geopolitical risk

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Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, buy and hold, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, family office, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

By the fall of 2015, a year after OPEC’s surprise Thanksgiving decision to maintain production levels, Venezuela was warning of a “catastrophe” if the cartel didn’t cut and prop up prices. “OPEC has never been more divided,” a longtime oil analyst named Fadel Gheit told CNNMoney. “When prices move by $40 a barrel, stuff in the world starts breaking,” one oil man says. “Oil remains the world’s most efficient mechanism for translating economic into geopolitical risk,” wrote three authors in a lengthy piece called “Fueling a New Order? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy,” which was published in 2014 by the Project on International Order and Strategy at Brookings. “In the modern era, no other commodity has played such a pivotal role in driving political and economic turmoil, and there is every reason to expect this to continue.”

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CHAPTER NINE 9890 percent of its government revenue: “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil: The Investment and Productivity Transformation,” McKinsey Global Institute, December 2015. 100long ruled by aging kings: “A Saudi Prince’s Quest to Remake the Middle East,” Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, April 9, 2018. 102anonymous and acerbic commentators: “As The Saudi Economy Implodes, a Fascinating Solution Emerges: The Aramco IPO,” Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, January 7, 2016. 102translating economic into geopolitical risk: “Fueling a New Order? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy,” Bruce Jones, David Steven, and Emily O’Brien, Brookings Institution, April 15, 2014. CHAPTER TEN 105crushing blow to imports: “Nigeria Bearing Brunt of U.S. Shale-Oil Boom,” Sarah Kent, The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2013. 111swords, daggers, and cheetah fur robes: “The Insane Gifts Saudi Arabia Gave President Trump,” Ken Klippenstein, The Daily Beast, September 4, 2017. 110Asian states heavily dependent on Gulf petroleum: “President Trump’s Trip to Saudi Arabia,” Anthony H.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Increasingly, a board is tasked with ensuring that its organization represents and reflects the fact that its customers, clients, and regulators are changing. A range of headwinds have arisen to make board responsibilities more complicated and the board’s role more complex. In the coming years, boards will face the challenges of providing oversight amid exponential technological change; rising activism by ever more powerful investors; mounting geopolitical risks that are trending toward insularity, protectionism, and de-globalization; and a war for global talent. Chapter 4 explores each of these critical issues and how short-term thinking alters boardroom decision-making on strategy and investment. It examines how myopia can exacerbate many of the risks that boards face, which can further hamper their choices.

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Global economic and political shifts demand that boards place an even greater premium on the type of experience and knowledge that has traditionally belonged to those working in public policy—including an understanding of areas such as human rights, social contracts, and the vested interests of domestic politicians. Shifts in the global policy regime could scupper board and management plans and even force multinational corporations to scale back and sell parts of their international operations. Boards of global corporations are already contending with a host of geopolitical risks. These include challenges to the efficacy of multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO), which have governed the global system and brought stability over the past fifty years. Rising trade protectionism and mounting regulatory requirements are affecting all manner of industries and sectors, including banking, food, and technology.

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Global economic growth forecasts were meaningfully reduced, and financial regulators responded by loosening the stress tests on banks, thereby enabling them to inject greater liquidity into the economy and avoiding the dire scenario that Dimon had foreshadowed. Greater economic protectionism and mounting geopolitical risks affect where and how companies can successfully and competitively sell across borders. Boards need to make sure they have the talent and skills to understand how management should navigate and mitigate these risks. For instance, a board member with a strong financial background can help a company think through how to use financial-market tools to hedge against emerging risks and make the best possible investment decisions.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

There is further reinforcing logic at a system design level for solar and wind power. The fuel cost for generation is zero and the energy is available all over the planet, meaning all those imports and impacts on balance of payments are gone. This global energy security also largely eliminates a whole range of related geopolitical risks and the resulting military threats and instability, not to mention the enormous costs involved. The savings on offer are tangible and we don’t have to look hard to find real numbers. A fascinating peer reviewed study reported in the journal Foreign Policy pointed out that keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007 cost over $7 trillion.

