trade Association, 44 European Free Trade Association Court, 44 European Investment Bank (EIB), 137, 247, 255, 301 European Regional Development Fund, 243 European Stability Mechanism, 23, 246, 357 European Union: budget of, 8, 45, 91 creation of, 4 debt and deficit limits in, 87–88 democratic deficit in, 26–27 economic growth in, 215 GDP of, xiii and lower rates of war, 196 migration in, 90 proposed exit of UK from, 4 stereotypes in, 12 subsidiarity in, 8, 41–42, 263 taxes in, 8, 261 Euro Summit Statement, 373 eurozone: austerity in, see austerity banking union in, see banking union counterfactual in, 235–36 double-dip recessions in, 234–35 Draghi’s speech and, 145 economic integration and, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50, 51–57 as flawed at birth, 7–9 framework for stability of, 244–52 German departure from, 32, 292–93 Greece’s possible exit from, 124 hours worked in, 71–72 lack of fiscal policy in, 152 and move to political integration, xvi, 34, 35, 51–57 Mundell’s work on dangers of, 87 policies of, 15–17 possible breakup of, 29–30 privatization avoided in, 194 saving, 323–26 stagnant GDP in, 12, 65–68, 66, 67 structure of, 8–9 surpluses in, 120–22 theory of, 95–97 unemployment in, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 working-age population of, 70 eurozone, proposed structural reforms for, 239–71 common financial system, see banking union excessive fiscal responsibility, 163 exchange-rate risks, 13, 47, 48, 49–50, 125, 235 exchange rates, 80, 85, 288, 300, 338, 382, 389 of China, 251, 254, 350–51 and competitive devaluation, 105–6 after departure of northern countries, 292–93 of euro, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 flexible, 50, 248, 349 and full employment, 94 of Germany, 254–55, 351 gold and, 344–45 imports and, 86 interest rates and, 86 quantitative easing’s lowering of, 151 real, 105–6 and single currencies, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 stabilizing, 299–301 and trade deficits, 107, 118 expansionary contractions, 95–96, 208–9 exports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98 disappointing performance of, 103–5 external imbalances, 97–98, 101, 109 externalities, 42–43, 121, 153, 301–2 surpluses as, 253 extremism, xx, 4 Fannie Mae, 91 farmers, US, in deflation, xii Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 91 Federal Reserve, US, 349 alleged independence of, 157 interest rates lowered by, 150 mandate of, 8, 147, 172 money pumped into economy by, 278 quantitative easing used by, 151, 170 reform of, 146 fiat currency, 148, 275 and taxes, 284 financial markets: lobbyists from, 132 reform of, 214, 228–29 short-sighted, 112–13 financial systems: necessity of, xix real economy of, 149 reform of, 257–58 regulations needed by, xix financial transaction system, 275–76 Finland, 16, 81, 122, 126, 292, 296, 331, 343 growth in, 296–97 growth rate of, 75, 76, 234–35 fire departments, 41 firms, 138, 186–87, 245, 248 fiscal balance: and cutting spending, 196–98 tax revenue and, 190–96 Fiscal Compact, 141, 357 fiscal consolidation, 310 fiscal deficits, see deficits, fiscal fiscal policy, 148, 245, 264 in center of macro-stabilization, 251 countercyclical, 244 in EU, 8 expansionary, 254–55 stabilization of, 250–52 fiscal prudence, 15 fiscal responsibility, 163 flexibility, 262–63, 269 flexible euro, 30–31, 272, 296–305, 307 cooperation needed for, 304–5 food prices, 169 forbearance, 130–31 forecasts, 307 foreclosure proposal, 180 foreign ownership, privatization and, 195 forestry, 81 France, 6, 14, 16, 114, 120, 141, 181–82, 331, 339–40, 343 banks of, 202, 203, 231, 373 corporate income tax in, 189–90 euro creation regretted in, 340 European Constitution referendum of, 58 extreme right in, xi growth in, 247 Freddie Mac, 91 Freefall (Stiglitz), 264, 335 free mobility of labor, xiv, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 142–44, 242 Friedman, Milton, 151, 152–53, 167, 339 full employment, 94–97, 379 G-20, 121 gas: import of, 230 from Russia, 37, 81, 93 Gates Foundation, 276 GDP-indexed bonds, 267 German bonds, 114, 323 German Council of Economic Experts, 179, 365 Germany, xxi, 14, 30, 65, 108, 114, 141, 181–82, 207, 220, 286, 307, 331, 343, 346, 374 austerity pushed by, 186, 232 banks of, 202, 203, 231–32, 373 costs to taxpayers of, 184 as creditor, 140, 187, 267 debt collection by, 117 debt in, 105 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 in departure from eurozone, 32, 292–93 as dependent on Russian gas, 37 desire to leave eurozone, 314 ECB criticized by, 164 EU economic practices controlled by, 17 euro creation regretted in, 340 exchange rate of, 254–55, 351 failure of, 13, 78–79 flexible exchange of, 304 GDP of, xviii, 92 in Great Depression, 187 growing poverty in, 79 growth of, 78, 106, 247 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 79, 333 inflation in, 42, 338, 358 internal solidarity of, 334 lack of alternative to euro seen by, 11 migrants to, 320–21, 334–35, 393 minimum wage in, 42, 120, 254 neoliberalism in, 10 and place-based debt, 136 productivity in, 71 programs designed by, 53, 60, 61, 202, 336, 338 reparations paid by, 187 reunification of, 6 rules as important to, 57, 241–42, 262 share of global employment in, 224 shrinking working-age population of, 70, 78–79 and Stability and Growth Pact, 245 and structural reforms, 19–20 “there is no alternative” and, 306, 311–12 trade surplus of, 117, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 “transfer union” rejected by, 22 US loans to, 187 victims blamed by, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309 wages constrained by, 41, 42–43 wages lowered in, 105, 333 global financial crisis, xi, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 17, 24, 67, 73, 75, 114, 124, 146, 148, 274, 364, 387 and central bank independence, 157–58 and confidence, 280 and cost of failure of financial institutions, 131 lessons of, 249 monetary policy in, 151 and need for structural reform, 214 originating in US, 65, 68, 79–80, 112, 128, 296, 302 globalization, 51, 321–23 and diminishing share of employment in advanced countries, 224 economic vs. political, xvii failures of, xvii Globalization and Its Discontents (Stig-litz), 234, 335, 369 global savings glut, 257 global secular stagnation, 120 global warming, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 gold, 257, 275, 277, 345 Goldman Sachs, 158, 366 gold standard, 148, 291, 347, 358 in Great Depression, xii, 100 goods: free movement of, 40, 143, 260–61 nontraded, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 traded, 102, 103, 216 Gordon, Robert, 251 governance, 157–63, 258–59 government spending, trade deficits and, 107–8 gravity principle, 124, 127–28 Great Depression, 42, 67, 105, 148, 149, 168, 313 Friedman on causes of, 151 gold standard in, xii, 100 Great Malaise, 264 Greece, 14, 30, 41, 64, 81, 100, 117, 123, 142, 160, 177, 265–66, 278, 307, 331, 343, 366, 367–68, 374–75, 386 austerity opposed by, 59, 60–62, 69–70, 207–8, 392 balance of payments, 219 banks in, 200–201, 228–29, 231, 270, 276, 367, 368 blaming of, 16, 17 bread in, 218, 230 capital controls in, 390 consumption tax and, 193–94 counterfactual scenario of, 80 current account surplus of, 287–88 and debt restructuring, 205–7 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 debt write-offs in, 291 decline in labor costs in, 56, 103 ECB’s cutting of funds to, 59 economic growth in, 215, 247 emigration from, 68–69 fiscal deficits in, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 GDP of, xviii, 183, 309 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 72 inherited debt in, 134 lack of faith in democracy in, 312–13 living standards in, 216 loans in, 127 loans to, 310 migrants and, 320–21 milk in, 218, 223, 230 new currency in, 291, 300 oligarchs in, 16, 227 output per working-age person in, 70–71 past downturns in, 235–36 pensions in, 16, 78, 188, 197–98, 226 pharmacies in, 218–20 population decline in, 69, 89 possible exit from eurozone of, 124, 197, 273, 274, 275 poverty in, 226, 261, 376 primary surplus of, 187–88, 312 privatization in, 55, 195–96 productivity in, 71, 342 programs imposed on, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 renewable energy in, 193, 229 social capital destroyed in, 78 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 and structural reforms, 20, 70, 188, 191 tax revenue in, 16, 142, 192, 227, 367–368 tools lacking for recovery of, 246 tourism in, 192, 286 trade deficits in, 81, 194, 216–17, 222, 285–86 unemployment in, xi, 71, 236, 267, 332, 338, 342 urgency in, 214–15 victim-blaming of, 309–11 wages in, 216–17 youth unemployment in, xi, 332 Greek bonds, 116, 126 interest rates on, 4, 114, 181–82, 201–2, 323 restructuring of, 206–7 green investments, 260 Greenspan, Alan, 251, 359, 363 Grexit, see Greece, possible exit from eurozone of grocery stores, 219 gross domestic product (GDP), xvii decline in, 3 measurement of, 341 Growth and Stability Pact, 87 hedge funds, 282, 363 highways, 41 Hitler, Adolf, 338, 358 Hochtief, 367–68 Hoover, Herbert, 18, 95 human capital, 78, 137 human rights, 44–45, 319 Hungary, 46, 331, 338 hysteresis, 270 Iceland, 44, 111, 307, 354–55 banks in, 91 capital controls in, 390 ideology, 308–9, 315–18 imports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98, 107 incentives, 158–59 inclusive capitalism, 317 income, unemployment and, 77 income tax, 45 Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, 376–377 Indonesia, 113, 230–31, 314, 350, 364, 378 industrial policies, 138–39, 301 and restructuring, 217, 221, 223–25 Industrial Revolution, 3, 224 industry, 89 inequality, 45, 72–73, 333 aggregate demand lowered by, 212 created by central banks, 154 ECB’s creation of, 154–55 economic performance affected by, xvii euro’s increasing of, xviii growth’s lowering of, 212 hurt by collective action, 338 increased by neoliberalism, xviii increase in, 64, 154–55 inequality in, 72, 212 as moral issue, xviii in Spain, 72, 212, 225–26 and tax harmonization, 260–61 and tax system, 191 inflation, 277, 290, 314, 388 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 bonds and, 161 central banks and, 153, 166–67 consequences of fixation on, 149–50, 151 costs of, 270 and debt monetization, 42 ECB and, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 255, 256, 266 and food prices, 169 in Germany, 42, 338, 358 interest rates and, 43–44 in late 1970s, 168 and natural rate hypothesis, 172–73 political decisions and, 146 inflation targeting, 157, 168–70, 364 information, 335 informational capital, 77 infrastructure, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 inheritance tax, 368 inherited debt, 134 innovation, 138 innovation economy, 317–18 inputs, 217 instability, xix institutions, 93, 247 poorly designed, 163–64 insurance, 355–356 deposit, see deposit insurance mutual, 247 unemployment, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 integration, 322 interest rates, 43–44, 86, 282, 345, 354 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 ECB’s determination of, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 and employment, 94 euro’s lowering of, 235 Fed’s lowering of, 150 on German bonds, 114 on Greek bonds, 4, 114, 181–82 on Italian bonds, 114 in late 1970s, 168 long-term, 151, 200 negative, 316, 348–49 quantitative easing and, 151, 170 short-term, 249 single, eurozone’s entailing of, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 on Spanish bonds, 114, 199 spread in, 332 stock prices increased by, 264 at zero lower bound, 106 intermediation, 258 internal devaluation, 98–109, 122, 126, 220, 255, 388 supply-side effects of, 99, 103–4 International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 79, 341 International Labor Organization, 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xv, xvii, 10, 17, 18, 55, 61, 65–66, 96, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 154, 234, 289, 309, 316, 337, 349, 350, 370, 371, 381 and Argentine debt, 206 conditions of, 201 creation of, 105 danger of high taxation warnings of, 190 debt reduction pushed by, 95 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 and failure to restore credit, 201 global imbalances discussed by, 252 and Greek debts, 205, 206, 310–11 on Greek surplus, 188 and Indonesian crisis, 230–31, 364 on inequality’s lowering of growth, 212–13 Ireland’s socialization of losses opposed by, 156–57 mistakes admitted by, 262, 312 on New Mediocre, 264 Portuguese bailout of, 178–79 tax measures of, 185 investment, 76–77, 111, 189, 217, 251, 264, 278, 367 confidence and, 94 divergence in, 136–38 in education, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 infrastructure in, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 lowered by disintermediation, 258 public, 99 real estate, 199 in renewable energy, 229–30 return on, 186, 245 stimulation of, 94 in technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), 393–94 invisible hand, xviii Iraq, refugees from, 320 Iraq War, 36, 37 Ireland, 14, 16, 44, 113, 114–15, 122, 178, 234, 296, 312, 331, 339–40, 343, 362 austerity opposed in, 207 debt of, 196 emigrants from, 68–69 GDP of, 18, 231 growth in, 64, 231, 247, 340 inherited debt in, 134 losses socialized in, 134, 156–57, 165 low debt in, 88 real estate bubble in, 108, 114–15, 126 surplus in, 17, 88 taxes in, 142–43, 376 trade deficits in, 119 unemployment in, 178 irrational exuberance, 14, 114, 116–17, 149, 334, 359 ISIS, 319 Italian bonds, 114, 165, 323 Italy, 6, 14, 16, 120, 125, 331, 343 austerity opposed in, 59 GDP per capita in, 352 growth in, 247 sovereign spread of, 200 Japan, 151, 333, 342 bubble in, 359 debt of, 202 growth in, 78 quantitative easing used by, 151, 359 shrinking working-age population of, 70 Java, unemployment on, 230 jobs gap, 120 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 228 Keynes, John Maynard, 118, 120, 172, 187, 351 convergence policy suggested by, 254 Keynesian economics, 64, 95, 108, 153, 253 King, Mervyn, 390 knowledge, 137, 138–39, 337–38 Kohl, Helmut, 6–7, 337 krona, 287 labor, marginal product of, 356 labor laws, 75 labor markets, 9, 74 friction in, 336 reforms of, 214, 221 labor movement, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 320 austerity and, 140 capital flows and, 135 see also migration labor rights, 56 Lamers, Karl, 314 Lancaster, Kelvin, 27 land tax, 191 Latin America, 10, 55, 95, 112, 202 lost decade in, 168 Latvia, 331, 346 GDP of, 92 law of diminishing returns, 40 learning by doing, 77 Lehman Brothers, 182 lender of last resort, 85, 362, 368 lending, 280, 380 discriminatory, 283 predatory, 274, 310 lending rates, 278 leverage, 102 Lichtenstein, 44 Lipsey, Richard, 27 liquidity, 201, 264, 278, 354 ECB’s expansion of, 256 lira, 14 Lithuania, 331 living standards, 68–70 loans: contraction of, 126–27, 246 nonperforming, 241 for small and medium-size businesses, 246–47 lobbyists, from financial sector, 132 location, 76 London interbank lending rate (LIBOR), 131, 355 Long-Term Refinancing Operation, 360–361 Lucas, Robert, xi Luxembourg, 6, 94, 142–43, 331, 343 as tax avoidance center, 228, 261 luxury cars, 265 Maastricht Treaty, xiii, 6, 87, 115, 146, 244, 298, 339, 340 macro-prudential regulations, 249 Malta, 331, 340 manufacturing, 89, 223–24 market failures, 48–49, 86, 148, 149, 335 rigidities, 101 tax policy’s correction of, 193 market fundamentalism, see neoliberalism market irrationality, 110, 125–26, 149 markets, limitations of, 10 Meade, James, 27 Medicaid, 91 medical care, 196 Medicare, 90, 91 Mellon, Andrew, 95 Memorandum of Agreement, 233–34 Merkel, Angela, 186 Mexico, 202, 369 bailout of, 113 in NAFTA, xiv Middle East, 321 migrant crisis, 44 migration, 26, 40, 68–69, 90, 125, 320–21, 334–35, 342, 356, 393 unemployment and, 69, 90, 135, 140 see also labor movement military power, 36–37 milk, 218, 223, 230 minimum wage, 42, 120, 254, 255, 351 mining, 257 Mississippi, GDP of, 92 Mitsotakis, Constantine, 377–78 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 377–78 Mitterrand, François, 6–7 monetarism, 167–68, 169, 364 monetary policy, 24, 85–86, 148, 264, 325, 345, 364 as allegedly technocratic, 146, 161–62 conservative theory of, 151, 153 in early 1980s US, 168, 210 flexibility of, 244 in global financial crisis, 151 political nature of, 146, 153–54 recent developments in theory of, 166–73 see also interest rates monetary union, see single currencies money laundering, 354 monopolists, privatization and, 194 moral hazard, 202, 203 mortgage rates, 170 mortgages, 302 multinational chains, 219 multinational development banks, 137 multinationals, 127, 223, 376 multipliers, 211–12, 248 balanced-budget, 188–90, 265 Mundell, Robert, 87 mutual insurance, 247 mutualization of debt, 242–43, 263 national development banks, 137–38 natural monopolies, 55 natural rate hypothesis, 172 negative shocks, 248 neoliberalism, xvi, 24–26, 33, 34, 98–99, 109, 257, 265, 332–33, 335, 354 on bubbles, 381 and capital flows, 28 and central bank independence, 162–63 in Germany, 10 inequality increased by, xviii low inflation desired by, 147 recent scholarship against, 24 Netherlands, 6, 44, 292, 331, 339–40, 343 European Constitution referendum of, 58 New Democracy Party, Greek, 61, 185, 377–78 New Mediocre, 264 New World, 148 New Zealand, 364 Nokia, 81, 234, 297 nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), 379–80 nonaccelerating wage rate of unemployment (NAWRU), 379–80 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 276 nonperforming loans, 241 nontraded goods sector, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), xiv North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 196 Norway, 12, 44, 307 referendum on joining EU, 58 nuclear deterrence, 38 Obama, Barack, 319 oil, import of, 230 oil firms, 36 oil prices, 89, 168, 259, 359 oligarchs: in Greece, 16, 227 in Russia, 280 optimal currency area, 345 output, 70–71, 111 after recessions, 76 Outright Monetary Transactions program, 361 overregulate, 132 Oxfam, 72 panic of 1907, 147 Papandreou, Andreas, 366 Papandreou, George, xiv, 60–61, 184, 185, 220, 221, 226–27, 309, 312, 366, 373 reform of banks suggested by, 229 paradox of thrift, 120 peace, 34 pensions, 9, 16, 78, 177, 188, 197–98, 226, 276, 370 People’s Party, Portugal, 392 periphery, 14, 32, 171, 200, 296, 301, 318 see also specific countries peseta, 14 pharmacies, 218–20 Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), 132 physical capital, 77–78 Pinochet, Augusto, 152–53 place-based debt, 134, 242 Pleios, George, 377 Poland, 46, 333, 339 assistance to, 243 in Iraq War, 37 police, 41 political integration, xvi, 34, 35 economic integration vs., 51–57 politics, economics and, 308–18 pollution, 260 populism, xx Portugal, 14, 16, 64, 177, 178, 331, 343, 346 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315, 332, 392 GDP of, 92 IMF bailout of, 178–79 loans in, 127 poverty in, 261 sovereign spread of, 200 Portuguese bonds, 179 POSCO, 55 pound, 287, 335, 346 poverty, 72 in Greece, 226, 261 in Portugal, 261 in Spain, 261 predatory lending, 274, 310 present discount value, 343 Price of Inequality, The (Stiglitz), 154 prices, 19, 24 adjustment of, 48, 338, 361 price stability, 161 primary deficit, 188, 389 primary surpluses, 187–88 private austerity, 126–27, 241–42 private sector involvement, 113 privatization, 55, 194–96, 369 production costs, 39, 43, 50 production function, 343 productivity, 71, 332, 348 in manufacturing, 223–24 after recessions, 76–77 programs, 17–18 Germany’s design of, 53, 60, 61, 187–88, 205, 336, 338 imposed on Greece, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 of Troika, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 346, 366, 379, 392 progressive automatic stabilizers, 244 progressive taxes, 248 property rights, 24 property taxes, 192–93, 227 public entities, 195 public goods, 40, 337–38 quantitative easing (QE), 151, 164, 165–66, 170–72, 264, 359, 361, 386 railroads, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 168, 209 real estate bubble, 25, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 126, 148, 172, 250, 301, 302 cause of, 198 real estate investment, 199 real exchange rate, 105–6, 215–16 recessions, recovery from, 94–95 recovery, 76 reform, 75 theories of, 27–28 regulations, 24, 149, 152, 162, 250, 354, 355–356, 378 and Bush administration, 250–51 common, 241 corporate opposition to, xvi difficulties in, 132–33 of finance, xix forbearance on, 130–31 importance of, 152–53 macro-prudential, 249 in race to bottom, 131–34 Reinhardt, Carmen, 210 renewable energy, 193, 229–30 Republican Party, US, 319 research and development (R&D), 77, 138, 217, 251, 317–18 Ricardo, David, 40, 41 risk, 104, 153, 285 excessive, 250 risk markets, 27 Rogoff, Kenneth, 210 Romania, 46, 331, 338 Royal Bank of Scotland, 355 rules, 57, 241–42, 262, 296 Russia, 36, 264, 296 containment of, 318 economic rents in, 280 gas from, 37, 81, 93, 378 safety nets, 99, 141, 223 Samaras, Antonis, 61, 309, 377 savings, 120 global, 257 savings and loan crisis, 360 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 57, 220, 314, 317 Schengen area, 44 schools, 41, 196 Schröeder, Gerhard, 254 self-regulation, 131, 159 service sector, 224 shadow banking system, 133 shareholder capitalism, 21 Shiller, Rob, 132, 359 shipping taxes, 227, 228 short-termism, 77, 258–59 Silicon Valley, 224 silver, 275, 277 single currencies: conflicts and, 38 as entailing fixed exchange rates, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 external imbalances and, 97–98 and financial crises, 110–18 integration and, 45–46, 50 interest rates and, 8, 86, 87–88, 92, 93, 94 Mundell’s work on, 87 requirements for, 5, 52–53, 88–89, 92–94, 97–98 and similarities among countries, 15 trade integration vs., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.