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All it would take would be a terrorist attack on fuel depots, a peak oil price panic, or a pandemic keeping drivers at home, and chaos could erupt very quickly, with enormous social and political consequences. This system is already tightly wound and highly stressed. Climate change is only increasing the pressure, making the global geopolitical risks even greater. We can expect major issues in India and China because, already struggling under the impacts of environmental degradation, the water supplies that feed their agriculture are being threatened by over use, magnified by climate-related shifts. Serious food shortages affecting this region of two billion people could soon lead to widespread geopolitical, economic, and social consequences, with resulting refugees and social and security instability.

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David MacKay, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (Cambridge, England: UIT Cambridge, 2009) This excellent overview of low carbon energy pathways in response to the climate challenge can be downloaded for free or purchased on paper at www .withouthotair.com. Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). An overview of future geopolitical risks and conflict scenarios viewed through the lens of climate change and sustainability. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). A fuller explanation of the issues covered in the chapter on inequality.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

We know many things well: natural gas is far more abundant than most people recently assumed, U.S. oil output has the potential to grow considerably, efficient cars are becoming more affordable every year, and the cost of alternative energy, even though still higher than that of fossil fuels, is on the decline. We also know that high and volatile oil prices 200 • THE POWER SURGE hurt the U.S. economy, fossil-fuel emissions increase the likelihood of dangerous climate change, and domestic gas has spared the country some geopolitical risks. But there is a lot we don’t know with anything close to high precision. We can’t say with enormous confidence how much oil or gas the United States will produce, how much it will cost to extract, or how welcoming affected communities will be. We can’t firmly predict the costs of increasing the efficiency of U.S. cars and trucks, and we certainly don’t know when electric vehicles will become a big commercial prospect.

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After nearly four decades of hard work, economists still can’t agree on whether spiking oil prices cause recessions, but they definitely can’t rule out the possibility that they do. National security strategists can’t agree on whether dependence on natural gas imports would expose the country to big geopolitical risks, but few are anywhere close to dismissing the link. Scientists can’t pin down just how bad every ton of greenhouse gas emissions will be for climate change, but most agree that the damages could be very large. Indeed, the unknowns of the energy world are almost always its most troubling elements.

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

There are plenty of candidates: a massive market bubble bursting as in 1929; a surge in inflation forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy in a draconian way, leading to an unsustainable rise in interest rates; pandemics worse than COVID-19 as zoonotic diseases transmitted from animals to humans become more frequent and virulent; a corporate debt crisis stemming from a credit crunch as interest rates rise; a new housing bubble and then bust clobbering homeowners and lenders; a geopolitical shock like the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022 escalating and becoming more severe, leading to further spikes in commodity prices and inflation; other geopolitical risks; and the rising risk of another global recession triggered by the confluence of the above risks. Alternatively, we might see a return to protectionism or a decoupling between the United States and China as the two countries careen toward a geopolitical collision. Italy could eventually go bankrupt and start the collapse of the eurozone.

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The first is to invest in inflation-indexed bonds or in short-term government bonds whose yields reprice rapidly in response to higher inflation. The second option is to invest in gold, other precious metals and possibly other commodities whose prices tend to rise when inflation is higher (gold is also a good hedge against the kinds of political and geopolitical risks that may hit the world in the next few years).17 Lastly, one can invest in real assets with a relatively limited supply, such as land, commercial and residential real estate, and infrastructure. But given global climate change, any investments in real estate should be directed to the regions of the United States and the world that are resilient, i.e. regions that will not be flooded by rising sea levels, hurricanes, and typhoons, and regions that are not too hot to become unlivable.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Medical hardware is (understandably) a tightly regulated space, and at that time investors didn’t have much appetite for clinical trials and a lengthy, onerous, and uncertain FDA approval process. After about a year, we closed up. Along with a few colleagues, I decided to give start-ups another try, this time seizing on an opportunity closer to my passion for geopolitics. We called it GeoQuant, and the idea was to use software to measure geopolitical risk. SwissRe, the world’s largest reinsurer, thought the technology was promising and invested. Our clients were Fortune 500 companies weighing the hazards of setting up operations in volatile countries. Typically, they’d bring on consultants with the usual backgrounds from the State or Defense Departments or the intelligence community.

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Reaching under the couch to retrieve it, Keith found a box I’d hidden. The box appeared to be cuff links for his birthday, but when he opened it, inside was a ring. The following year, we were married in a beachside ceremony, with the setting sun reflecting off the water. Last Days of Innocence Throughout much of 2016, I was working to quantify geopolitical risk. GeoQuant promised to take high-quality big data, run it through a powerful “machine learning engine,” supplement those assessments with input from human experts, and generate objective, actionable measurements of political risk. Exciting, right? Our algorithms tracked a variety of factors, such as instability in the governing coalitions of G20 nations, declines in the price of oil, and rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, 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 Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In the short term, the surge in oil prices to $150 in the summer of 2008 contributed to the financial breakdown and the recession—and the fear that oil prices could return to these levels is a major threat to global economic recovery in 2010 and beyond. In the very long-term, oil is a limited resource, as is the atmosphere’s capacity for absorbing carbon. And in the middle-distance time horizon, the immense transfer of global resources to politically unstable oil-producing countries creates huge geopolitical risks. Why, then, has the United States in particular, and the Western world in general, done so little to reduce its dependence on oil? The answer is quite simply that oil, even at $100 a barrel, is a cheaper source of energy than any existing alternative.10 In the mindset of Capitalism 3.3, this is the end of the matter: Whatever source of energy is cheapest is the one that should be used.

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The point of political intervention will be to bring about a different kind of equilibrium in the oil market to achieve three different objectives that financial markets, acting on their own, could not even be expected to recognize. The first objective will be to balance oil supply and demand in a way that does not inflict unnecessary damage on economic activity and living standards in oil-consuming countries. The second objective will be to avoid the geopolitical risks to Western democracy of allowing a return to the $150 free-market oil price, which resulted in a windfall of some $1 trillion annually to some of the world’s most unstable, undemocratic, and politically hostile regimes.19 The third will be to combine the rebalancing of supply and demand with environmental imperatives.

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

A Current Challenge: The Rapid Development of Translation Systems for New Language Pairs Here we must say a few words on one of the current challenges in the field of machine translation: the rapid development of translation systems for languages that have not been covered up to now. This concerns mainly the defense and intelligence industry; surveillance and intelligence needs evolve rapidly depending on geopolitical risks (see chapter 14, dedicated to the machine translation market). From a technical point of view, the challenge is to collect bilingual corpora very quickly for the languages considered. While automatic corpus collection is a well-known technique nowadays (see chapter 7), the volume of data collected is often insufficient in practice to develop operational machine translation systems.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Even the violence in eastern Ukraine involves nonstate actors. Yes, they are influenced by Moscow, but it is not clear that the Kremlin can decisively impose its will on them at all times. Again, it is hard to argue that markets have priced in the scale and scope of possible disruptions that come with this unfortunate combination of geopolitical risks. And, again, the reason for this is a conditioned rational one that includes enormous faith in the power of central banks to insulate markets, together with excitement about the cash sitting on corporate balance sheets. But should these influences wane, as they are bound to in the future, markets will have to play rapid catch-up with quite an uncertain and worrisome geopolitical configuration.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

In 1985, during my first year at work, the Dow Jones stock index in the US rallied by just over 27%, the strongest single year since 1975 (the year of recovery from the crash that followed the oil crisis and deep recession of 1973/1974). Rising prices reflected both improving fundamentals and a fall in uncertainty and geopolitical risk. Low inflation and interest rates led to a growing belief that, after a period of strong growth, the major economies could achieve a ‘soft landing’ – avoiding a recession and enjoying an extended economic expansion. The fall of communism and the ‘peace dividend’ that followed, together with the expansion of liberal capitalism, enabled risk premia to fall.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Manipulated media has already become a flashpoint in U.S. politics, with crudely manipulated videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or White House press correspondent Jim Acosta making the rounds on social media. These “shallow fakes” were manipulated without AI, but AI-based synthetic media will enable more sophisticated fake audio and video, making it harder for people to know what is real and what is fake. The geopolitical risks from deepfakes extend beyond manipulating elections. Fake audio or video could be used to manufacture a political crisis, undermine relations between allies, or inflame geopolitical tensions. Even a fake that was eventually exposed as fraudulent could be damaging if it caused doubt for a period of time.