., 51–57 single currency and, 45–46 economic rents, 226, 280 economics, politics and, 308–18 economic security, 68 economies of scale, 12, 39, 55, 138 economists, poor forecasting by, 307 education, 20, 76, 344 investment in, 40, 69, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 electricity, 217 electronic currency, 298–99, 389 electronics payment mechanism, 274–76, 283–84 emigration, 4, 68–69 see also migration employment: central banks and, 8, 94, 97 structural reforms and, 257–60 see also unemployment Employment Act (1946), 148 energy subsidies, 197 Enlightenment, 3, 318–19 environment, 41, 257, 260, 323 equality, 225–26 equilibrium, xviii–xix Erasmus program, 45 Estonia, 90, 331, 346 euro, xiv, 325 adjustments impeded by, 13–14 case for, 35–39 creation of, xii, 5–6, 7, 10, 333 creation of institutions required by, 10–11 divergence and, see divergence divorce of, 272–95, 307 economic integration and, 46–47, 268 as entailing fixed exchange rate, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 143, 193, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 as entailing single interest rate, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 and European identification, 38–39 financial instability caused by, 131–32 growth promised by, 235 growth slowed by, 73 hopes for, 34 inequality increased by, xviii interest rates lowered by, 235 internal devaluation of, see internal devaluation literature on, 327–28 as means to end, xix peace and, 38 proponents of, 13 referenda on, 58, 339–40 reforms needed for, xii–xiii, 28–31 risk of, 49–50 weakness of, 224 see also flexible euro Eurobond, 356 euro crisis, xiii, 3, 4, 9 catastrophic consequences of, 11–12 euro-euphoria, 116–17 Europe, 151 free trade area in, 44–45 growth rates in, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 military conflicts in, 196 social models of, 21 European Central Bank (ECB), 7, 17, 80, 112–13, 117, 144, 145–73, 274, 313, 362, 368, 380 capture of, 158–59 confidence in, 200–201 corporate bonds bought by, 141 creation of, 8, 85 democratic deficit and, 26, 27 excessive expansion controlled by, 250 flexibility of, 269 funds to Greece cut off by, 59 German challenges to, 117, 164 governance and, 157–63 inequality created by, 154–55 inflation controlled by, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 250, 256, 266 interest rates set by, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 Ireland forced to socialize losses by, 134, 156, 165 new mandate needed by, 256 as political institution, 160–62 political nature of, 153–56 quantitative easing opposed by, 151 quantitative easing undertaken by, 164, 165–66, 170, 171 regulations by, 249, 250 unemployment and, 163 as unrepresentative, 163 European Commission, 17, 58, 161, 313, 332 European Court of Human Rights, 45 European Economic Community (EEC), 6 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 30, 335 European Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), 336 European Free Trade Association, 44 European Free Trade Association Court, 44 European Investment Bank (EIB), 137, 247, 255, 301 European Regional Development Fund, 243 European Stability Mechanism, 23, 246, 357 European Union: budget of, 8, 45, 91 creation of, 4 debt and deficit limits in, 87–88 democratic deficit in, 26–27 economic growth in, 215 GDP of, xiii and lower rates of war, 196 migration in, 90 proposed exit of UK from, 4 stereotypes in, 12 subsidiarity in, 8, 41–42, 263 taxes in, 8, 261 Euro Summit Statement, 373 eurozone: austerity in, see austerity banking union in, see banking union counterfactual in, 235–36 double-dip recessions in, 234–35 Draghi’s speech and, 145 economic integration and, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50, 51–57 as flawed at birth, 7–9 framework for stability of, 244–52 German departure from, 32, 292–93 Greece’s possible exit from, 124 hours worked in, 71–72 lack of fiscal policy in, 152 and move to political integration, xvi, 34, 35, 51–57 Mundell’s work on dangers of, 87 policies of, 15–17 possible breakup of, 29–30 privatization avoided in, 194 saving, 323–26 stagnant GDP in, 12, 65–68, 66, 67 structure of, 8–9 surpluses in, 120–22 theory of, 95–97 unemployment in, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 working-age population of, 70 eurozone, proposed structural reforms for, 239–71 common financial system, see banking union excessive fiscal responsibility, 163 exchange-rate risks, 13, 47, 48, 49–50, 125, 235 exchange rates, 80, 85, 288, 300, 338, 382, 389 of China, 251, 254, 350–51 and competitive devaluation, 105–6 after departure of northern countries, 292–93 of euro, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 flexible, 50, 248, 349 and full employment, 94 of Germany, 254–55, 351 gold and, 344–45 imports and, 86 interest rates and, 86 quantitative easing’s lowering of, 151 real, 105–6 and single currencies, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 stabilizing, 299–301 and trade deficits, 107, 118 expansionary contractions, 95–96, 208–9 exports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98 disappointing performance of, 103–5 external imbalances, 97–98, 101, 109 externalities, 42–43, 121, 153, 301–2 surpluses as, 253 extremism, xx, 4 Fannie Mae, 91 farmers, US, in deflation, xii Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 91 Federal Reserve, US, 349 alleged independence of, 157 interest rates lowered by, 150 mandate of, 8, 147, 172 money pumped into economy by, 278 quantitative easing used by, 151, 170 reform of, 146 fiat currency, 148, 275 and taxes, 284 financial markets: lobbyists from, 132 reform of, 214, 228–29 short-sighted, 112–13 financial systems: necessity of, xix real economy of, 149 reform of, 257–58 regulations needed by, xix financial transaction system, 275–76 Finland, 16, 81, 122, 126, 292, 296, 331, 343 growth in, 296–97 growth rate of, 75, 76, 234–35 fire departments, 41 firms, 138, 186–87, 245, 248 fiscal balance: and cutting spending, 196–98 tax revenue and, 190–96 Fiscal Compact, 141, 357 fiscal consolidation, 310 fiscal deficits, see deficits, fiscal fiscal policy, 148, 245, 264 in center of macro-stabilization, 251 countercyclical, 244 in EU, 8 expansionary, 254–55 stabilization of, 250–52 fiscal prudence, 15 fiscal responsibility, 163 flexibility, 262–63, 269 flexible euro, 30–31, 272, 296–305, 307 cooperation needed for, 304–5 food prices, 169 forbearance, 130–31 forecasts, 307 foreclosure proposal, 180 foreign ownership, privatization and, 195 forestry, 81 France, 6, 14, 16, 114, 120, 141, 181–82, 331, 339–40, 343 banks of, 202, 203, 231, 373 corporate income tax in, 189–90 euro creation regretted in, 340 European Constitution referendum of, 58 extreme right in, xi growth in, 247 Freddie Mac, 91 Freefall (Stiglitz), 264, 335 free mobility of labor, xiv, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 142–44, 242 Friedman, Milton, 151, 152–53, 167, 339 full employment, 94–97, 379 G-20, 121 gas: import of, 230 from Russia, 37, 81, 93 Gates Foundation, 276 GDP-indexed bonds, 267 German bonds, 114, 323 German Council of Economic Experts, 179, 365 Germany, xxi, 14, 30, 65, 108, 114, 141, 181–82, 207, 220, 286, 307, 331, 343, 346, 374 austerity pushed by, 186, 232 banks of, 202, 203, 231–32, 373 costs to taxpayers of, 184 as creditor, 140, 187, 267 debt collection by, 117 debt in, 105 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 in departure from eurozone, 32, 292–93 as dependent on Russian gas, 37 desire to leave eurozone, 314 ECB criticized by, 164 EU economic practices controlled by, 17 euro creation regretted in, 340 exchange rate of, 254–55, 351 failure of, 13, 78–79 flexible exchange of, 304 GDP of, xviii, 92 in Great Depression, 187 growing poverty in, 79 growth of, 78, 106, 247 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 79, 333 inflation in, 42, 338, 358 internal solidarity of, 334 lack of alternative to euro seen by, 11 migrants to, 320–21, 334–35, 393 minimum wage in, 42, 120, 254 neoliberalism in, 10 and place-based debt, 136 productivity in, 71 programs designed by, 53, 60, 61, 202, 336, 338 reparations paid by, 187 reunification of, 6 rules as important to, 57, 241–42, 262 share of global employment in, 224 shrinking working-age population of, 70, 78–79 and Stability and Growth Pact, 245 and structural reforms, 19–20 “there is no alternative” and, 306, 311–12 trade surplus of, 117, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 “transfer union” rejected by, 22 US loans to, 187 victims blamed by, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309 wages constrained by, 41, 42–43 wages lowered in, 105, 333 global financial crisis, xi, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 17, 24, 67, 73, 75, 114, 124, 146, 148, 274, 364, 387 and central bank independence, 157–58 and confidence, 280 and cost of failure of financial institutions, 131 lessons of, 249 monetary policy in, 151 and need for structural reform, 214 originating in US, 65, 68, 79–80, 112, 128, 296, 302 globalization, 51, 321–23 and diminishing share of employment in advanced countries, 224 economic vs. political, xvii failures of, xvii Globalization and Its Discontents (Stig-litz), 234, 335, 369 global savings glut, 257 global secular stagnation, 120 global warming, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 gold, 257, 275, 277, 345 Goldman Sachs, 158, 366 gold standard, 148, 291, 347, 358 in Great Depression, xii, 100 goods: free movement of, 40, 143, 260–61 nontraded, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 traded, 102, 103, 216 Gordon, Robert, 251 governance, 157–63, 258–59 government spending, trade deficits and, 107–8 gravity principle, 124, 127–28 Great Depression, 42, 67, 105, 148, 149, 168, 313 Friedman on causes of, 151 gold standard in, xii, 100 Great Malaise, 264 Greece, 14, 30, 41, 64, 81, 100, 117, 123, 142, 160, 177, 265–66, 278, 307, 331, 343, 366, 367–68, 374–75, 386 austerity opposed by, 59, 60–62, 69–70, 207–8, 392 balance of payments, 219 banks in, 200–201, 228–29, 231, 270, 276, 367, 368 blaming of, 16, 17 bread in, 218, 230 capital controls in, 390 consumption tax and, 193–94 counterfactual scenario of, 80 current account surplus of, 287–88 and debt restructuring, 205–7 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 debt write-offs in, 291 decline in labor costs in, 56, 103 ECB’s cutting of funds to, 59 economic growth in, 215, 247 emigration from, 68–69 fiscal deficits in, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 GDP of, xviii, 183, 309 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 72 inherited debt in, 134 lack of faith in democracy in, 312–13 living standards in, 216 loans in, 127 loans to, 310 migrants and, 320–21 milk in, 218, 223, 230 new currency in, 291, 300 oligarchs in, 16, 227 output per working-age person in, 70–71 past downturns in, 235–36 pensions in, 16, 78, 188, 197–98, 226 pharmacies in, 218–20 population decline in, 69, 89 possible exit from eurozone of, 124, 197, 273, 274, 275 poverty in, 226, 261, 376 primary surplus of, 187–88, 312 privatization in, 55, 195–96 productivity in, 71, 342 programs imposed on, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 renewable energy in, 193, 229 social capital destroyed in, 78 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 and structural reforms, 20, 70, 188, 191 tax revenue in, 16, 142, 192, 227, 367–368 tools lacking for recovery of, 246 tourism in, 192, 286 trade deficits in, 81, 194, 216–17, 222, 285–86 unemployment in, xi, 71, 236, 267, 332, 338, 342 urgency in, 214–15 victim-blaming of, 309–11 wages in, 216–17 youth unemployment in, xi, 332 Greek bonds, 116, 126 interest rates on, 4, 114, 181–82, 201–2, 323 restructuring of, 206–7 green investments, 260 Greenspan, Alan, 251, 359, 363 Grexit, see Greece, possible exit from eurozone of grocery stores, 219 gross domestic product (GDP), xvii decline in, 3 measurement of, 341 Growth and Stability Pact, 87 hedge funds, 282, 363 highways, 41 Hitler, Adolf, 338, 358 Hochtief, 367–68 Hoover, Herbert, 18, 95 human capital, 78, 137 human rights, 44–45, 319 Hungary, 46, 331, 338 hysteresis, 270 Iceland, 44, 111, 307, 354–55 banks in, 91 capital controls in, 390 ideology, 308–9, 315–18 imports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98, 107 incentives, 158–59 inclusive capitalism, 317 income, unemployment and, 77 income tax, 45 Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, 376–377 Indonesia, 113, 230–31, 314, 350, 364, 378 industrial policies, 138–39, 301 and restructuring, 217, 221, 223–25 Industrial Revolution, 3, 224 industry, 89 inequality, 45, 72–73, 333 aggregate demand lowered by, 212 created by central banks, 154 ECB’s creation of, 154–55 economic performance affected by, xvii euro’s increasing of, xviii growth’s lowering of, 212 hurt by collective action, 338 increased by neoliberalism, xviii increase in, 64, 154–55 inequality in, 72, 212 as moral issue, xviii in Spain, 72, 212, 225–26 and tax harmonization, 260–61 and tax system, 191 inflation, 277, 290, 314, 388 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 bonds and, 161 central banks and, 153, 166–67 consequences of fixation on, 149–50, 151 costs of, 270 and debt monetization, 42 ECB and, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 255, 256, 266 and food prices, 169 in Germany, 42, 338, 358 interest rates and, 43–44 in late 1970s, 168 and natural rate hypothesis, 172–73 political decisions and, 146 inflation targeting, 157, 168–70, 364 information, 335 informational capital, 77 infrastructure, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 inheritance tax, 368 inherited debt, 134 innovation, 138 innovation economy, 317–18 inputs, 217 instability, xix institutions, 93, 247 poorly designed, 163–64 insurance, 355–356 deposit, see deposit insurance mutual, 247 unemployment, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 integration, 322 interest rates, 43–44, 86, 282, 345, 354 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 ECB’s determination of, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 and employment, 94 euro’s lowering of, 235 Fed’s lowering of, 150 on German bonds, 114 on Greek bonds, 4, 114, 181–82 on Italian bonds, 114 in late 1970s, 168 long-term, 151, 200 negative, 316, 348–49 quantitative easing and, 151, 170 short-term, 249 single, eurozone’s entailing of, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 on Spanish bonds, 114, 199 spread in, 332 stock prices increased by, 264 at zero lower bound, 106 intermediation, 258 internal devaluation, 98–109, 122, 126, 220, 255, 388 supply-side effects of, 99, 103–4 International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 79, 341 International Labor Organization, 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xv, xvii, 10, 17, 18, 55, 61, 65–66, 96, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 154, 234, 289, 309, 316, 337, 349, 350, 370, 371, 381 and Argentine debt, 206 conditions of, 201 creation of, 105 danger of high taxation warnings of, 190 debt reduction pushed by, 95 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 and failure to restore credit, 201 global imbalances discussed by, 252 and Greek debts, 205, 206, 310–11 on Greek surplus, 188 and Indonesian crisis, 230–31, 364 on inequality’s lowering of growth, 212–13 Ireland’s socialization of losses opposed by, 156–57 mistakes admitted by, 262, 312 on New Mediocre, 264 Portuguese bailout of, 178–79 tax measures of, 185 investment, 76–77, 111, 189, 217, 251, 264, 278, 367 confidence and, 94 divergence in, 136–38 in education, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 infrastructure in, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 lowered by disintermediation, 258 public, 99 real estate, 199 in renewable energy, 229–30 return on, 186, 245 stimulation of, 94 in technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), 393–94 invisible hand, xviii Iraq, refugees from, 320 Iraq War, 36, 37 Ireland, 14, 16, 44, 113, 114–15, 122, 178, 234, 296, 312, 331, 339–40, 343, 362 austerity opposed in, 207 debt of, 196 emigrants from, 68–69 GDP of, 18, 231 growth in, 64, 231, 247, 340 inherited debt in, 134 losses socialized in, 134, 156–57, 165 low debt in, 88 real estate bubble in, 108, 114–15, 126 surplus in, 17, 88 taxes in, 142–43, 376 trade deficits in, 119 unemployment in, 178 irrational exuberance, 14, 114, 116–17, 149, 334, 359 ISIS, 319 Italian bonds, 114, 165, 323 Italy, 6, 14, 16, 120, 125, 331, 343 austerity opposed in, 59 GDP per capita in, 352 growth in, 247 sovereign spread of, 200 Japan, 151, 333, 342 bubble in, 359 debt of, 202 growth in, 78 quantitative easing used by, 151, 359 shrinking working-age population of, 70 Java, unemployment on, 230 jobs gap, 120 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 228 Keynes, John Maynard, 118, 120, 172, 187, 351 convergence policy suggested by, 254 Keynesian economics, 64, 95, 108, 153, 253 King, Mervyn, 390 knowledge, 137, 138–39, 337–38 Kohl, Helmut, 6–7, 337 krona, 287 labor, marginal product of, 356 labor laws, 75 labor markets, 9, 74 friction in, 336 reforms of, 214, 221 labor movement, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 320 austerity and, 140 capital flows and, 135 see also migration labor rights, 56 Lamers, Karl, 314 Lancaster, Kelvin, 27 land tax, 191 Latin America, 10, 55, 95, 112, 202 lost decade in, 168 Latvia, 331, 346 GDP of, 92 law of diminishing returns, 40 learning by doing, 77 Lehman Brothers, 182 lender of last resort, 85, 362, 368 lending, 280, 380 discriminatory, 283 predatory, 274, 310 lending rates, 278 leverage, 102 Lichtenstein, 44 Lipsey, Richard, 27 liquidity, 201, 264, 278, 354 ECB’s expansion of, 256 lira, 14 Lithuania, 331 living standards, 68–70 loans: contraction of, 126–27, 246 nonperforming, 241 for small and medium-size businesses, 246–47 lobbyists, from financial sector, 132 location, 76 London interbank lending rate (LIBOR), 131, 355 Long-Term Refinancing Operation, 360–361 Lucas, Robert, xi Luxembourg, 6, 94, 142–43, 331, 343 as tax avoidance center, 228, 261 luxury cars, 265 Maastricht Treaty, xiii, 6, 87, 115, 146, 244, 298, 339, 340 macro-prudential regulations, 249 Malta, 331, 340 manufacturing, 89, 223–24 market failures, 48–49, 86, 148, 149, 335 rigidities, 101 tax policy’s correction of, 193 market fundamentalism, see neoliberalism market irrationality, 110, 125–26, 149 markets, limitations of, 10 Meade, James, 27 Medicaid, 91 medical care, 196 Medicare, 90, 91 Mellon, Andrew, 95 Memorandum of Agreement, 233–34 Merkel, Angela, 186 Mexico, 202, 369 bailout of, 113 in NAFTA, xiv Middle East, 321 migrant crisis, 44 migration, 26, 40, 68–69, 90, 125, 320–21, 334–35, 342, 356, 393 unemployment and, 69, 90, 135, 140 see also labor movement military power, 36–37 milk, 218, 223, 230 minimum wage, 42, 120, 254, 255, 351 mining, 257 Mississippi, GDP of, 92 Mitsotakis, Constantine, 377–78 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 377–78 Mitterrand, François, 6–7 monetarism, 167–68, 169, 364 monetary policy, 24, 85–86, 148, 264, 325, 345, 364 as allegedly technocratic, 146, 161–62 conservative theory of, 151, 153 in early 1980s US, 168, 210 flexibility of, 244 in global financial crisis, 151 political nature of, 146, 153–54 recent developments in theory of, 166–73 see also interest rates monetary union, see single currencies money laundering, 354 monopolists, privatization and, 194 moral hazard, 202, 203 mortgage rates, 170 mortgages, 302 multinational chains, 219 multinational development banks, 137 multinationals, 127, 223, 376 multipliers, 211–12, 248 balanced-budget, 188–90, 265 Mundell, Robert, 87 mutual insurance, 247 mutualization of debt, 242–43, 263 national development banks, 137–38 natural monopolies, 55 natural rate hypothesis, 172 negative shocks, 248 neoliberalism, xvi, 24–26, 33, 34, 98–99, 109, 257, 265, 332–33, 335, 354 on bubbles, 381 and capital flows, 28 and central bank independence, 162–63 in Germany, 10 inequality increased by, xviii low inflation desired by, 147 recent scholarship against, 24 Netherlands, 6, 44, 292, 331, 339–40, 343 European Constitution referendum of, 58 New Democracy Party, Greek, 61, 185, 377–78 New Mediocre, 264 New World, 148 New Zealand, 364 Nokia, 81, 234, 297 nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), 379–80 nonaccelerating wage rate of unemployment (NAWRU), 379–80 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 276 nonperforming loans, 241 nontraded goods sector, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), xiv North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 196 Norway, 12, 44, 307 referendum on joining EU, 58 nuclear deterrence, 38 Obama, Barack, 319 oil, import of, 230 oil firms, 36 oil prices, 89, 168, 259, 359 oligarchs: in Greece, 16, 227 in Russia, 280 optimal currency area, 345 output, 70–71, 111 after recessions, 76 Outright Monetary Transactions program, 361 overregulate, 132 Oxfam, 72 panic of 1907, 147 Papandreou, Andreas, 366 Papandreou, George, xiv, 60–61, 184, 185, 220, 221, 226–27, 309, 312, 366, 373 reform of banks suggested by, 229 paradox of thrift, 120 peace, 34 pensions, 9, 16, 78, 177, 188, 197–98, 226, 276, 370 People’s Party, Portugal, 392 periphery, 14, 32, 171, 200, 296, 301, 318 see also specific countries peseta, 14 pharmacies, 218–20 Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), 132 physical capital, 77–78 Pinochet, Augusto, 152–53 place-based debt, 134, 242 Pleios, George, 377 Poland, 46, 333, 339 assistance to, 243 in Iraq War, 37 police, 41 political integration, xvi, 34, 35 economic integration vs., 51–57 politics, economics and, 308–18 pollution, 260 populism, xx Portugal, 14, 16, 64, 177, 178, 331, 343, 346 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315, 332, 392 GDP of, 92 IMF bailout of, 178–79 loans in, 127 poverty in, 261 sovereign spread of, 200 Portuguese bonds, 179 POSCO, 55 pound, 287, 335, 346 poverty, 72 in Greece, 226, 261 in Portugal, 261 in Spain, 261 predatory lending, 274, 310 present discount value, 343 Price of Inequality, The (Stiglitz), 154 prices, 19, 24 adjustment of, 48, 338, 361 price stability, 161 primary deficit, 188, 389 primary surpluses, 187–88 private austerity, 126–27, 241–42 private sector involvement, 113 privatization, 55, 194–96, 369 production costs, 39, 43, 50 production function, 343 productivity, 71, 332, 348 in manufacturing, 223–24 after recessions, 76–77 programs, 17–18 Germany’s design of, 53, 60, 61, 187–88, 205, 336, 338 imposed on Greece, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 of Troika, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 346, 366, 379, 392 progressive automatic stabilizers, 244 progressive taxes, 248 property rights, 24 property taxes, 192–93, 227 public entities, 195 public goods, 40, 337–38 quantitative easing (QE), 151, 164, 165–66, 170–72, 264, 359, 361, 386 railroads, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 168, 209 real estate bubble, 25, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 126, 148, 172, 250, 301, 302 cause of, 198 real estate investment, 199 real exchange rate, 105–6, 215–16 recessions, recovery from, 94–95 recovery, 76 reform, 75 theories of, 27–28 regulations, 24, 149, 152, 162, 250, 354, 355–356, 378 and Bush administration, 250–51 common, 241 corporate opposition to, xvi difficulties in, 132–33 of finance, xix forbearance on, 130–31 importance of, 152–53 macro-prudential, 249 in race to bottom, 131–34 Reinhardt, Carmen, 210 renewable energy, 193, 229–30 Republican Party, US, 319 research and development (R&D), 77, 138, 217, 251, 317–18 Ricardo, David, 40, 41 risk, 104, 153, 285 excessive, 250 risk markets, 27 Rogoff, Kenneth, 210 Romania, 46, 331, 338 Royal Bank of Scotland, 355 rules, 57, 241–42, 262, 296 Russia, 36, 264, 296 containment of, 318 economic rents in, 280 gas from, 37, 81, 93, 378 safety nets, 99, 141, 223 Samaras, Antonis, 61, 309, 377 savings, 120 global, 257 savings and loan crisis, 360 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 57, 220, 314, 317 Schengen area, 44 schools, 41, 196 Schröeder, Gerhard, 254 self-regulation, 131, 159 service sector, 224 shadow banking system, 133 shareholder capitalism, 21 Shiller, Rob, 132, 359 shipping taxes, 227, 228 short-termism, 77, 258–59 Silicon Valley, 224 silver, 275, 277 single currencies: conflicts and, 38 as entailing fixed exchange rates, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 external imbalances and, 97–98 and financial crises, 110–18 integration and, 45–46, 50 interest rates and, 8, 86, 87–88, 92, 93, 94 Mundell’s work on, 87 requirements for, 5, 52–53, 88–89, 92–94, 97–98 and similarities among countries, 15 trade integration vs., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.