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., 192 STEM talent, 30–34 sterilization and abortion, 81 Strategic Capabilities Office, 56 strategic reasoning, 49 Strategy Robot, 44–45, 49, 51 Strike Hard Campaign, 79–80 Stuxnet, 283 subsidies, government, 179–80 Sullivan, Jake, 186 Sun Tzu, 45 superhuman attentiveness, 269–70 superhuman precision, 270 superhuman reaction time, 277 superhuman speed, 269, 271 supervised learning, 232 supply chain(s), 300 attacks, 246 global, 76, 179, 183 “Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution, The,” 235 surveillance, 79–90 cameras, 6, 86–87, 91 laws and policies for, 108–9 throughout China, 84–90 in Xinjiang, 79–83 Sutskever, Ilya, 210 Sutton, Rich, 299, 455 swarms and swarming, 277–79 autonomous systems, 50, 220 demonstrations, 257 Sweden, 108, 158, 187 Switch-C, 294 Synopsys, 162 synthetic aperture radar, 210 synthetic media, 127–34, 138–39 criminal use, 128–29 deepfake detectors, 132–33 deepfake videos, 130–32 geopolitical risks, 129–30 watermarks, digital, 138–39 Syria, 58 system integration, 91 tactics and strategies, 270 Taiwan, 27, 71, 76, 100, 175, 178, 185–86 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), 27–28, 179, 181, 184 Taiwan Strait, 71, 75–76 talent, 30–34, 304 Tang Kun, 393 tanks, 192 Tanzania, 109 targeting cycle, 263 target recognition, 210 Target Recognition and Adaptation in Contested Environments (TRACE), 210–12 Tay, chatbot, 247 TDP (thermal design power), 454 TechCrunch, 120 technical standards Chinese, 171–75 international, 169–71 techno-authoritarianism, 79–110, 169 China’s tech ecosystem, 91–96 global export of, 105–10, 106f social governance, 97–104 throughout China, 83–90 in Xinjiang, 79–83 technology ecosystem, Chinese, 91–96 platforms, 35 and power, 11 transfer, 33, 163–64 Tektronix, 162 Tencent, 37, 143, 160, 169, 172 Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), 180 Terregator, 193 Tesla, 65, 180 TEVV (test and evaluation, verification and validation), 251–52 Texas Instruments, 162 text generation, 117–21, 123 text-to-image models, 125, 295 Thailand, 107, 109 thermal design power (TDP), 454 Third Offset Strategy, 53, 61 “Thirteenth Five-Year Science and Technology Military-Civil Fusion Special Projects Plan,” 73 Thousand Talents Plan, 32, 164 “Three-Year Action Plan to Promote the Development of New-Generation AI Industry,” 73 Tiananmen Square massacre, 68, 97–98, 103, 148, 160, 341, 359 tic-tac-toe, 47, 336 TikTok, 146–49 Tortoise Market Research, Inc., 15, 40 TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), 180 TRACE (Target Recognition and Adaptation in Contested Environments), 210–12 Trade and Technology Council (TTC), 187 training costs, 296–97 training datasets, 19–23 attacks on, 238–40, 244–45 of drone footage, 203 “radioactive,” 139 real world environments, vs., 58, 64, 233, 264 size of, 294–96 transistor miniaturization, 28 transparency among nations, 258–59, 288 Treasury Department, 246 Trump, Donald, and administration; See also “Donald Trump neuron” budget cuts, 39–40 and COVID pandemic, 74 and Entity List, 166 GPT-2 fictitious texts of, 117–19 graduate student visa revocation, 164 and Huawei, 182–84 and JEDI contract, 215–16 national strategy for AI, 73 relations with China, 71 and TikTok, 147 Twitter account, 150 trust, 249–53 Trusted News Initiative, 138–39 “truth,” 130 Tsinghua University, 31, 93, 173, 291 TSMC, See Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) TTC (Trade and Technology Council), 187 Turkey, 107, 108, 110 Turkish language, 234 Twitter, 139–40, 142, 144, 149, 247 Uganda, 108, 109 Uighurs; See also Xinjiang, China facial recognition, 88–89, 158, 353–55 genocide, 79, 304 mass detention, 74, 79–81, 102, 175 speech recognition, 94 surveillance, 82, 155–56 Ukraine, 108, 129, 196, 219, 288 United Arab Emirates, 107, 109 United Kingdom, 12, 76, 108, 122, 158, 187, 191–92 United States AI policy, 187 AI research of, 30 Chinese graduate students in, 31 competitive AI strategy, 185 United States Presidential election, 2016, 122 United States Presidential election, 2020, 128, 131, 134, 150 University of Illinois, 157 University of Richmond, 123 Uniview, 89, 355 unsupervised learning, 232 Ürümqi, 80, 84 Ürümqi Cloud Computing Center, 156 U.S.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Can we do even better at predicting the future? Probably, though one high-profile attempt was denounced as “useless, offensive, and unbelievably stupid.”10 The idea that prompted such strong words—from a U.S. senator no less—was a pilot project within the Pentagon in the early years of the war on terror to set up a futures market for geopolitical risk. Real-money bettors would have been able to wager on the possibility of, say, Jordan’s King Abdullah being assassinated by a certain date or a North Korean nuclear missile strike on U.S. soil. You can just imagine the trading pit banter: “I’ll take five hundred contracts at the close on L.A. getting smoked . . .”