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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

With more information at their fingertips, patients can truly be in the driving seat.”96 As we reviewed in Chapter 7, we will get away from keyboards in the office, also known as “death by a thousand clicks,” and replace them with computer processing of natural language into notes.98–100 This sort of data, combined with a machine-learning powered app to turn spoken words into notes, will truly revolutionize the doctor’s visit of the future—assuming, of course, that we need the routine visits at all. Doctors Disintermediated? We’ve already seen some examples of how physicians react to the threat of being marginalized, along with their general reluctance to adapt to new technology. Now we get into the “Second Machine Age”101 question as to whether the new digital landscape will reboot the need for doctors and health professionals.

Source: Adapted from “Physician Shortages to Worsen Without Increases in Residency Training,” American Association of Medical Colleges, 2014, https://www.aamc.org/download/153160/data/physician_shortages_to_worsen_without_increases_in_residency_tr.pdf. Smartphone Medicine to the Rescue? Unfortunately, most physicians don’t get it yet and are somewhat vulnerable to being marginalized or disintermediated. They haven’t gone digital. Jay Parkinson, who originated and runs a progressive primary care physician practice, wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve hired two generations of doctors—one from my parents’ generation and one from my own. The differences are striking. One feels right at home, empowered and enabled, and the other thinks she’s going to break something.

It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer.”102 The Economist weighed in on this too: “The machines are not just cleverer, but they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale.”153 But smart doctors need not feel threatened, for their occupation is secure. Letting go and competing on embracing digital medicine may turn out to be the best way to prevent disintermediation and disillusionment in the long run. SECTION THREE The Impact Chapter 10 The Edifice Complex “Start delivering healthcare farther and farther from the hospital setting and even out of doctors’ offices.” —GEORGE HALVORSON, FORMER CEO OF KAISER PERMANENTE1 “The hospital of the future will not be a hospital at all.”


Mastering Private Equity by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl, Bowen White

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, book value, business process, buy low sell high, capital controls, carbon credits, carried interest, clean tech, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, currency risk, deal flow, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, fixed income, high net worth, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, junk bonds, Lean Startup, low interest rates, market clearing, Michael Milken, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty

Closing In summary, the picture that is emerging is one of a more diverse PE model: institutional investors are attempting more direct investments in larger, lower risk transactions, a trend that has been observed for some time in real estate and infrastructure investing. This may be the start of the commoditization of the PE asset class that, in line with other markets, is expected to see more disintermediation. For PE’s bread and butter transactions, LPs are negotiating and receiving an increasing proportion of co-investments, thereby lowering fees and regaining some control over the allocation process. The co- and direct investing trend is a relatively recent one, so it remains to be seen if the move into a partial GP role will achieve the desired returns for its LPs.

Relevant Case Studies from Private Equity in Action—Case Studies from Developed and Emerging Markets Case #2: Going Direct: The Case of Teachers’ Private Capital Case #4: Hitting the Target: Optimizing a Private Equity Portfolio with the Partners Group Case #19: Asian Private Equity: A Family Office’s Quest for Return References and Additional Reading Alpinvest (2014) The Virtue of Co-Investments, White Paper 2014/2. Coller Capital (2016–17) Global Private Equity Barometer, Winter http://www.collercapital.com/Uploaded/Documents//Publications/2016/Coller_Capital_Winter_Barometer_2016.pdf. Fang, Lily, Ivashina, Victoria and Lerner, Josh (2013) The Disintermediation of Financial Markets: Direct Investing in Private Equity, Journal of Financial Economics, 116(1 April): 160–178. State of Wisconsin Investment Board (2013) Private Equity Co-Investments: Historical Performance and Strategy Opportunities, quoted in: Privcap Reports, The Co-investment Era Q2/2014. www.privcap.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/coinvestment_final_5.14.14.pdf.

Secondly, by creating more transparency around the investment process and economic model of PE, some power in the limited partner (LP)–GP relationship has moved back to the former, or at least to the larger LPs. Not only have they renegotiated fees and expense allocation practices but they have also moved aggressively into co-investments and, although from a low base, independent direct investments. In effect, PE is now experiencing the first signs of commoditization and disintermediation characteristic for a mature market with standardized products. How Does the Industry Respond? The question therefore is can the industry maintain its entrepreneurial spirit of earlier years and the returns associated with it? How will GPs react to the pressures on their business model?


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

When interest rates rose in an overheating economy—or were raised by the Fed to forestall inflation—depositors put their money elsewhere because banks could not raise their own rates under Regulation Q. This diversion of funds was known as disintermediation, and the result was a credit crunch as bank lending to businesses would dry up. Wriston realized that the Fed now feared disintermediation and the economy needed him as much as he needed the economy. But not all his competitors were in favor of the negotiable CD. Unlike Wriston, they feared challenging the Federal Reserve and were also concerned with a possible rate war, in which banks would keep raising rates competitively to attract depositors.

There were still restrictions on the rates paid, and the minimum size of a CD was $100,000, but bank credit increased far faster than the economy in these years, lending rising from $30 billion to $200 billion between 1962 and 1965. By the mid-1960s, new negotiable CDs were not adequate to ward off likely disintermediation and resulting credit crunches. Spending on the Vietnam War was pushing the federal budget into deficit at a time when the economy was growing strongly, new social programs were under way, and U.S. business was booming. The negotiable CDs actually contributed to higher inflation and interest rates, a fact that was not well recognized by either policymakers or economists.