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

The gradual decline of trust in societal institutions over the years, meanwhile, from business to government, accelerated in the wake of the Great Recession, making people more receptive to a “fringe” idea than they might otherwise have been (see Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump). Add on a growing sense of unease over geopolitical risk and the sense that horrible and unpredictable things are happening in the world, and the urge to connect with others becomes an unarticulated desire in all of us. Whatever you think about “belonging,” these forces really were a large part of what made people more open to trying this new, quirky, affordable travel experience.

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

Lower commodity prices, currency devaluations, competition, industrial overcapacity, and changes in technology and business models are creating deflationary pressures globally. Low economic growth rates and low inflation would not normally be an issue, helping resolve other pressing problems, such as carbon emissions and the availability of food and energy. But low growth, low inflation, and high levels of debt are incompatible. Geopolitical risks are rising, threatening to reverse the peace dividend that followed the end of the Cold War. In 2014, journalist Roger Cohen called it the “great unraveling,” a term that captures the increasing political powerlessness, absence of control, and difficulty in predicting the locus and evolution of current and future crises.

The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

Are the resource disposals (sales) strategic, or Strategic Resources & Consequences Report: Case No. 4 185 aimed at boosting short-term earnings (capital gains from sales) and cash flows, or—worse yet—funding share buybacks? Do the shifts from gas to oil, or vice versa, make sense (and what about unconventional resources)? At the end of the day, did the portfolio shifts enhance total proved reserves? And what was the impact of the shifts on the company’s geopolitical risk exposure (more or less exposure in Russia, say)? Only with answers in hand can you then decide whether you are comfortable holding equity in an enterprise with such a geographical resource portfolio mix and risk exposure. Furthermore, does this enterprise diversify other oil and gas investments you have, or just mimic them?

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It carries huge risks, upsetting old geopolitical realities and evoking a nineteenth-century world of great-power rivalry, a race for power at the heart of the greatest landmass on earth. Start with logistics and you will quickly find yourself addressing much more delicate issues. Even in its incipient form the project is creating considerable geopolitical risks. In late 2016 the founder of the military security company Blackwater, associated with the American invasion of Iraq, announced his new company would be establishing an operation base in Xinjiang to support the Belt and Road in Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. In Kazakhstan the project has raised fears of increased Chinese presence, and these fears sparked public protests which are throwing doubts over the stability of the Nazarbayev regime.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Sethi, Ramit

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, geopolitical risk, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Paradox of Choice, prediction markets, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, Vanguard fund

But instead of accepting these simple truths and acting on them, we discuss trans fats, diet pills, and Atkins versus South Beach. WHY ARE MONEY AND FOOD SO SIMILAR? Most of us fall into one of two camps as regards our money: We either ignore it and feel guilty, or we obsess over financial details by arguing interest rates and geopolitical risks without taking action. Both options yield the same results—none. The truth is that the vast majority of young people don’t need a financial adviser to help them get rich. We need to set up accounts at a reliable no-fee bank and then automate savings and bill payment. We need to know about a few things to invest in, and then we need to let our money grow for thirty years.