Inflation kept rising, doubling in 1966, to 3.5 percent. The Federal Reserve, eager to staunch inflation, raised its discount rate sharply to suppress the ongoing business lending. When the banks raised rates to the maximum allowed to be paid even on the negotiable CDs, and market rates went still higher, disintermediation again began and a credit crunch was unavoidable. Large depositors fled the banks, and placed their money in commercial paper or in overseas investments. The volume of CDs shrank rapidly. Corporate lending and mortgage underwriting dried up, and the economy slowed down. A recession seemed likely.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

In the old days, Allie probably would have worked for someone like the Everleigh sisters, who paid their girls handsomely but took enough off the top to make themselves truly rich. The Internet let Allie be her own madam and accumulate the riches for herself. Much has been said of the Internet’s awesome ability to “disintermediate”—to cut out the agent or middleman—in industries like travel, real estate, insurance, and the sale of stocks and bonds. But it is hard to think of a market more naturally suited to disintermediation than high-end prostitution. The downside was that Allie had no one but herself to screen potential clients and ensure they wouldn’t beat her up or rip her off. She hit upon a solution that was as simple as it was smart.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

After all, major credit card companies don’t put all their eggs in the same basket, either. In Zopa, money moves from Person A to Person C (without the need for Big Bank B in the middle). This path follows the basic economic law of disintermediation, the removal of middlemen from a process or supply chain to create more efficient markets. But it’s not the concept of the efficiency behind disintermediation that is important in collaborative lifestyles. It’s the significant shift the transparency creates in generating new levels of peer-to-peer trust, even between strangers. “Ten years ago some people thought it would be mad to send money to someone in the post in the expectation that they would receive a parcel in return, but that collaboration led to the development of the largest retailer in the world,” current CEO Giles Andrews says.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

tab=2&code=DNK (accessed on June 26, 2019). 39. “Quality of Life Rankings by Country 2019,” Numbeo, https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp (accessed on June 26, 2019). Chapter Five COMMERCIAL TRANSFORMATION 1. Tom Goodwin, “In the Age of Disintermediation the Battle Is All for the Customer Interface,” Techcrunch, March 3, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/ (accessed on June 26, 2019). 2. “Employment by Major Industry Sector,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm (accessed June 26, 2019). 3. Jordan Weissmann, “How Wall Street Devoured Corporate America,” The Atlantic,, March 5, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/how-wall-street-devoured-corporate-america/273732/ (accessed June 26, 2019); and Erin Duffin, “Corporate Profits in the United States in 2018, by Industry,” Statista.com, June 26, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/222122/us-corporate-profits-by-industry/ (accessed June 26, 2019). 4.


pages: 423 words: 149,033

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

The ITC e-Choupal Story: Profitable Rural Transformation 339 The Samyojak The commission agents earned profit from two sources. The first was through provision of value-added logistical services that substituted for the lack of rural infrastructure. The second was by blocking information flow and market signals on the trading transactions. Complete disintermediation would result in the loss of a legitimate and essential service in the rural context. The goal was selective disintermediation so that agents would participate, but only as providers of essential services, not as principals in a trading transaction. In this incarnation, the agent was christened the samyojak. The samyojak’s collaboration began right from the selection of the first sanchalaks.

Farmers mentioned simple touches such as a shaded area with chairs to await their paperwork as indicators of ITC’s respect for them and their produce. Even though intangible in the short term, the self-confidence created by the professional treatment is changing the way farmers conduct themselves. Sanchalaks and even a commission agent noted this change in farmer attitudes. ITC Gains ■ Disintermediation savings. The commissions paid to the agents were not excessive, but the true cost of intermediation, including the rent seeking, was between 2.5 percent and 3 percent of procurement costs. A 0.5 percent commission to the sanchalak has replaced this. ■ Freight costs. Direct reimbursement of transport costs to the farmer is estimated to be half of what ITC used to pay the commission agents for transport to their factory


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Chircu and Robert J. Kauffman (1998), “Analyzing market transformation in the presence of Internet-driven disintermediation: The case of online travel reservation providers,” Management Information Systems Research Center, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download? doi=10.1.1.196.4820&rep=rep1&type=pdf. in some cases—advertising: Tim Williams (3 Jun 2013), “The disintermediation of the advertising agency business,” LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130603205503-2042198-the-disintermediation-of-the-agency-business. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (2013), The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Knopf, http://www.newdigitalage.com.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Electronic communication networks and the widespread use of the Internet revolutionized financial trade between firms, between investors and firms, between sellers and buyers, and, ultimately, the stock exchange markets.127 One major consequence of the transformation of finance was the global integration of financial markets, as analyzed above in this chapter. Another major development was the process of financial disintermediation; that is, the direct relationships between investors and securities markets, bypassing traditional brokerage firms, on the basis of electronic communication networks (ECNs). While Internet technology was crucial in allowing this trend to happen, a major institutional change made possible electronic trading.

The on-line brokerage industry in the US in 1999 had about 9.7 million accounts, three times the number in 1997, with customers’ assets of nearly half a trillion dollars – a figure that is likely to be dwarfed in the early twenty-first century. Electronic trading quickly spread from stocks to bonds. In November 1999, the city of Pittsburgh used the opportunity of electronic disintermediation to offer $55 million worth of municipal bonds directly to institutional investors over the Internet, thus bypassing Wall Street. This was the first time municipal bonds were directly sold electronically. The entry of electronic trading into the $13.7 trillion bond market is likely to change financial markets even further.

On the other hand, if there is trust in the institutions underlying the market, then expectations of the potential future value of a future stock will increase its value. In the case of Russia, neither trust nor expectations were inducers of value in 1999. In the case of Amazon, in spite of losing money, the institutional environment of the new economy (essentially characterized by deregulation and disintermediation) had won the approval and trust of investors. And expectations were high on the ability of the on-line selling pioneer to move into e-commerce beyond books. This is why, for firms that bring together a “new economy” flavor with traditional virtues in profit-making and corporate respectability, the rewards are the highest, as shown in Exhibit one.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

However, it’s a tremendous opportunity for business leaders who are looking to invent new disruptive business models, or entrepreneurs looking to invent new digital businesses. Netflix is a classic example of this awareness and opportunism: first identifying the low storage cost and high transportability of DVDs via the postal system, then capitalizing on the improved storage and transportability of streaming films over the internet. Where’s Blockbuster today? Disintermediated by data. The only store I have seen in the past five years is in Anchorage, Alaska, where internet access is still unavailable or spotty for some in the surrounding area. New Business Models and Profitability The long-term value of IT with respect to business investments lies not in the features and functions of a proposed technology or solution, but in the value of the information that the technology or solution creates to drive new business models and profitability.

Call it “global business climate change.” This affects information ecosystems to the extent that these changes must be anticipated by any information vision. No longer can organizations afford merely to sense and respond to worldwide or industry changes brought about by widespread digitalization, business model disruption, and disintermediation, nor by the resulting orders of magnitude increases in the volume, variety, and velocity of information. In biological ecosystems, the concept of succession describes wholesale changes to an ecosystem based on major disturbances. To be part of that succession (rather than part of the extinction that often follows), a vision for IAM must either anticipate these disturbances, be flexible enough to handle any disturbances, or recognize your intention to create such disturbances.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

These cash flows appear in its income statement in the form of revenues and expenses. The difference, or spread, between the two constitutes the intermediary’s earnings. The intermediary’s balance sheet and income statement thus function as holding tanks for both parties – those who have surplus capital and those who need it: Today’s economy is experiencing increasing disintermediation, characterised by the following phenomena: more companies are obtaining financing directly from capital markets; and more companies and individuals are investing directly in capital markets. When capital markets are underdeveloped, an economy functions primarily on debt financing. Conversely, when capital markets are sufficiently well developed, companies are no longer restricted to debt, and they can then choose to increase their equity financing.

Intermediation gives way to the brokerage function, and the business model of financial institutions evolves towards the placement of companies’ securities directly with investors. In this economic model, bank loans are extended primarily to households in the form of consumer credit, mortgage loans, etc., as well as to small enterprises that do not have access to the capital markets. The growing disintermediation has forced banks and other financial intermediaries to align their rates (which are the rates that they offer on deposits or charge on loans) with market rates. Slowly but surely, market forces tend to pervade all types of financial instruments. For example, with the rise of the commercial paper market, banks regularly index short-term loans on money-market rates.

Unlike conventional bank loans, debt securities can be traded on secondary markets (stock exchanges, money markets, mortgage markets and interbank markets), but their logic is the same and all the reasoning presented in this chapter also applies for bank loans. Debt securities are bonds, commercial paper, Treasury bills and notes, certificates of deposit and mortgage-backed bonds or mortgage bonds. Furthermore, the current trend is to securitise loans to make them negotiable. Disintermediation was not the only factor fuelling the growth of bond markets. The increasing difficulty of obtaining bank loans was another, as banks realised that the interest margin on such loans did not offer sufficient return on equity. This pushed companies to turn to bond markets to raise the funds that banks had become reluctant to advance.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The services pay less in royalties than she would have received from full album sales. Her most ardent fans purchased her album. The strategy resulted in over 1.2 million record sales in its first week, edging out Ed Sheeran’s for the strongest sales of any album in 2017.22 Technology is rapidly facilitating “disintermediation,” enabling musicians to produce, record, publish, and distribute their own music without the need of a record label. Companies such as Kobalt are emerging to help independent artists publish music and collect royalties. And services such as DistroKid enable artists to upload their music to streaming services and online stores.

But the seven key economic lessons for understanding the music business are likely to endure and continue to be helpful for understanding developments in the industry. Supply, demand, and all that jazz of human desire for fair treatment and government policy relating to copyright and scalping, for example, will always play a central role in determining the direction of the music business. Although technology will enable further disintermediation, and provide new avenues for artists to create, market, and distribute their music, the music industry will likely continue to be dominated by a relatively small number of superstars given the scale of the market, the uniqueness of performers, and the role of networks in determining popularity.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Investor enthusiasm has spawned a growing list of investment vehicles dedicated to fintech, where bullish observers see lofty growth potential in cashless payments. Not everyone welcomes newcomers. Banks trapped in outdated technology face massive costs to convert their legacy systems. If customers bolt for fintech options, money will flow out of traditional banks, draining deposits that underpin lending capacity. By luring money away, disintermediation could put banks out of business. Widespread failures would strain a financial system that barely survived the global financial crisis. A more profound threat to banks may come from the very source of their ability to function. Aware that money has begun departing their jurisdiction for crypto or fintech alternatives, central banks are contemplating the most dramatic innovation yet.

They retain a small amount of these deposits in liquid assets and lend the rest in the expectation that depositors will never claim more than a fraction of their assets. This arrangement fuels the fractional reserve banking system. Demand deposits become long-term loans that banks record as assets. In this scenario, CBDCs create two serious risks to financial stability. The first is disintermediation as depositors move funds from commercial banks to central banks. Survival would mean converting banks into financial institutions that replace low-cost deposits with long-term borrowing at market rates to finance their long-term loans and mortgages, squeezing if not eradicating their profits.


The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

To put this simply, HDFC Bank has excelled at providing steady customer service using clever technology and well-drilled standard operating processes. Such customer service has, in turn, helped the bank maintain a high CASA ratio. The bank has then lent these funds judiciously, ensuring that its NPAs remain low. With financial technology players trying to disintermediate banks, HDFC Bank’s strong technological platform and data-driven insights into the historical behaviour of its large customer base are key strategic assets. A prime example of how the bank leveraged these assets is the ten-second, pre-approved personal loan for existing customers, the first of its kind, launched in 2015.

Although numerous case studies have been written on GCMMF, the following appear to be the dominant factors at the core of this cooperative’s success: (a) its fifty-year-old brand with its distinctive imagery of the little girl in the red polka-dotted dress; (b) the idea of a fair deal for the small farmer and the linked idea of the disintermediation of the unfair middleman; and (c) the spirit of Indian nationalism in an industry dominated by globe-girdling for-profit corporates. A more prosaic but equally effective example of architecture would be the way India’s largest car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki, is tied up in a common architecture with its suppliers.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

Working Paper RHS-06-027. Social Science Research Network, Rochester. SSRN-id929845, downloadable at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=825687 (accessed 25 May 2016). Goodwin, Tom. 2015. ‘The Battle Is for the Customer Interface’. TechCrunch. 3 March. http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-allfor-the-customer-interface (accessed 25 May 2016). Gordon, Robert. 2000. ‘Interpreting the “One Big Wave” in US Long-Term Productivity Growth’. NBER Working Paper 7752. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w7752 (accessed 25 May 2016). Greenspan, Alan. 1996.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The sole purpose is to provide adequate transparency for the proper exercise of the U.S. government’s duty to maintain functioning capital markets which constitute part of the critical national security infrastructure. … The prime brokers and clearing banks … could be quickly identified and concentration risk in the regulated sector could be ascertained. The past 30 years have witnessed the disintermediation of the regulated financial sector by the less regulated and non-regulated sectors. … Every step in this evolution … has involved a diminution in transparency and an increase in risk. … When derivatives technology drives an exponential increase in the quantum of risk, the risk-increasing effects of scaling and complexity in a non-linear critical system dominate the risk-reducing effects. … A problem cannot be resolved unless the dimensions of the problem are known to some extent.

These reasons had in part to do with the unfairness of not giving depositors a decent return on their money while Wall Street bankers used easy money to enrich themselves with leveraged stock buybacks. Stein was subtler. He saw inside the machine. Stein knew that asset swaps—an exchange of junk collateral for good collateral so the exchanging party could pledge good collateral in another deal—were adding hidden leverage. He understood that increased regulation was driving disintermediation—so-called shadow banking—making it worse than what collapsed in 2008. He grasped that derivatives risk was in gross notional values, not net. This was clear from his speeches and writings. Stein saw the bubble dynamics. Then he was gone. No one left on the FOMC seemed to see what Stein saw. My question to Jon was straightforward.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The process of performing a wire transfer, opening a bank account, or setting up a will has remained unchanged.” Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, expands on this idea: “My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue.” Charlie forecasts the elimination of commissions for the sale of stocks or bonds, since they can be transferred on the ledger. He imagines that contracts can also be embedded on the ledger, including proof of ownership for hard assets like land.

Much as the Internet was a confusing space largely populated by technologists prior to the creation of the World Wide Web, once the blockchain has safer and more user-friendly wallets, trading platforms, and pricing indexes, its use will expand beyond those who are very adept technologically. As blockchain technology takes off, its impact will be like that of the sharing economy and other forces of digital disintermediation: it will force a rewrite of the compact between corporation, citizen, and government. It is bringing frontier economies onto the global playing field while destroying middlemen and traditional authorities. Amid his enthusiasm, Charlie still cautions, “The unknown unknowns of an experiment like this are massive.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Second, the nature of sound money, as explained earlier, lies precisely in the fact that no human is able to control it, and hence, a predictable immutable algorithm is uniquely suited for this task. Having thought of this question for years, in no other avenue of business can I find a similar process that is at once so important as to be worth the extra costs for disintermediation, as well as being so transparently simple that removing all human discretion would be a massive advantage. An analogy with the automobile is instructive here. In 1885, when Karl Benz added an internal combustion engine to a carriage to produce the first autonomously powered vehicle, the express purpose of that move was to remove horses from carriages and free people from having to constantly deal with horse excrement.

There cannot be wide adoption of blockchain technology in industries reliant on trust in intermediaries, because the mere presence of intermediaries makes all the costs associated with running a blockchain superfluous. Any application of blockchain technology will only make commercial sense if its operation is reliant on the use of electronic cash, and only if electronic cash's disintermediation provides economic benefits outweighing the use of regular currencies and payment channels. Good engineering begins with a clear problem and attempts to find the optimal solution for it. An optimal solution not only solves the problem, but by definition does not contain within it any irrelevant or superfluous excess.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

He cited how programmatic ad buying, run by machine algorithms that target desired audiences, “may be able to cut out the agency. The agency/client/marketing model is being challenged now the way it has never been challenged before, based not only on technology potentially disintermediating . . . but when you break down the trust barrier,” because the client doesn’t know how its money is being spent, the disintermediation accelerates. So what stance, an executive asked, should we take with clients? “I harken back to my baseball days: get a cup,” Kassan answered. To protect MediaLink, their task is to serve as “a bridge between the buyer and the seller.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

With their limited capital, the specialists were not willing to wait for the process to unfold, and their increasingly aggressive offers ended up backfiring. Prices dropped so violently that many potential buyers started to wonder what was happening and backed off completely. The root dynamic was what I call time disintermediation—the time frame for being able to do transactions in the futures market was substantially different from the time frame in the the equity market, yet these two markets had been linked together through market arbitrageurs. We could see the effect on our trading floor. One of our institutional clients in Boston was bullish on IBM and had discussed strategies for adding more of the stock to his substantial portfolio.

., 165, 189, 243 Shiller, Robert, 179 Shopkorn, Stan, 181 Shuttle disasters, 159–161 Simon, Jim, 165 Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX), Osaka Exchange (matched positions), 39 Smith Barney, 75 Solow, Robert, 208–209 Soros, George, 179–180 Speculative traders, economic service, 219 Spread trades, holding periods, 83 Standard & Poor’s (S&P) futures contracts, sale, 20 Statistical arbitrage concept, 194 emergence, 182–188 origination, 184 traders, 191–192 Statistics, objective, 134–135 Stavis, Rob, 53, 59, 70–80, 84 Stock clearance/finance, 27–28 StockGeneration, web site, 168 Stock market crash (1929), 137 Stock market crash (1987), 1–2 demons, 7 impact/meditation, 18–20 mechanism, understanding, 28 meltdown, physics, 25–30 postmortem, 13–14 warning signs, 16–18 Strauss, Thomas, 196 resignation, 199 STRIPS, 40–41 Sunbeam, restatements/liability, 135 SuperDOT, linkage, 189 Swap maturity/rate level, interaction, 47 Systems, interactive complexity, 155 Takeovers, impact, 15–16 Tartaglia, Nunzio, 187–189 Thorp, Ed, 188 Three Mile Island, 159 safety systems, dangers, 147–150 Tight coupling, 143 accidents, 154–157 complexity, combination, 256 failure, cascade, 145–146 interactive complexity, relationship, 157–159 origination, 144–145 reduction, 260 Tilley, Jim, 8–9, 46 Time disintermediation, 21 Toevs, Alden, 9 Too big to fail doctrine, 113 Top-down approach, 167 Travelers brokerage unit, 75 Citigroup merger, 125, 140 Shearson American Express, merger, 78 Tribeca Investments, 204 Tulip mania, 174–177 Turnover, demand satisfaction, 173 Two-plus model, 85–86 U.K. tax code, change (1997), 117, 118 Ukraine Radiological Institute, 163 Unanticipated events, 239 Uncertainty, implications, 257 Uncertainty Principle, 223–227 behavioral analogue, 226 Undecidability Theorem, 223–224 Underwriting, profitability, 33–34 Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), 48 Epstein, impact, 48–49 Goldstein, impact, 116–118 LTCM impact, 118–120 LTCM losses, 113–116, 120 monetary loss, 49 Swiss Bank Corporation, merger, 49 Unwind/unrealized losses, 68 275 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 276 INDEX U.S. arbitrage, losses, 100 U.S. swap market, 92 U.S.


pages: 426 words: 115,150

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Treasury bonds, when they are newly issued, can be bought directly from the Federal Reserve, with no commissions whatsoever, through a program called Treasury Direct. This cuts out the middleman: no broker, no added brokerage house fees. Cutting out the middleman by buying bonds directly is called “disintermediation”; it is the act of buying a given security, such as a treasury bond, yourself rather than investing your money in an intermediary (such as a fund, bank or other institution) that will turn around and put it into the same investments while taking a big chunk for itself. You can also buy existing treasury bonds through a broker (for a minimal fee).

See Consumer Price Index (CPI) craigslist credit cards crossover point cultural perspective of money cushion for emergencies Dacyczyn, Amy and Jim daily decompression daily money log sample of Dalai Lama Danko, William D. debt denial about getting out of levels of consumer and national See also liabilities Debtors Anonymous decompression, daily Depression, The diet analogy Diets Don’t Work (Schwartz) discernment discount buying discrimination vs. recrimination disintermediation do it yourself investment management job expenditures and learn basic living skills Dominguez, Joe Dovey, Catherine Downshifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track (Saltzman) dreams durability, in purchases earnings. See income earth. See planet earth Ebay Ecks, Fred Ecological Footprint economic growth consumerism and full employment doctrine and limits to as recipe for well-being education, college Ehrlich, Paul emergencies, cushion for emotional/psychological perspective of money employment full, doctrine of paid part-time unpaid See also work empowerment end-of-month balancing enjoyment of material world enough components of concept of for everyone and then some entertainment environment.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

They were intermediates between the handset makers and the users: they controlled pricing of devices and data contracts, the timing of software updates, device branding, everything. Within Nokia and other handset makers, the thinking had become more about keeping the carriers happy than delighting the customers who would make calls. To Jobs, they were both ripe for disintermediation. The deal that he negotiated with Cingular (soon to be renamed AT&T) was unprecedented in the history of mobile networks: Apple would control the iPhone’s branding and marketing and the timing of software updates. It was the expression of Jobs’s desire to control the presentation of every item he sold – you can’t let just anyone sell your ties.

There are only companies that have good fast decisions.’1 Where Apple hadn’t heard of Google 13 years before, now it had gone from having a common cause against Microsoft to being just a business acquaintance, and frequent opponent; Apple and Microsoft bid together against Google for patents covering the mobile business. Apple was seeking to disintermediate Google from search with the cloud-based voice search of its upcoming iPhone. And they were constantly niggling each other in smartphones and tablets. Even so, by September 2011 the majority of mobile search still came from iPhones, according to Google testimony at the US Senate. Apple had changed.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

It was also a category of goods that would lend itself well to the online medium. Conceivably, one could have in a single place listings of every work of original art available for sale in the world and could search by artist, medium, subject, or any other characteristic. What the partners were looking for were categories that were ripe for “disintermediation”—removing a middle layer in the distribution chain. In this case, that layer was the twelve thousand or so art galleries in the country. “Huge market,” Kagle insisted again. “All kinds of bad selling tactics there. Ugliness.” It was ripe for the introduction of a more efficient form of matching buyers with the art they sought.

Chicago’s weather didn’t increase its allure, either. “What scares me about this market,” Beirne said, “is kind of the same thing on PlanetRx. When you don’t have a major distributor, you don’t have a major player, you have this real big fragmented industry. You think, Okay, it’s a great opportunity to go in and disintermediate all this bullshit.” Kagle was a one-voice chorus. “Right!” “Then again,” Beirne continued, “there’s a bunch of quirks around traditional, small little nichey businesses like this. They operate that way for a reason.” So maybe what seemed to be a large opportunity was illusory. Undeterred, Kagle returned to Lederer.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

As the use of drones and other robotic technologies becomes more commonplace, we can expect them to be leveraged by all members of society, for both good and ill. While 9/11 1.0 was about human beings’ seizing aircraft and flying them into occupied buildings for terrorist effect, 9/11 2.0 makes it possible to disintermediate the humans and use robots in their stead. We, Robot In the future, I’m sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them. RODNEY BROOKS Throughout the history of film and television, we’ve seen robots presented in a variety of lights.

Those who find such a future implausible need only look at the strides already made with synthetic biology and engineered drugs. E. coli bacteria have been genetically engineered and reprogrammed to produce THC (the active ingredient in cannabis), and others have been able to coax baker’s yeast into making LSD and opium. Rapidly advancing changes in digital biology may also disintermediate existing incumbents in the narcotics trade. Just as Microsoft took the personal PC away from IBM, and Apple took the mobile phone from Nokia and BlackBerry, it may be a student at MIT who obviates the need for a Colombia-based Pablo Escobar of tomorrow. Moreover, if Craig Venter is right and we will all have bio-printers at home, why not just print my own THC or oxycodone—evaporating billions in profits from legacy players and creating new leaders in the bio-cartels of tomorrow.

The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.” Though our data pay for Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook today, we could just as easily support Internet companies whose goal was to store as little personal data of ours as possible, in exchange for minute sums of cash. Why not just disintermediate the middle man altogether for a much more logical system? We would become Facebook’s and Google’s clients for a dollar a month and could go on to enjoy our lives. Unfortunately today, just as is the case with software vendors, the incentives are misaligned from a public safety and security perspective.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Salptre became uneconomic overnight, and you can see trains that were carrying loads of it to the port which were simply abandoned mid-journey. Today’s disruption is caused by the digital revolution – the internet, in short – and it is unusual in that it is affecting so many industries simultaneously. During the dotcom boom and bust at the turn of the century there was much talk of companies being “disintermediated” by the internet, and a continuing example of that is the publishing industry, where publishers no longer dictate whose books get read because Amazon has enabled authors to publish themselves. Kodak The poster child of digital disruption is Kodak. At its peak in the late 1980s it employed 145,000 people and had annual sales of $19bn.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Given the number of such central institutions that have evolved over time, and attached themselves like barnacles to the ship of civilization, a technology this radically innovative is going to have political effects so profound I am confident that the pace of social change is only going to quicken when those centralized institutions (including various government functions) find themselves disintermediated. Will government slip into a naked rearguard action, as with taxis moving to outlaw Uber? Or will the people remember in time that these institutions were not sent to us from a burning bush, that we created them in order to fulfill functions, and that those functions can now be done within cryptotechnology at a tiny fraction of the price, and without the risk of centralized institutions getting captured?


pages: 172 words: 46,104

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Kvamme, sure that Funny or Die would trump in its over-the-top distribution and bare-bones economics the $2-million-an-episode South Park with its cumbersome and costly Viacom–Comedy Central relationship (the South Park creators had just negotiated a 50/50 deal to split digital profits with Viacom, which had committed to handling advertising), got up and went to the whiteboard and brusquely erased “media companies” on the triangle, replacing it with just “consumer”—emphasizing this new, disintermediated world. The Google guys were even more direct, pointing out, with some impatience, that there was quite some lack of understanding in the room about the nature of the revolution that was under way. It was Andreessen, whose word alone would come nearly to have the power to create tech success, who was perhaps most daunting and in the end most frightening—signaling how far apart the two sides were, and how precarious the television business suddenly seemed.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

If Tom Peters discovered that it is possible to sell management theory to the masses, Tom Friedman and company discovered that it is possible to reach the lucrative business market through bypassing the conventional suppliers, the business schools, and consultancies. To mimic the language of the industry itself: first Tom Peters turned a B-to-B business into a B-to-C one, then a new generation of entrepreneurs disintermediated the established suppliers and went straight to the consumers. The Rise of the Journo-Gurus The most eye-catching change in the guru business is the rise of the journo-gurus. These are the locust years for the journalistic profession as a whole. Newspapers from the New York Times down are sacking journalists by the hundred.

They can no longer hide behind old-fashioned barriers such as huge factories and elaborate distribution networks. Nor can they rely on softer barriers such as deference or loyalty. Technorati determines the “authority” of a blog by the number of people who link to it rather than the institutional connections of the bloggers. Old-fashioned intermediaries such as dealers and brokers are being disintermediated regardless of how much loyalty they have built up over the years. Established companies must keep running in order to stay in the same place. The capital markets are also giving companies a shaking. The markets control vastly more money than ever before: the U.S. Investment Company Institute calculates that the volume of money controlled by American mutual funds increased from $135 billion in 1980 to $12 trillion in 2007.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Preface In 1999, in a book entitled The Control Revolution, journalist and legal scholar Andrew Shapiro described two futures that the Internet might take.1 The first was the familiar story of increased individual freedom, as the network gave us greater control over our lives, and over the institutions, including government, that regulate our lives. The second was a less familiar warning—of the rebirth of technologies of control, as institutions “disintermediated” by the Internet learned how to alter the network to reestablish their control. Shapiro saw good and bad in both futures. Too much dis-intermediation, he warned, would interfere with collective governance; some balance was needed. But likewise, efforts to rearchitect the Net to reenable control threatened to undermine its potential for individual freedom and growth.


Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

Sockets for vacuum tubes stud its surface, one of them occupied by the broken base of a component; numerous diodes and resistors connect it to an odd, stellate design in gold that covers most of the surface of the board. "This board was taken from a GRU-issued Model 60 oneiromantic convolution engine found aboard the K-129. As you can see, it spent rather longer in the water than was good for it. Ellis reverse-engineered the basic schematic and pieced together the false vacuum topology that the valves disintermediated. Incidentally, these aren't your normal vacuum tubes — isotope imbalances in the thorium-doped glass sleeves suggest that they were evacuated by exposure in a primitive wake-shield facility, possibly aboard a modelthree Sputnik satellite similar to the one first orbited in 1960. That would have given them a starting pressure about six orders of magnitude cleaner than anything available on Earth at the time, at a price per tube of about two million rubles, which suggests that someone in the GRU's scientific directorate really wanted a good signal, if that wasn't already obvious.

"Who's the target?" Mo ducks out and stands beside me. "Him!" I pull the trigger. There's an ear-stinging ricochet a fraction of a second after the shot. I'm nowhere near the target. "Damn, missed. "Bob, we've got to get out of here! Can you still feel that Black Chamber bitch? The chromatic disintermediator should have broken your entanglement, but — why are you trying to shoot that cat" "Because — " I squeeze off another shot " — it's possessed!" "Bob." She looks at me as if I'm mad. There's a loud bang from inside the control room, and a human figure in a black beret runs out onto the sealed doors flooring the pool: I shoot instinctively and miss, and he dives for cover.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Users wouldn’t merely be transferring balances between accounts within a closed system such as PayPal’s, but could exchange full-fledged digitized dollars with anyone, anywhere, as if they were cash. Also like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Rosen’s project ran off a permanent ledger of transactions and allowed for the digital dollar to be cut into smaller pieces so that commerce could occur in whatever denomination was required. Citi’s e-cash was in this sense a disruptive, disintermediating, peer-to-peer currency. It wouldn’t need the extensive network of communications that underpins credit-card payments, so transaction costs would be kept low, providing gains for both consumers and businesses and making micropayments viable. But this is not to say Rosen wanted to cut banks out from the system as, say, Satoshi Nakamoto did.

Still, it might not have to be so stark. If we consider that banks simply act as middlemen aggregating the funds of those seeking to lend their excess savings and delivering them to those who are short of money and need to borrow, there’s nothing to say such matching of lenders and borrowers can’t occur in a disintermediated fashion with cryptocurrencies. The new trend of peer-to-peer loans, exemplified by the Lending Club, offers one model that easily scales to cryptocurrency systems, with the checks and balances of the blockchain potentially helping to enhance a system of credit checks and credit reputations. Either way, the flow of credit and money in a cryptocurrency-led financial system would take on a very different form if banks were removed from those flows


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Jackson, and Paolo Pin, “Identifying the Roles of Race-Based Choice and Chance in High School Friendship Network Formation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 11 (2010): 4857–61. “choice homophily” and “induced homophily”: Kossinets and Watts, “Origins of Homophily.” romantic relationships formed through online algorithms: Michael J. Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–58. “the entire social network”: Johan Ugander et al., “The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,” arXiv:1111.4503 (2011). Later studies have confirmed homophily in Facebook: For a review of that literature and more primary evidence, see Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis, “Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 2 (2010): 583–642.

social sharing of Times articles in one city: Sinan Aral and Michael Zhao, “Social Media Sharing and Online News Consumption,” February 4, 2019, https://ssrn.com/​abstract=3328864. More romantic partners have been introduced online: Michael J. Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–58. how the digital breadcrumbs we leave on social dating sites: Ravi Bapna et al., “One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment,” Management Science 62, no. 11 (2016): 3100–122.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Wall Street: The symbol of the financial industry, from investment banks to insurance companies, from credit card vendors to payday lenders, from brokers to hedge funds. Today Wall Street is gorging itself on the HYPERTROPHY OF FINANCE. Ideally, finance intermediates transactions across time through interest rates and across space through currency-exchange rates. But today both these functions are falsified by government manipulation. They face disintermediation by gold, by a new transactions layer in the Internet software stack, and by new cryptographic blockchain currencies. In the hypertrophy of finance, Wall Street was bloated by MONOPOLY MONEY created by the Federal Reserve and channeled to the U.S. Treasury by banks, never touching MAIN STREET.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The argument merely reinforces the human obligation to keep consuming, or to keep working for an unlivable wage. More countercultural solutions, such as bitcoin and the blockchain, are no less technosolutionist in spirit. The blockchain replaces the need for central authorities such as banks by letting everyone on a network authenticate their transactions with computer encryption. It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism. It simply substitutes for trust in a different way: using the energy costs of blockchain mining as a security measure against counterfeiting or other false claims.


pages: 218 words: 44,364

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing

And for a hundred years they've been paying the artists cents on the dollar, if that. They are starting to try to recharacterize what they do for a living as marketing companies, but you know, how many times have you seen print ads or TV ads or outdoor billboards for music artists? Rarely. They're going to be completely disintermediated at some point." It seems like everyone associated with the labels is losing money. Well, almost everyone. As Sam tells us, "You have to remember who's making money right now in this whole process over the last few years—hands down, it's the lawyers." Don Verrilli isn't complaining. For lawyers, it's a lot of the same old same old—more and more lawsuits.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The web’s creative democratic architecture notwithstanding, it seems more in tune with the commercial character and aspirations of those who developed the new applications than with the ideals of those responsible for the original innovations. In theory, the Internet (though originally a product of the Defense Department) offered a remarkable new social and civic as well as pedagogical and cultural interface. It proffered a horizontal rather than a vertical technology, connecting people directly with one another. It disintermediated authority and gave birth to a crowdsourcing wiki-logic in which knowledge would be subjected to democratic (critics would say anarchic) processes. Yet in application, the technological dreams were diminished. Social media as imagined by a college sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg (obsessed with rating girls and sharing gossip rather than generating a new mode of uplifting civic and social interaction of value to educators, deliberative democrats, or creative artists) instead produced the popular blockbuster Facebook—a product in which, though it defined social media, neither civic culture nor the culture of cities was visible.

There can be little doubt that cities are getting smarter and finding ways to use digital technology for outreach, information, and education and for involving citizens in neighborhood business, mainly within but also among towns. The possibilities (and perils) of crowdsourced knowledge—call it Wiki-logic—developed on the horizontal and disintermediated terrain of the Internet has powerful democratic implications. The assault on authority can liberate common women and men and invite them into deliberation, policy making (participatory budgeting), and a greater sense of ownership over government. Or it can unleash prejudice and the shameless promotion of straight-out lies.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Strong growth of ‘shadow banking’ in the US has been a characteristic feature of the 2000s contributing to the bubble and subsequent crash, as is shown in more detail in Chapter 9. Suffice it here to say ‘shadow banking’ reached a comparable size to regular commercial banking in the US toward the end of the 2000s. The relative decline of commercial banks has been perceived by mainstream economists as marginalization, or ‘disintermediation’, often in conjunction with the rise of direct finance through open markets. But commercial banks have also transformed themselves, while ‘shadow’ financial institutions are often dependent on banks for funding. Commercial banks have remained the pivotal institution of the financial system even in the US, as has become apparent in the gigantic crisis that broke out in 2007.7 Pursuing the analysis of financial asset stocks further, figure 4 turns to financial assets held by the non-financial sector – mostly households and non-financial enterprises.