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

There are emerging risks emanating from the fracturing of petrostates as the world attempts to decrease its dependence on oil. China is a new power in the financial markets, with regional territorial ambitions. In all of this, we are seeing not only pathways for financial vulnerability and crisis but also the multiplying effect of a growing link between financial and geopolitical risks. This time—every time—it really is different. We are not stepping into a smooth, equilibrium sort of world where the agents and institutions will behave the same way in the future as they have in the past, or even where the agents in our financial system will be those of the past. We have had one hundred fifty years of neoclassical economics.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

They fear a repeat of the rare earth price shock in 2010, specifically that geopolitics will reduce market supply or drastically increase the price of a material.15 What concerns Silver is that companies are spending vast sums of money to switch away from reliable metals to untested alternatives that appear to face less geopolitical risk. Silver calls this decision to use a less-than-best option because of fears over geopolitics, “innovation distortion.” And these geopolitical, not geological or manufacturing, considerations are leading companies to develop second-best technologies. Switching material to shore up your supply chain may make sense in some cases, but it provides the space for companies that don’t share your supply chain concerns to develop better products because they continue to use the known rare metals.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

In 1997 a group of at least 2000 economists, including 6 Nobel laureates issued a declaration: The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. As economists, we believe that global climate change carries with it significant environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical risks, and that preventive steps are justified.91 FIGURE 3-23 Global Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons all reduce emissions of heat from the earth to outer space, thus increasing the temperature of the earth. The atmospheric concentration of these gases-except for CFCs, which were first synthesized in the mid-1900s-has been increasing since the 1800s.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Now comes the hard stuff—the offshore drillers with their attendant dangers in the Gulf of Mexico (see BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010), the sheer climatic challenge of the Arctic waters above Russia, the environmental hazards of Canada’s Athabasca tar sands, the ultra-deep and ultra-long-range technology Brazil must master to tap its “pre-salt” bounty hundreds of kilometres offshore in the South Atlantic Ocean, the upgrades needed to get Iraqi oil flowing freely again, the geopolitical risks that have to be weighed for existing and new ventures in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond—not to mention the clashes that may intensify when Vietnam, China, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia cross paths as they probe the oil and gas riches of the South China and East China Seas.

The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

' · In a separate initiative, a global meeting of 2,800 economists, including Nobel Prize winners James Tobin and John Harsanyi, unanimously agreed on the following opinion: 'Global climate change is a real and pressing danger', carrying with it significant environmental, economic, social and geopolitical risks. All these exhortations invariably seem to hit a brick wall wherever serious financial interests are involved. Financial markets focus on the; next quarter's results, and even if a particular CEO were to advocate longer-term priorities at the expense of immediate results, he or she would be ruthlessly punished or even removed from office.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

Downstream, figures for production, storage, net trade, and refining stocks and flows should be comprehensively reported, enabling much better implied demand estimates. Build Up Strategic Stocks and Coordinate Their Use in Emergencies Given continued tight OPEC spare production capacity and the many geopolitical risks in key oil producing countries and regions, oil importing countries should bolster defenses against price shocks that could be transmitted by severe supply interruptions. They can do so by increasing strategic stocks and coordinating their use with others in cases of disruption. Congress may wish to reconsider selling off strategic stocks and instead bolster them.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

I had never before considered the subjects I was talking about from the perspective of making a profit, and I was struck by how obviously that shifted your perspective. Up above the city, you no longer felt you were in a nation-state; instead, you were in the globalized community of capital markets. Men and women of different nationalities looking for some germ of knowledge that could allow them to make a bet on something—currencies, companies, geopolitical risk—that would pay off. The latest technologies were readily available, the video links more pristine than those that used to connect me with a global community of diplomats and military officers from the White House Situation Room. There was a seemingly limitless supply of bottled water, coffee, and tea.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Before the trail leads to Tehran, it probably winds its way through servers in at least one other country (after all, Iran does not do much business with the United States). Maybe it leads to computers in our once and future allies Germany and France. Maybe it leads to a server in our sometimes adversary China. Either way, following that trail comes with a boatload of geopolitical risks. Dropping a “cyber bomb” on those servers is not a viable response, at least in the near term. If the legal and diplomatic questions can be worked out, maybe, just maybe, the counter-cyber team can follow it all the way to the laptop resting on the knees of the Iranian hacker. Now what?

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

In such a circumstance, the declining power of Brussels leaves countries in the eastern half of the continent more vulnerable to Moscow. So rather than listen to the platitudes and clichés of big shots at conferences in Munich and Davos, where everyone is performing for an audience, I would rather have one-on-one conversations at café tables in Ljubljana, closer to the borders of the Near East and Orthodox worlds, where geopolitical risk is more immediate, less abstract. Ljubljana: known in German as Laibach, a place more historically associated with the Habsburg Empire than with any particular nation-state. Here in 1821, one of the crucial congresses was held to stabilize Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, in the very sound of its name Laibach recalls such personages as Metternich and Castlereagh.