Financial assets held by households, for instance, are typically mediated by financial institutions, and generate profits for the latter. Even so, there are considerable differences among the four countries regarding the financial flows associated with the financial and the non-financial sectors. Crude as they might be, the ratios proposed here can still highlight these differences. 7 For analysis of disintermediation and continuing concern about the role of banks see Mark Gertler and John H. Boyd, ‘U.S. Commercial Banking: Trends, Cycles and Policy’, in NBER Macroeconomics Annual, ed. O. Blanchard and S. Fischer, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993; and E. Gerald Corrigan, ‘Are Banks Special? – A Revisitation’, The Region, The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, March 2000.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

But, in time, it all turned tragic, as the computer spreadsheet allowed us—or even encouraged us—without any governance other than our own character, to manipulate and push that initial good idea beyond the boundaries of acceptable risk. The second and arguably more troubling change ushered in by the computer spreadsheet was the removal of character from the financial services world. Character doesn’t have a column in a computer spreadsheet. The process of cleansing character from the financial system began with the disintermediation of the bank lending officer, who was essentially replaced by computer analytics. The importance of assessing character diminished, insofar as character meant anything more than paying bills in a timely manner. We eventually reached a point at which the fifth c of credit, character, was replaced with a single measurement called “credit worthiness.”

It started with the false magic trick of ATM deposits, then the very idea of money shapeshifted into calling cards and other new forms of currency, and finally the advent of the internet pushed us into an entirely new realm; in a few short years it became possible to execute everyday tasks and transactions—like hailing a ride, buying groceries or clothes or books, ordering food delivery, chipping in for your share of a restaurant meal—with the mere touch of a screen. So many popular apps and tech forces—Amazon, Uber, Venmo, Airbnb—simply provide the means to disintermediate humans from commerce. It’s not uncommon in several cities to see a knee-high robot, basically a fancy cooler on wheels, navigating through pedestrians en route to deliver lunch to some hungry office worker, who not only doesn’t need to offer a gratuity, but can skip the small talk and pleasantries too.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

This might lead to a greater modularization and even outsourcing of governmental services to constituents interested in providing and innovating these.38 However, the PRISM/Snowden affair and the general revelation of the core role that consultants like Booz-Allen Hamilton and Palantir play in the federal information complex demonstrate that this disintermediation of the work of the Cloud-based state is not only well underway, and that the more individualistic-entrepreneurial story of “government as a platform,” as told by publisher, Tim O’Reilly and others, is at most a supplemental augmentation of a well-established apparatus. In fact, one shudders at the thought of what a more individually distributed subcontracting of state Cloud surveillance might look like.

Speaking of reserve currencies, Bitcoin introduces addressable scarcity not in direct relation to the sum of mined minerals or national currencies, but by the mathematics of solving increasingly difficult problems toward an eventual arbitrary limit of 21 million “coins.” There is much to explore with Bitcoin, blockchains and related initiatives, such as Ethereum, but it is also the monetary platform of choice of secessionist projects for which the metaphysical expulsion of externalities is the paramount program, as important if not more than the disintermediation of central banks. The version of Bitcoin that we have (other currencies may fork or follow) is exemplary of the future-archaic quality of many Stack innovations. It is, as Paul Krugman puts it, “both a 17th century and 21st century currency at once,” a currency mechanism that would freeze the sum total of possible liquid value tokens in the world, now and forever.64 In this regard, for certain persuasions, it is better than magic rocks (like gold) because incrementally more gold can always be mined, allowing rootless cosmopolitans to upset “the natural order” of hierarchical hereditary accumulation.

A pinch of governance now saves a pound later, and so the filibustering inaction actually does more to guarantee the arrival of what the right (supposedly) fears most.Responses like this are by no means confined to the right. Now that The Stack has emerged as a globally hegemonic system, we see on the left an unfortunate knee-jerk antidigital technology politics. When “the Internet” was seen as a way to decentralize and distribute power horizontally, disintermediating older institutions, then a “net politics” for the multitude was essential, but now that it is seen instead as an architecture for the consolidation and instrumentalization of power in volumetric space, then the Left falls into familiar stances well suited to critique but not to design or to the possession of power.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Boisi Professor, Emeritus, the Wharton School “In the new world of crowd sourcing, the sharing economy, and the internet of everything, there is no question that every business is being transformed by a networked world. In The Network Imperative, Libert, Beck, and Wind break down this twenty-first century phenomenon and offer an actionable and effective approach for any business to not only ward off disintermediation, but also to set a path for long-term success.” —MICHAEL DISTEFANO, Senior Vice President and CMO, Korn Ferry; President, Korn Ferry Institute “Networks really are at the heart of our modern economic system. A model spurred by the eponymic GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) but also encompassing billion-dollar unicorns and all other companies changing our lives through computer technology, The Network Imperative not only reveals the strategic value of networks but also delivers an actionable framework to help industry leaders transform asset-based companies into graph-powered organizations.”


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Work Without Managers Debbie is now thinking bigger. Can Mozilla can be a community without managers? How can she create a culture of coaching and support that doesn’t require a top-down hierarchy? How can she build the kind of company that truly serves its community—employees, customers, and investors? A disintermediated workforce is not as radical as it sounds, and is an idea that several companies are experimenting with, most notably Evan Williams’ new company, Medium. Evan wanted to boost creativity from his whole team, solve problems more quickly, spend less time in meetings, speed production, and have the entire team truly understand the business.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

What’s more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add nearly two million new sales jobs by 2020. Likewise, the Internet has not had nearly the effect on sales that many predicted. Between 2000 and today, the very period that broadband, smartphones, and e-commerce ascended to disintermediate salespeople and obviate the need for selling, the total number of sales jobs increased and the portion of the U.S. workforce in sales has remained exactly the same: 1 in 9.9 What holds for the United States holds equally for the rest of the world. For example, in Canada, “sales and service occupations”—a broader category than the United States uses—constitute slightly more than 25 percent of the Canadian workforce.


100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

“Generally speaking,” he writes, “stable industries are more conducive to sustainable value creation. Unstable industries present substantial competitive challenges and opportunities.” 126 100-BAGGERS The beverage industry is a stable industry. Trends there unfold slowly over time. Sodas don’t get disintermediated by the Internet. Smartphones, by contrast, constitute a very unstable market. BlackBerry smartphones went from market leader to also-ran status in a few years. Since 100-baggers need time to ripen, Mauboussin’s research indicates you may be better served in industries less susceptible to sweeping changes in the competitive landscape.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Financial trading long ago ceased to be a largely tactile, physical, face-to-face activity; it occurs overwhelmingly online, in and through computer networks. To maintain their rent-generating intermediary roles in this changing world, stock exchange operators such as LSEG have had to move with the times or risk rapid disintermediation. Instead of providing a superior physical platform for financial trading, then, exchange operators must provide a superior digital platform; companies’ willingness to continue listing their securities on the London Stock Exchange, and to continue paying handsomely for the privilege, is entirely dependent on the LSEG furnishing an optimal technological trading environment for the world’s major financial institutions.

The most satisfactory explanation is that, from the earliest days of the commercial Internet, the UK has offered up a relatively benign and accommodating political, regulatory and legal environment. There have been a few road bumps along the way, but commercial digital platforms have mostly been given relatively free rein to create new markets and disintermediate existing ones – and to do so in the face of growing concerns around, for example, data privacy, labour practices and restraints on competition. When Nikita Malik noted in a 2018 opinion piece that the existing powers and regulations available in the UK to audit and regulate the Internet were ‘unclear’, she was putting it mildly.26 ‘Over a dozen regulators have a remit covering the digital world.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The document quoted Bagehot, cited the crises of 1825 and 1847, and noted that Britain could no longer act as a lender of last resort; the report recommended that this function be performed by the Bank for International Settlements by the issue of ‘paper gold’, to be called International Certificates.47 The first opportunity to halt the international disintermediation came in May 1931 with the collapse of the Credit Anstalt, the leading Austrian bank. The Austrian central bank had maintained high interest rates to keep money in Vienna which in turn contributed to the softness in the economy and large losses as asset prices declined. The publication of the Credit Anstalt’s statement on 11 May revealed that it had lost 140 million schillings, about three-fourths of its capital.

In Britain the foreign secretary Arthur Henderson was attracted to the idea of a loan but Montagu Norman, then the governor of the Bank of England, held that the Bank had ‘already lent quite as much as is entirely convenient’.51 One argument against foreign loans was that the crisis was believed to have been caused by a flight of domestic capital rather than by withdrawals of funds by foreign investors. By 20 July the idea of a loan had been tacitly abandoned, ‘brushed aside as impractical’.52 Instead, the Germans relied on internal measures to halt the disintermediation at home and on a Standstill Agreement, imposed upon reluctant foreign bankers, to halt the external drain. The speculative pressure then turned to Britain. The run began in mid-July 1931, stimulated partly by losses on the Continent, but also fed by the May and Macmillan reports of the large prospective domestic budget deficits and the unexpectedly high estimate of foreign money in London that might be withdrawn.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

What could we expect with self-replicating, networked, material printers? If man, irrevocably empowered and asserting his unalienable conscience, could dissolve his church, then whither his state? Was ending its domination a matter of mere historical condition? Would it just take a technical disintermediation after all—putting production into the hands of the individual? “Will you have a gun? Will you not have a gun? No one else can decide for you anymore.” That was as comfortable with traditional political reason as I had ever been. “As an Englishman I find this all abhorrent,” said a man seated directly in front of me after the floor had been opened for questions.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Because for every stroke of the pen, for every piece of legislation, for every paid-off congressman, there now exists a price umbrella that overvalues what he or any political entrepreneur is doing. Real entrepreneurs, “market entrepreneurs,” recognize the price-to-value gap and jump in. Ignoring legislation, they innovate, disintermediate, compete, stay up all night coding, and offer something better and cheaper until the market starts to shift. Author and Loyola University professor Thomas DiLorenzo defined it best: “A political entrepreneur succeeds primarily by influencing government to subsidize his business or industry, or to enact legislation or regulation that harms his competitors.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

References Farr, C. (2015, October 26). Why Homejoy Failed. Medium. Retrieved from https://backchannel.com/why-homejoy-failed-bb0ab39d901a#.a4l51hejy Goodwin, T. (2015, March 3). The Battle is for the Customer Interface. TechCrunch (blog). Retrieved from http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/ in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/ Jourdan, A., & Ruwitch, J. (2016, February 18). Uber Losing $1 Billion a Year to Compete in China. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/uber-china-idUSKCN0VR1M9 Jovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L. (2005). General Purpose Technologies.


pages: 209 words: 13,138

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck

Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, business cycle, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, payment for order flow, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

On the other hand, if inventory control is more broadly interpreted as position management, the issues are as pertinent as ever. The underlying concerns of risk and credit exposure, formerly viewed as important mostly (or solely) for dealers, are in fact pertinent for a large number of agents that may, in the course of their trading decisions, act as liquidity suppliers. Finally, although trade has become disintermediated in many markets (such as actively traded equities), dealers remain important in many other markets (bonds, foreign exchange, swaps, etc.). The role they play and how they should be regulated are ongoing concerns of practical interest. 117 12 Limit Order Markets The worldwide proliferation of limit order markets (LOMs) clearly establishes a need for economic and statistical models of these mechanisms.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Nestlé and Samsung partnership: Samsung, “Samsung and Nestlé Collaborate on the Internet of Things and Nutrition to Advance Digital Health,” Samsung.com, July 28, 2016, https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-and-nestle-collaborate-on-the-internet-of-things-and-nutrition-to-advance-digital-health. TechCrunch on platforms: Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is For The Customer Interface ,” TechCrunch.com, March 3, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/. Oxford research on job automation: Aviva Hope Rutkin, “Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization,” Technology Review, September 12, 2013, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/.


pages: 326 words: 74,433

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

Congressman for the second district of Colorado. Ideas are easy to come by. I have had many that I never had time to see through and heard many other good ones from flakes and drifters, but I believe the key to success is focusing on a good idea and implementing it well. In the case of ProFlowers, my idea was to disintermediate the supply chain by sending flowers directly from the grower to the customer, delivering fresher flowers at a better price. From there, it became a matter of focusing on the implementation. I had to invent a system to get the orders to the growers. Since many flower growers were extremely low tech at the time and couldn't be relied upon for Internet access, we created a foolproof way of faxing FedEx labels directly to the growers right on sticky peel-off paper for them to affix to the boxes.


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In a world without financial innovation—and, it might be added, financial markets insisting on very high returns on capital—such a regime might have produced a more stable financial system. But the United States had already developed a finance-driven economy in which both governments at all levels and the top tier of corporations had direct access to the capital markets. This process, called by the ugly term “disintermediation,” had become entrenched well before the Basel process. In fact, it was a factor in the embrace of sovereign debt lending by the largest US banks whose core corporate banking franchise had been eroding throughout the 1970s due to competition from the bonds and commercial paper issued by Wall Street firms—a competition that banking systems in other countries did not face to any degree.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

For years the channel through which the Bank of England operated to influence the financial system DISCOUNTING The practice of issuing securities at less than their face value. Rather than receiving payment in the form of interest, the holder profits from the difference between the price of the discounted security and its face value DISINTERMEDIATION Process whereby borrowers bypass banks and borrow directly from investment institutions DIVIDEND A payment, representing a proportion of profits, that is made to company shareholders ECGD Export Credit Guarantee Department – government agency which provides trade insurance for exporters ENDOWMENT MORTGAGE Mortgage linked to a life-assurance scheme.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

The plan to open 50 Health Nucleus centers around the world was no more. Those centers were expensive and burdened by foreign regulatory issues. The way the board saw it, scaling them was not sustainable. Nor would Human Longevity seek any longer to aggressively gather a million integrated genomes—certainly not by 2020. HLI’s new strategy was to disintermediate traditional medicine in the way that Airbnb and Uber had disrupted the hospitality and transportation industries. The current Health Nucleus center in San Diego would remain. But instead of the costly rollout of its own facilities worldwide, HLI began planning partnerships with a variety of institutions: physicians interested in longevity medicine, hospitals and clinics that wanted to prevent or slow the diseases of aging.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

In the digital economy, one issue is that GDP is a value-added construct: the intermediate stages of consumption are netted off the final revenues because otherwise there is double-counting: we do not want to count both the flour going into the bread and the bread at the same time. However, this means that the whole process of disintermediation over the last twenty years at least, which is continuing apace with cloud computing and the splitting of supply chains into increasingly specialist activities, is invisible in the GDP statistics. We are netting out all the intermediate stages and somehow the benefits are not appearing in final output.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

For the lending banks, who did not see such a bold proposal coming, it is also irresistible. Here is a buyer with a multilayered answer to Raptor’s problems, itself a major existing client of many of the lenders, with ample firepower to invest and a track record of swift execution. The family’s support is part of the package, and by disintermediating Wall Street and striking a deal directly, the banks can save themselves perhaps a hundred million dollars in refinancing and advisory fees. That the Firm will charge a one-time fee of ten million dollars for arranging the deal amounts to a rounding error. It seems straightforward for the banks to cancel the pledges and personal guarantees that remain.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Such early conversations probably explain why The Merchant of Venice left such a deep impression when I encountered it in high school: with its multiple merchants, Shakespeare’s most economically oriented play got me thinking more deeply about why some middlemen are admired while others are reviled. Later, living in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, I saw my share of headlines about disintermediation—and sensed that the elimination of middlemen was more wishful thinking than economic reality. The rise of companies like Airbnb and Uber in recent years has made it clear to me that the Internet was helping make middlemen more important than ever. The economist Kay-Yut Chen, with whom I had the privilege to collaborate on Secrets of the Moneylab, was an inspiration as well.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

As if he sat at a lab table in the R&D department at Apple headquarters in Cupertino and soldered chips on a tiny motherboard . . . until boom! he gave the world the iPod. Actually, that was Steve Wozniak with the Apple 1 a quarter century before. Steve Jobs was a genius—but his gifts lay elsewhere. And nowhere was that genius more visible than when business experts everywhere were proclaiming the “disintermediation” of tech—the disappearance of the physical distribution and retail channels as they were replaced by the virtualization of e-commerce. Jobs understood, as none of his peers did, that whereas content, even commodity products, might be sold online, if you wanted to sell electronics hardware as premium-priced luxury items, you had to sell them like other luxury items.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The convexity is implanted in Semitic vocabulary: mishnah, which in Hebrew refers to the pre-Talmudic compilation of oral tradition, means “doubling”; midrash itself may also be related to stamping and repeated grinding, and has a counterpart in the madrassa of the children of Ishmael. Books should be organized the way the reader reads, or wants to read, and according to how deep the author wants to go into a topic, not to make life easy for the critics to write reviews. Book reviewers are bad middlemen; they are currently in the process of being disintermediated just like taxi companies (what some call Uberized). How? There is, here again, a skin-in-the-game problem: a conflict of interest between professional reviewers who think they ought to decide how books should be written, and genuine readers who actually read books because they like to read books.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

The president’s Democracia Popular Party, although the largest in the Congress, had far less than a majority of the seats in the Congress and relied for support on other parties. The next largest party, the Partido Social Cristiano, opposed tax reform generally but was willing to substitute the transactions tax for the income tax. Although it proved an effective revenue source during 1999 and 2000, the transactions tax encouraged financial disintermediation and set an added incentive for deposit withdrawals at a moment when the banks were already in severe crisis. B. The Deepening Crisis, 1999 In February 1999 the Central Bank floated the exchange rate to limit international-reserve loss.23 Because the 1999 budget incorporated an exchange-rate assumption that the float would have made implausible, the Central Bank delayed the float, at a substantial cost in reserve loss, until the moment the Congress approved the budget.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

“Google’s vision of Android is Microsoft’s vision of owning the operating system of every PC,” a platform monopoly, former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told author Ken Auletta. “Guys like me want to make sure that there is a distribution of platforms and devices. Is it in Google’s interest to disintermediate us? Yeah.” * * * When Rubin and the Android team were done dealing with the initial shock of how good the iPhone was, little drama surrounded what needed to be done. Rubin is at his core a start-up CEO—messianically convinced that his path is the best one regardless of whether people and circumstance agree with him.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

But as the world is getting flatter and more digitized, the prospect for what once were comfortable and secure means of making a living is much bleaker. We look ahead at the prospect of ferocious competition, remorseless downward pressure on pay, the constant prospect of outsourcing, and the incessant press of technological change threatening to disintermediate and—to use the cant term beloved of Silicon Valley—“disrupt” traditional forms of employment. Flat living standards, flat median income, the disappearance of secure employment. We are told, in the title of a lively recent book by Tyler Cowen, that “average is over.” But most of us in our hearts know that in most important aspects, we are average.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Many now ignore, mistrust, or even detest it.18 DISRUPTIVE NEW MEDIA: These new channels, which include social media echo chambers, content aggregators, online forums, and the ever-evolving niche blogosphere, is as powerful and addictive as it is rife with ethical and influence issues on an election-tipping scale. Many of the new media players—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like—are still far younger than mainstream platforms and unregulated, albeit incredibly powerful as avenues for information and influence. Clearly we live in a dangerous era of disintermediation and confusion—an era arising in part from a sickly mainstream media’s scrambling to find a viable viewership and revenue model for the twenty-first century. . . . The points of intersection among today’s channels now appear to outnumber the once-sacred separations. What constitutes news and what constitutes advertising—or, worse, propaganda—is at times a crapshoot to decipher, especially online.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Banks should give thanks to Google, Apple and Facebook for enabling our customers to create and share anything at anytime with anyone. Anyone can create anything and, if it’s popular, it is valuable. By way of example, software and information design companies like you (talking about Polaris et al) are now able to design and create anything for banking. In fact, you have the ability to disintermediate IT. You can design new services for banks, you can create and you can put it out there before we, as banks, are even thinking about it. The biggest challenge then is: How to convert the business? How to persuade the bank to change? How to get the organisation to move? How to make the elephant dance?


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

This mind-set of traditional players places a higher premium on striking smart partnerships. In emerging markets, mobile reach often exceeds banking access. In countries like Argentina, Colombia, and Ukraine, for example, virtually everybody has a mobile phone, but less than half the population has bank accounts. As messaging apps threaten to disintermediate their core business, telecommunication companies have partnered with banks to offer new payment channels. In Kenya, Safaricom, East Africa’s largest mobile telecommunications provider, partnered with Commercial Bank of Africa to launch m-pesa, Afric’a first SMS-based money transfer service, in 2007.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Lyft's slogan is “Your Friend with a Car.” Airbnb and Feastly urge hosts and guests to share photos and communicate to build trust. Some things remain the same. Researchers have found that, accounting for other variables, Airbnb guests pay black hosts less than they do white ones.8 The sharing economy, in reality, relies on disintermediating existing businesses and minimizing regulatory costs. Amateur chauffeurs, chefs, and personal assistants now perform, at a lower cost, work once undertaken by full-time professionals. Airbnb, Lyft, and others do not always comply with regulations designed to ensure a minimum level of skill, standard of performance, safety and security, and insurance coverage.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In this sense, it is closer to the tradition of populist movements that ultimately become political actors on the basis of a frontal challenge to a delegitimized political system. Yet, M5S is a most revealing symptom of the crisis of representative democracy in Italy and in Europe, and it also shows the potential of the Internet as an organizing and mobilizing medium with the power to disintermediate traditional forms of political action dependent on party machines and the control of institutions through manipulated electoral systems. It is important to observe that, in Italy, in the midst of the economic and political crises, there were no autonomous social movements similar to those taking place in Spain, Portugal, or Greece.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And progress is not linear. Progress is accelerating. Whereas last year, we could do about two-thirds of what we can do today with equivalently priced equipment, 15 years ago we could do about one-one thousandth of what we can do today. We have to anticipate progress. For job seekers, or for those who will be disintermediated in the coming wave of technological change, I recommend projecting out and imagining what the world will look like 2, 3, 4, or more years into the future and decide what will be your highest and best use to society then. If we are to think about what kind of job to get (or to create) today, we have to think about what trends are relevant and what might be an important marketplace in the future.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

There are equally powerful challenges from below—from breakaway nations, such as the Catalans and the Scots, from Indian states, from Chinese provinces, from American city mayors. They are trying to reclaim powers they surrendered to national governments during the great age of centralization. There are also a host of what Moisés Naím calls “micro-powers,” everything from NGOs to lobbyists, which are disintermediating traditional politics. The Internet is lowering barriers, making it easier to organize and agitate; in a world where people are now used to choosing and voting with a click, parliamentary democracy, where elections happen only every few years, looks increasingly anachronistic. Douglas Carswell, a British member of Parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to buying music through iTunes.9 The biggest challenge from below comes from the voters themselves.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

These extreme prices occurred for somewhat arcane reasons, but those really were the prices at which you would have had to sell or buy at that moment. They wouldn’t seem to be related, but the Flash Crash had echoes of the 1987 crash. The Flash Crash was another crisis of liquidity, one in which liquidity demand came in faster than the supply—the same sort of time disintermediation as occurred in 1987. The difference was in the available computer power. With the wonders of high-frequency trading, this crash occurred in minutes rather than over the course of hours. There has, not surprisingly, been a lot of ink spilled over the Flash Crash, with various congressional hearings and a months-in-the-making report from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the SEC for the equity markets, the CFTC for the futures).3 These agencies were caught flat-footed because they had no access to the trade-by-trade or order-by-order data, nor did they have the hardware to analyze the millions of data points even if they had had access.


pages: 284 words: 95,029

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day

Airbnb, country house hotel, Desert Island Discs, disintermediation, Easter island, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, gender pay gap, Kintsugi, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pre–internet, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, stem cell, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, unpaid internship

But that is hard to do in a hyper-connected world that always seems more perfect for other people. Social media has been an undoubted force for good in many areas but it comes with obvious difficulties too. A platform such as Instagram enables us to follow almost any celebrity we choose. As a result, we’re given direct, supposedly disintermediated access, to Taylor Swift’s pet cats or Selena Gomez’s friend’s twenty-sixth birthday party or Kourtney Kardashian’s summer spent swanning around on a yacht in Italy. An intimacy is established, however constructed that intimacy might be. We begin to feel closer to said famous people, as if for all their wealth and success and private jets, they are ‘just one of us’ at heart.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

As processing speeds radically increased and transaction costs fell at the end of the twentieth century, some value chains began to break up. With lower transaction costs, there was less need for vertically integrated organizations. Smaller, more agile competitors started to outmaneuver their larger, older rivals. A smaller competitor could attack one piece of an incumbent company’s value chain and disintermediate it or provide the same quality offering at a much lower price (see Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5. As transaction costs fell, value chains broke up, and smaller competitors could attack one component of your business. This is exactly what happened to the encyclopedia industry. In the days of large, leather-bound books, the encyclopedia business was dependent on large sales forces in order to sell its product.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Others have succeeded quite well, including Amazon Prime (its express shipping service, launched in 2005, that now has over 200 million subscribers worldwide), Amazon Subscribe & Save (an offering launched in 2007 that enables automatic reordering of a variety of household products), and one of my personal favorites—the Amazon Kindle (its e-reader device, which was launched in 2007 and became the category leader and helped the company hedge against the digital disintermediation of its physical book retail business). For avid readers, Amazon Kindles have been a heaven-sent gift. The ability to download and access almost any book at any time was a huge breakthrough. The first-generation Kindles may have been kludgy and awkward, but they removed friction. They eliminated time between discovering a book and reading it.


pages: 306 words: 88,545

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex by Rachel Feltman

COVID-19, disintermediation, double helix, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Internet Archive, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, moral panic, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, TikTok, University of East Anglia, white flight

Christine Foster, “Punch-Card Love,” Stanford Magazine, March 2007, https://stanfordmag.org/contents/punch-card-love; Alicia M. Chen, “Operation Match,” Harvard Crimson, February 16, 2018, www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/2/16/operation-match. 35. Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no. 36 (July 15, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908630116. 36. Eli J. Finkel et al., “Online Dating,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13, no. 1 (2012): 3–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612436522. 37.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Yes, it's true that historically low unemployment, high asset values, economic growth, and other such factors are inflationary, but these factors are offset by the exponential trends in the price-performance of all information-based technologies: computation, memory, communications, biotechnology, miniaturization, and even the overall rate of technical progress. These technologies deeply affect all industries. We are also undergoing massive disintermediation in the channels of distribution through the Web and other new communication technologies, as well as escalating efficiencies in operations and administration. Since the information industry is becoming increasingly influential in all sectors of the economy, we are seeing the increasing impact of the IT industry's extraordinary deflation rates.

Despite dramatic mood swings on Wall Street, the extraordinary values ascribed to so-called e-companies during the 1990s boom era reflected a valid perception: the business models that have sustained businesses for decades are in the early phases of a radical transformation. New models based on direct personalized communication with the customer will transform every industry, resulting in massive disintermediation of the middle layers that have traditionally separated the customer from the ultimate source of products and services. There is, however, a pace to all revolutions, and the investments and stock market valuations in this area expanded way beyond the early phases of this economic S-curve. The boom-and-bust cycle in these information technologies was strictly a capital-markets (stock-value) phenomenon.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Indeed, the insurance business will grow significantly in the future in response to new risks and fears, although quite what companies and individuals will be insuring themselves against is far from clear. Equally, while banks and credit-card companies will be damaged by the digitization of cash and the increase in mobile payments, micro-payments, pre-pay and contactless payments, I don’t foresee banks being disintermediated entirely. They will hold on to larger transactions simply because big-ticket payments require risk management and default and dispute systems, which are generally too expensive and complicated from a compliance point of view for non-banks. Nevertheless, digital money will turn parts of the financial services industry on its head because the banks and credit-card companies will no longer be in sole charge of checkbooks, credit cards, ATMs and branches.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Thus in the Soros meeting, when the talk turned to farm supply chains in a remote region of India, the lingua franca was business language. It was said that there were too many intermediaries in the supply chain: too many traders and brokers and such between the Indian farmer and the Indian dinner plate. The corporate answer was to “disintermediate.” What did not appear to cross anyone’s mind on West 57th Street was the possibility of being wrong about rural India. What if the intermediaries in that area tended to be women, making the job inefficient but also a beachhead of social progress? What if the intermediaries ensured that fresh produce ended up in villages and hamlets along the route to the cities, whereas large trucks would bypass them and increase their reliance on processed food?


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Consumers no longer understand why they should settle for frozen bacon during certain parts of the year, and pork suppliers have learned how to accommodate the demand for constant flow. With no need for their ability to translate flow into storage and back again, commodity traders left the pork bellies pit, and the oldest existing livestock futures contract was delisted. Futures traders became disintermediated by a marketplace looking for direct access to an always-on reality. So while local merchants in depressed European economies are abandoning storage-based euros because it is too expensive for them to use, the pork industry stopped using futures because their focus on freshness and flow was no longer compatible with a spring-loaded strategy.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

To quote a May 2016 article in Harvard Business Review by Don and Alex Tapscott: “The technology most likely to change the next decade of business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence. It’s the blockchain, the technology behind digital currencies like bitcoin.”7 Incumbents are sensing the inherent creative destruction, especially within the financial services sector, understanding that winners will grow new markets and feast off the disintermediated. Many startups are eyeing these middlemen with the oft-flickering thought that has been credited to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: “Your fat margins are my opportunity.”8 If financial incumbents don’t embrace the technology themselves, Bitcoin and blockchain technology could do to banks what cell phones did to telephone poles.


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

Besides once again demonstrating eBay’s ability to flex its muscles whenever a competitor threatened its dominance, it also marked the first time that eBay controlled a trading platform that limited a seller’s payment options. Half.com collected a credit card payment directly from the buyer and told the seller to ship the item with the knowledge that the seller would later receive a check from Half. This disintermediation of the buyer and seller froze PayPal out of the process. If it wanted, eBay could make Billpoint the mandatory payment processor for Half.com, compelling all of Half’s buyers and sellers to open Billpoint accounts while giving PayPal no chance to compete. Fortunately for us, the same slow development cycle that prevented eBay from building its own version of Half.com also impeded Billpoint.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984). 5. See Julie Niederhoff, “Video Rental Developments and the Supply Chain: Netflix, Inc.,” Washington University, St. Louis (2002); Michael K. Mills and Jon Silver, “Analysing the Effect of Digital Technology on Channel Strategy, Power and Disintermediation in the Home Video Market: The Demise of the Video Store?” Video Technology magazine (February 2005); IRS, “Retail Industry ATG— Chapter 3: Examination Techniques for Specific Industries (Video/DVD Rental Business),” Small Business and Self-Employed One-Stop Resource, August 2005, available at link #50; “Videotape Rental—Background and Development,” All Business, available at link #51; “Videotape Rental— Current Conditions,” All Business, available at link #52. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 307 8/12/08 1:56:23 AM 308 NO T E S 6.


pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Today, the Internet is an information smorgasbord, an endless buffet of data sets, research papers, essays, news articles, instruction manuals, annual reports, and myriad other materials that the curious soul can use for edification and self-improvement. But much of this content is inaccessible, consigned to subscription databases or hidden behind paywalls or subject to other impediments. The Internet has simultaneously shrunk and expanded the world with its hyperlinked data and its decentralized, disintermediated communications. And it has consistently confused and frustrated legislators and capitalists who don’t understand why so many users are so insistent on flouting The Rules. Aaron Swartz broke The Rules, consistently and creatively. He did not always explain why, but he broke them, and now his death has led many people to question those rules and wonder why they seem so incongruous with the realities of the digital era, in which information has become untethered to physical formats and it takes only moments for news and legend to permeate the cultural brain.


file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

Remember earlier when I said that the NYSE is much like an auction, and that Nasdaq resembles a flea market? Well, ECNs are akin to eBay, the Internet auction company that lets buyers and sellers meet directly in cyberspace. ECNs are cheaper because they are designed to cut out the middlemen. This is what the fancy term "disintermediation" means. Investors, through their brokers, send ECNs their orders, and within seconds they appear on the ECN's screen, along with many others'. The ECNs are transparent because they aren't looking to hide orders, or to trade on the knowledge gained from an advance peek at orders, as middlemen sometimes do.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Newspapers and magazines have been hollowed out by Google and Facebook, which in 2018 together took 60 percent of the Internet advertising market.4 This is a key reason for the shuttering of some 1,800 newspapers between 2004 and 2018, a process that has left 200 counties with no paper at all,5 restricting the supply of reliable information that is the oxygen of democracy. And given that digital advertising surpassed TV ads in 2017, it’s clear that TV news will be the next to go.6 While cable news may have gotten a “Trump bump” in recent years, the longer term trend line is clear—TV will ultimately be disintermediated by Big Tech just the way print media has been. But the trouble with Big Tech isn’t just an economic and business issue; it has political and cognitive implications as well. Often, these trends are written about in isolation, but in fact they are deeply intertwined. In this book, my goal is to connect the dots—to tell the whole story, which is far bigger than the sum of its parts.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The problem was that most readers would not pay enough to cover the costs of producing news, or at least not as much news as the public had grown to expect. (As the digital-media pundit Frederic Filloux put it, “You can’t sell news for what it costs to make.”) The business model for reality-based journalism had been to use news to attract audiences and then sell those audiences to advertisers. When disintermediation demolished that model by moving advertising to Google and Facebook and Craigslist, news-gathering became a money-losing proposition. Reality-based news outlets began shrinking and shutting in droves. By 2018 newspaper circulation in the United States had fallen to its lowest level since 1940, the first year with available data.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

This means that a charismatic technology does not even need to be present or possessed to have effects.”34 It didn’t matter that the OLPC’s specifications were disappointing, or that it lacked the originally charming hand crank that would recharge its battery, or that software updates would regularly delete children’s data. The OLPC’s charisma transcended such material concerns through its promise to transform education for the world by literally airdropping millions of cheap laptops around the world. These laptops would disintermediate teachers from the educational process, allowing children to achieve their full potential, just in the same way that the OLPC’s founders and funders reached their own potential: by learning how to programme computers at home. Ames calls this “nostalgic design”: “Key features of this laptop—focused on play, freedom, and connectivity—were based on how a number of OLPC developers nostalgically remembered their own (often privileged and idiosyncratic) childhoods rather than on contemporary childhoods in the Global South.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But Flynn had become quite a maniacal partisan, part of the Trump traveling road show, one of the ranters and ravers opening Trump rallies. This all-in enthusiasm and loyalty had helped win him access to Trump’s ear, into which he poured his anti-intelligence-community theories. During the early part of the transition, when Bannon and Kushner had seemed joined at the hip, this was part of their bond: an effort to disintermediate Flynn and his often problematic message. A subtext in the White House estimation of Flynn, slyly insinuated by Bannon, was that Defense Secretary Mattis was a four-star general and Flynn but a three-star. “I like Flynn, he reminds me of my uncles,” said Bannon. “But that’s the problem: he reminds me of my uncles.”