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

Rubin’s adjoining letter was even skimpier on detail. He focused on the outlook for the world economy, which he described as being in the midst of “transformative change.” Such high-flown phrases abounded. He declared the global economy to be “strong . . . despite serious financial imbalances, geopolitical risks, and multiple other issues.”2 However, Rubin did not burden his readers by enumerating what those “issues” might be. Substantively, the letter was weightless. Patronizing as they were, the Citigroup letters were highly (if unintentionally) revealing. The stewards of America’s largest bank waxed optimistic about Citi’s prospects, but paid no attention to the individual business lines, much less to the emerging stresses to those businesses.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

See also Funan Cameron, David, 178 Caravanserai Project, 42 Carbon dioxide emissions, 120, 198 –199 Cargo flights, 181 Carter, Jimmy, 137, 239 Central Asian trade, expansion of, 57–59, 58t Central Asia plus Japan Dialogue, 39 –40 Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Institute, 94, 272n86 Chabahar port (Iran), and India, 13, 61, 74, 76m, 258 –259n17 “Checkbook diplomacy,” 20 Cheng Li, 240 China, demographics: one-child policy, 190, 294n15; population, 11, 20, 186, 190 China, domestic politics: ethno-religious conflicts, 188, 194 –195; interest groups, 110 –111; leadership, 11, 115 –117; nationalism, 186 China, economy: in comparative context, 1–4, 86 – 87, 101–102, 149 –150; “continental drift,” 14m, 92; export-oriented industrialization, 102 –103; government debt, 105, 186; “Made in China 2025,” 104 –105; overcapacity, 108-110; real estate bubble, 186 –187; western development, 115-116. See also Four Modernizations; Special Economic Zones (SEZs); stateowned enterprises (SOEs) China, energy: coal, 83, 198; gas, 82 – 83; geopolitical risks, 74, 127, 128-129; oil, 81– 82, 119; pipelines, 34, 57, 58 –59, 78 – 81, 83 – 84, 135, 144 –145, 153, 193; pollution, 198 –199; renewables, 84 China, and Eurasia: continentalism, 42 –46; economic complementarity, 172 –175; impact of the Four Modernizations on, 117–120; impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on, 56-59; impact of the Global Financial Crisis on, 170 –171; national champions, 111–114.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