The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Bankers acceptances have declined in importance in recent years in favor of other forms of financing. Exhibit 6.8 presents the total amount of bankers acceptances outstanding in billions of dollars each year for the period 1980-2000. There are several reasons that account for this decline. First, the rise in financial disintermediation has reduced corporations’ dependence on bank financing in that they now have access to wider range of funding options (e.g., commercial paper). Second, the vicious circle of low liquidity leads to less issuance and so on. Third, in July 1984, the Federal Reserve discontinued the use of bankers acceptances as collateral for repurchase agreements when conducting open market operations.3 The Creation of a Bankers Acceptance The most efficient way to explain the creation of a bankers acceptance is by an illustration.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Different genres emerged, and record companies became big business. The technology has moved on again. The Internet has made the cost of distributing music digitally essentially free. But artists still want to make a living—or preferably a fortune—and the record companies and some musicians are even more upset about being disintermediated. U2’s lead singer Bono sounded off about it in the New York Times: “A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators.”13 Is this true? They (or their record companies) do have to cover some high upfront costs. Marketing to turn an artist into a big name and publicize new albums is expensive, and there are costs in the initial recording.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

A fairly simple circuit is inscribed around the radius and ulna and the fingertips are ignited. What it does is a limited invocation that results in the bearer becoming invisible. In effect. There are variations, like the inversion laser--stick a phase-conjugate mirror on the base and it makes a serious mess of whatever the hand's pointed at--but the original use of the hand is as a disintermediating tool for observer/subject interactions. Or so Eugene Wigner insisted. How many people have you got?" The airlock door is cycling: Alan crouches, gun levelled on the door. He waves me off to one side impatiently. It's Howe. No luminous worms behind his face plate; he hefts a lumpy, misshapen sack and my basilisk gun as he steps through the door.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

First, the advent of floating exchange rates in 1971 had gradually led to the dismantling of international controls on the movement of capital. As capital started to become ever more mobile, Wall Street firms were ideally placed to skim a little froth from the river of money as it passed on through.2 Secondly, Wall Street had perfected the art of ‘disintermediation.’ The term is ugly and obscure, but its meaning is startlingly simple. In the old days, if large borrowers‌—‌industrial companies, for example‌—‌wanted to borrow money, they were, on the whole, obliged to get it from banks. Banks, for their part, acted as middlemen: taking money on deposit from investors, lending it on, making a spread.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

In hundreds of cities across the country, Limbaugh’s most ardent listeners would spend their lunch hours in barrooms and diners that carried the show. “Rush rooms” were harbingers of internet-age sociability. It was not enough to follow politics in your community—now the politics you followed were your community. Already in the 1970s, as noted earlier, Our Bodies, Ourselves had been an exercise in anti-authoritarian “disintermediation.” Women whose doctors wouldn’t give them the whole truth could assemble it from bits and pieces available somewhere in the wider world. By the 1990s, few professions were as walled off from their clienteles as gynecology had been two decades before. But all professions were on watch. The Reaganite hostility toward government agencies—the belief that they were full of time-servers, featherbedders, rent-seekers—fed into a wider cynicism toward retailers, agents, and middlemen of all kinds.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Similarly, Motorola went too far down the outsourcing route and has since retreated to gain more control: around 35% of its manufacturing is now outsourced, says Mr Lynch. Northstream predicts that, in the long run, odms will account for around half of all handsets manufactured. Another extreme outcome – the complete disintermediation of handset-makers by operators – also seems highly unlikely. Operators like to have someone to blame when handsets go wrong, and with handsets becoming ever more complex and more reliant on software they are unlikely to want to take on servicing and support. So while some operators will use some own-branded odm handsets in particular niches, they will not want to do away with traditional handset-makers altogether.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

cid=AEN20160223003651315. 6 “I kind of felt powerless”: Jordan Novet, “Go Board Game Champion Lee Sedol Apologizes for Losing to Google’s AI,” VentureBeat, March 12, 2016, http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/12/go-board-game-champion-lee-sedol-apologizes-for-losing-to-googles-ai. 6 “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company”: Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface,” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface. 7 over a million people: Ellen Huet, “Uber Says It’s Doing 1 Million Rides per Day, 140 Million in the Last Year,” Forbes, December 17, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/12/17/uber-says-its-doing-1-million-rides-per-day-140-million-in-last-year. 7 one of 300 cities in 60 countries: Anne Freier, “Uber Usage Statistics and Revenue,” Business of Apps, September 14, 2015, http://www.businessofapps.com/uber-usage-statistics-and-revenue. 7 640,000 different lodging options: Chip Conley, “Airbnb Open: What I Learned from You,” Airbnb (blog), November 25, 2014, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-open-chips-takeaways. 7 191 countries: Airbnb, “Airbnb Summer Travel Report: 2015,” accessed January 11, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Airbnb-Summer-Travel-Report-1.pdf. 7 a yurt in Mongolia: Airbnb, “Nomadic Life in the Countryside,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/13512229?


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

It wasn’t only Goldman’s US competitors; foreign banks were buying US banks (Deutsche Bank bought Bankers Trust/Alex Brown, UBS bought Warburg and Dillon Read, etc.). Goldman also faced competition from the advent of electronic execution and alternative trading systems, lowering commissions. It also faced disintermediation by hedge funds, alternative asset management companies, and other unregulated firms in providing or raising capital. Goldman also began facing stiff competition in attracting and retaining employees. “We live in a competitive environment,” said David Viniar during his tenure. “We still have people leaving for multiyear offers away from us, some from our competitors, some from other industry participants.”47 Goldman’s client base also began to change.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

By the measure of financial inclusion alone, then Kenya has shown a far more constructive and socially responsible approach to the community. It has also produced more positive economic activity, reduced crime (with respect to cash) and increased the savings of participating constituents. What has the South African approach done? Well, it has reduced the risk of disintermediation of the banks, and reduced the risk of possible fraud in the mobile payments space. I would argue that the Kenyan approach is therefore far more positive for the economy and individuals. The emergence of the mobile wallet This is what Visa and MasterCard already know: that mobile payments and the behaviour required to drive mobile payment adoption are already widespread.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

In 1999, however, Cantor made its internal electronic system (rechristened “eSpeed”) “accessible through your own keyboard and through your own ability to input trades” (interviewee YD), giving dealers direct access to Cantor’s electronic interdealer Treasurys order book. FIGURE 4.3. Traders’ desks at a Treasurys dealer, late 1980s. Photograph courtesy of interviewee XU. Dealers’ clients, though, were still not given access to eSpeed. Dealers nevertheless feared that sooner or later Cantor “was going to disintermediate banks” (interviewee XO) by granting clients access, thus turning Treasurys into an all-to-all market. “[W]e [major dealers] got together,” says XO, “and said let’s put this consortium [of dealers] together so that [clients] can directly access our bids and offers and not go through Cantor.” The result was Tradeweb, launched in 1998, an electronic trading system (similar in structure to the later Bloomberg FIT system described at the beginning of this chapter) that was not an anonymous order book, but rather a means of automating the process whereby an institutional-investor client telephoned a small number of dealers to ask them to quote prices, in an interaction in which each party knew the other’s identity.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

The Great Strategy Debate: From the 1990s to Today In parallel with the development of the derivatives market in the early 1990s, many traditional commercial banks were faced with a fundamental strategic issue: After watching the corporate loan market become commoditized due to intense competition and disintermediation in the capital markets, many commercial banks seriously considered changing their strategic focus. Some leaders such as Bankers Trust and JP Morgan underwent a fundamental transformation from a commercial bank to trading institutions. As with any transformation of this magnitude, the process was difficult and required strong commitment by senior management.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

The arbitrage age The party almost never got started – the banks stopped selling credit risk almost as soon as they started. They didn’t actually have a lot of the better quality risks needed to make CDOs work; these clients had long ago bypassed the banks and raised money from investors directly. The banks had been ‘dis-intermediated’. The capital freed up proved difficult to redeploy. Opportunities didn’t seem to be abundant. Repurchasing shares was okay but it was starting to reach absurd levels. CDOs also reduced reported earnings. Equity analysts wanted banks to improve RAROC and keep earnings growing at an unrealistic rate.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

For instance, they can reduce costs by optimizing inventory levels; “to have the right amount of stock in the right place at the right time.”28 Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can rely on sensors to track products and components throughout the supply chain from 8 Setting the Scene production to point-of-sale. Moreover, online platforms can unleash economic value on several levels. The sharing economy, for example, promises to increase efficiency through greater transparency and disintermediation. People can immediately profit from assets currently being underutilized—our cars, houses, power tools, or spare time. As more people rely on ride-sharing apps, fewer people will need to buy cars. Fewer cars, or individual car trips, mean less space devoted to garages and parking lots; space in high-rent urban centers like San Francisco now can be used for housing and other productive endeavors.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

No one can predict the effects of labor-saving and intelligent machines on livelihoods and work in the future, but the narratives themselves have the potential to drive amplified economic booms and recessions, as well as public policy. The narratives at the time of this writing about artificial intelligence and machine learning replacing human intelligence and disintermediating skilled workers lend an instability to expenditure and entrepreneurship patterns. These and other economic narratives may show up in the speculative markets, notably the real estate markets and the stock markets, to which we turn in the next two chapters. Chapter 15 Real Estate Booms and Busts Real estate narratives—stories about the often tantalizing increase in value of land, housing, locations, and homes—are among the most prominent economic narratives.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Wall Street brokerage houses and mutual funds began offering money market funds that paid a far higher rate of interest than savings accounts. People increasingly withdrew money from savings banks and savings and loan associations and moved it to the new money market funds, a movement referred to by the sonorous economic term “disintermediation.” Commercial banks, most of whose deposit base was in noninterest-bearing checking accounts, could cope. The other banks could not. Faced with a rapidly declining deposit base and with long-term real estate loans paying low interest, they went to the federal government for help. Congress was anxious to do so.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

This phrase was apparently a buzzword that had been circling around in the company propaganda. As the session went on, he turned into a little jargon machine. “At the end of the day, we try not to boil the ocean but just look for the best win-wins,” he told her. Apparently people at this company were always drilling down and disintermediating the dialogue. They were driving maximum functionality, with end-to-end mission-critical competence to incent high-level blue-ocean change. Erica sat there with a smile pasted on her face. She appeared eager and supplicating. She debased herself. When he asked her what she wanted to do at the company, she slipped into the argot and threw it all back at him.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

I remember sitting in her living room with her children’s belongings boxed up ready for repossession, as I commentated on various elements of global financial crisis, including the sharpest collapse in world trade in a century. I thought: ‘How did we get here? Who let this happen?’ The answer was, a chain of disintermediation that started with savings in the East, and in particular in China. This book follows the root canals of Esther’s mortgage up through the securitisation department at Northern Rock, the shadow banking system centred on London, bad regulators, conflicted politicians, broken formulaic self-regulation emerging out of Basel, mistakes in the setting of interest rates by central bankers, concurrent problems in Spain, Cyprus, Iceland and Greece, and the prolonging of the crisis in a reluctant Berlin.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Years ago, Jeff Bezos had given his marketplace team a few simple instructions: remove all friction to selling on Amazon; eliminate the barriers to cross-border trade; address any problems with innovative technology and automated systems, not costly manpower. One result was an explosion of low-priced selection that fueled the historic growth of Amazon’s e-commerce business. But another was the disintermediating forces of globalization that crushed Western sellers and created a dynamic that made it exceedingly difficult to protect intellectual property, prevent fraud, and fairly adjudicate disputes. Amazon knew about these problems but disguised them with its unrelenting corporate communications machine, which insisted that the company was a friend to entrepreneurs.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

But by the time Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, sixty years later, twenty million books had been printed—and more of them were Bibles than anything else. Print it, and they will come. During the century after printed English Bibles appeared, the literacy rate among English people tripled. Now millions of Christians were able to make good on Luther’s DIY Christianity. The Catholic Church and its priestly elite were disintermediated. Disruptive innovation? No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon. Apart from devolving religious power to ordinary people—that is, critically expanding individual liberty—Luther’s other big idea was that belief in the Bible’s supernatural stories, especially those concerning Jesus, was the only prerequisite for being a good Christian.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Glassman, James K., and Kavin A. Hassett. “Dow 36,000.” The Atlantic, September 1999. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/09/dow-36-000/306249. Goodwin, Tom. “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface.” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015. https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/. Govindarajan, Vijay, Shivaram Rajgopal, and Anup Srivastava. “Why Financial Statements Don’t Work for Digital Companies.” Harvard Business Review, February 26, 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/02/why-financial-statements-dont-work-for-digital-companies.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

On April 8, Thiel and his team met with Peter Davison and Graeme Linnett, two of Confinity’s investors. In an email sent to Davison and Linnett, Thiel outlined the main takeaways from their discussion, including: “We will investigate further whether (and what kind) of collaboration with eBay might be possible—especially given the consumer-to-consumer disintermediation model that our two companies share.” However, the team shelved the idea for the rest of 1999. “eBay was such a sketchy company,” Thiel later told a Stanford audience, “multilevel marketing people selling junk on the internet.” Confinity, on the other hand, built cutting-edge mobile payment technology.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

There was no concept of the user; that was not part of the metaphor at all. Mark Pincus: I mark Napster as the beginning of the social web—people, not pages. For me that was the breakthrough moment, because I saw that the internet could be this completely distributed peer-to-peer network. We could disintermediate those big media companies and all be connected to each other. Steven Johnson: To me it really started with blogging in the early 2000s. You started to have these sites that were oriented around a single person’s point of view. It suddenly became possible to imagine, Oh, maybe there’s another element here that the web could also be organized around?


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Available at bea.gov. 57 Edwin Dickens, “A Political-Economic Critique of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis: The Case of the 1966 Financial Crisis,” Review of Political Economy 11: 4 (1999), pp. 392–3. 58 “In addition to limiting the buildup of dollar assets in foreign official hands, these goals included easing Treasury financing operations, limiting financial disintermediation, promoting the growth of bank credit, especially mortgage loans, discouraging inflation, and clearly the top priority, encouraging a more complete utilization of the nation’s [resources].” Richard N. Cooper and Jane Sneddon Little, “US Monetary Policy in an Integrating World: 1960 to 2000,” New England Economic Review 3 (2001), p. 86. 59 Quoted in Hawley, Dollars and Borders, p. 97. 60 See Aaron Major, “The Fall and Rise of Financial Capital,” Review of International Political Economy 15: 5 (December 2008). 61 Hawley, Dollars and Borders, pp. 112, 119–20. 62 Joanne Gowa, Closing the Gold Window: Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, p. 99. 63 These are the words of a Federal Reserve official interviewed in Gowa, Closing the Gold Window, p. 145. 64 Ibid., pp. 63, 129.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

Alignment of incentives to promote growth works a lot better than a control-and-command approach. Keynes, of course, posited a central role for government in solving the disjunctions caused by unchecked financial globalization and bad savings habits. His legacy is a financial architecture designed to blunt the potential for colonial exploitation by disintermediating lenders and sovereign borrowers—replacing that relationship with a collective institutional financial organization. Did Bretton Woods save the world from a revival of imperialism? Did it bring more nations into the fold of prosperity? Whether it did or not, it undeniably altered the way that nations interact with one another and with the capital markets.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

Less developed countries, in contrast, tend to be run by governments that lack the capacity and, frequently, the will to deliver public goods. Foreign aid, as Nobel economist Angus Deaton has emphasized, not only fails, all too frequently, to develop such local capacity but to undermine it. Aid can be designed to bypass governments, and to go directly to the population, but disintermediation does nothing to address the problem that effective government is necessary for development—something Marshall’s State Department took as a given.145 It should not be surprising that large-scale American aid has not had transformative effects in more recent post-conflict societies. As of January 2015, U.S. relief and reconstruction aid to Afghanistan totaled $110 billion; to Iraq, $61 billion.146 The combined nominal total of $171 billion is about $40 billion more than the present value of all Marshall aid.


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Discount rate Rate used to calculate the present value of future cash flows. Discounted payback rule Requirement that discounted values of cash flows should be sufficient to pay back initial investment within a specified time. Discriminatory price auction Auction in which successful bidders pay the price that they bid (cf. uniform price auction). Disintermediation Withdrawal of funds from a financial institution in order to invest them directly (cf. intermediation). Dividend Payment by a company to its stockholders. Dividend discount model Model showing that the value of a share is equal to the discounted value of future dividends. Dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) Plan that allows shareholders to reinvest dividends automatically.

Interest rate parity Theory that the differential between the forward exchange rate and the spot exchange rate is equal to the differential between the foreign and domestic interest rates. Interest tax shield The extra after-tax income that results from the tax deductibility of interest. Intermediation Investment through a financial institution (cf. disintermediation). Internal finance Finance generated within a firm by retained earnings and depreciation (cf. external finance). Internal growth rate The maximum rate of firm growth without external finance (cf. sustainable growth rate). Internal rate of return (IRR) Discount rate at which investment has zero net present value.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

These unsustainable developments reversed sharply in 2008 (see Figure 27.4). Figure 27.4. U.S. financial sector’s share of corporate profits and market cap. Source: Haver Analytics. Financialization is related to several other trends: rising leverage and asset richening; securitization and its flip side (i.e., disintermediation from banks); deregulation and active financial innovations; expansion of the delegated asset management industry (institutionalization of asset holding and trading); the finance sector’s increasing political influence; widening income inequality within countries; and globalization and integration of capital markets.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In 1993–94, a boom year for the economy, nearly half of all firms laid off an average of 10 percent of their workforce.6 “Not only did the uppermost managers of the nineties now receive compensation packages that towered over those of their predecessors,” observes Thomas Frank, “but as Wall Street placed a very predictable value on layoffs and downsizing, CEOs often saw their own pay rise in direct proportion to the number of employees they could expel from the firm. . . . This equation was the origin of many of the big management ideas of the decade: delayering, disaggregating, outsourcing, reengineering, disintermediating.”7 Having achieved most of their objectives—including the freedom to hire and fire at will and the weakening of regulations—it is at this point, Mizruchi argues, that the American corporate elite lost any vestiges of cohesiveness, whether that was its moderately liberal stance of the postwar years, or its viciously probusiness response to the economic crisis of the 1970s.