For years, the extraction and processing of rare earth minerals was controlled by a small number of mostly state-owned companies in China—allowing them to rattle the entire electronics supply chain when China temporarily banned the export of rare earth minerals in 2011. But as with the oil shocks of the 1970s, geopolitical risk has spurred the United States, Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Australia to invest in excavating new supplies.9 Just as distributed energy supplies and alternative and renewable energy technologies have ended OPEC’s grip on oil prices, it is better to have diverse mineral suppliers as well. The even more interesting story, however, is not of material competition but of substitution.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Oil, and more recently natural gas, will obviously remain central to the future of the Middle East—its economic prospects, the rivalries for regional predominance, governance, demographics, stability, and the region’s relations with the rest of the world. Yet, ironically, this very centrality—and dependence—creates an imperative to make oil and gas less central for the future of the region. * * * — While the perennial and sometimes unexpected geopolitical risks affecting oil will remain, they will be tempered by several factors. Even if the number of vehicles so far is small, the emergence of electricity as a competitor in transportation and the possibility of Auto-Tech provide an alternative to oil-based transportation and the unchallenged dominance of oil.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Fred, 42 Sinner, George, 312 Sitkalidak Island, 332 sixties-era dropouts, 403, 404 Skates, Chris, 53n Skocpol, Theda, 229 Skouries forest (Greece), mining project in, 293–94, 296–98, 303, 314, 342, 347, 445 Slate, 263 slavery, slaves, 154, 177 compensation paid to owners of, 415–16, 457 economic case against, 462 economic impact of, 415–16, 455–57 reparations for, 414–15 see also abolition movement Slett, Marilyn, 340 Slottje, Helen, 361 smart energy grids, 108 Smart Growth America, 126 Smith, Adam, 173, 462 Smith, Brendan, 401, 402 smog, 176 social democracy, 132, 179 socialism, 38, 40, 75, 159, 177, 184, 210n authoritarian, 44, 178–79 centralization under, 179 Chávez’s “Twenty-first Century,” 182 extractivism and, 178 5-year plans under, 133 social isolation, 105 social justice, 36, 59, 61, 117 social media, in Blockadia movement, 303, 466 social movements, 83, 121, 124, 177, 204–5, 450, 453–57, 459–61, 463–64 social programs, 10, 119 cuts in, 8 Social Security, 454 social spending, cuts in, 8 Society of Petroleum Engineers, 193 Solangi, Moby, 432–33 solar heaters, 393–96 solar panels, solar arrays, 70, 122, 131, 132, 142, 223, 237, 287, 402 global oversupply of, 66n rooftop, 100 trade restrictions on manufacturers of, 65–69 Solar Pathfinder, 393 solar power, 24, 25, 72, 97, 102, 110, 118, 124, 127, 131, 147, 156, 215, 237, 395, 396 in combined-cycle plant, 129 fracking’s negative impact on, 129, 144 in Ontario, 67–68 private sector and, 100–101 Solar Radiation Management (SRM), 257–61, 277, 282 computer models of, 270–71 Governance Initiative (SRMGI) for, 263 historical record as predictive tool in, 271–75 “proof of harmlessness” argument in, 271, 272 unequal geopolitical risk in, 269, 275–76, 287 untestability of, 269–70 see also Pinatubo Option solastalgia, 165 Solazyme, 240 solidarity, 62–63 Solnit, Rebecca, 62–63 Solomon, Ilana, 86, 359 Solón, Pablo, 18 Sompeta, India, 350 Soon, Willie, 33 South Africa, 11, 127, 412 apartheid in, 454–55 fracking in, 347, 348 South Asia, 13 Pinatubo eruption and, 272 Southeast Asia, 14 South Korea, 81, 82 South Pacific, 162 Soviet Union, 75, 178 collapse of, 88, 178 see also Russia space mirrors, 258 Spaceship Earth, 286 Spain, 132, 225 opposition movement in, 9 renewables subsidies cut in, 110 Spatharidou, Dimitra, 132 Spencer, Baldwin, 415 Speth, Gus, 120, 205 Standard & Poor’s, 367–69, 383 Stanford University, 101, 102, 137, 214, 354 Starbucks, 49 starfish, 27–28 “Star Wars” missile defense system, 268n State Department, U.S., Keystone XL and, 140, 375 Statoil, 130, 179, 198, 246 steam power, 171–74, 266, 410 steamships, 175 Steinberger, Julia, 124 Steingraber, Sandra, 214, 317, 335, 427 Stephen, Marcus, 168 Stern, Nicholas, 88 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 70 Steshia Hubert, Nerida-Ann, 161, 162, 164 stewardship, 169, 383, 444–45 Steyer, Tom, 49, 234–35 Stiglitz, Joseph, 72 stimulus program, 121–22, 124 green initiatives in, 124 Stockholm, 179, 202 Stockholm Environment Institute, 417–18, 465 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 114 Stockman, Steve, 161 stock market crash of 1929, 10 Stone, Ed, 449 Stone, I.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

“To have one really good upstream asset,” Noto said, “you have to have six projects in the frying pan to bring experience, money, and talent to bear.” Moreover, Mobil’s new growth projects were in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Qatar, as well as Indonesia, meaning that the company’s future prospects would be susceptible to geopolitical risks of one kind or another. Qatar’s vast offshore natural gas field, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, would be a particular challenge. Because of the field’s immense size, the investment bill would be enormous. “The more we learned about Qatar,” said Noto, “the more we realized that it would be beyond the capacity of a single company.”

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In June 1982 Israel intervened directly in Lebanon. At one meeting of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, there was some discussion of instituting another embargo against the United States as "punishment." But the distressed condition of the oil market, combined with the immediate geopolitical risks for the Gulf exporters from Iran, was such as to make it an incredible proposal, and one that was quickly scotched as irrelevant, dangerous, and likely to be highly damaging to the interests of the exporters. Meanwhile, in June 1982, King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, an interim figure who had suffered from chronic heart disease, died.