mittelstand

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pages: 669 words: 150,886

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

Yet significant numbers of smallholding ‘new farmers’, beneficiaries of the 1945 land reform, were also heading west.⁴⁴ The Mittelstand felt next in line. Artisans, businessmen, and factory owners left in massive numbers in 1953, following the introduction of Manual Production Collectives. Significantly, neither farmers nor the Mittelstand were natural candidates for flight. Farmers were tied to the land, and the commercial sector to its businesses.⁴⁵ Members of the ‘old’ Mittelstand of artisans and shopkeepers knew there was little call for them in the West, so it was all the more remarkable when these groups departed.

Yet, as the GDR aged and the outlet to the West was closed, this pattern switched. By 1970 Berlin had reached pole position, at 0.66 per cent, followed by Potsdam at 0.41 per cent, a pattern repeated with minor changes ten years later in 1980. BAB, DA-5/5999. 20 Behind the Berlin Wall intelligentsia, the Mittelstand , and women of all classes, than it was for other groups.¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, the special status of travel petitions is revealed by the fact that from the 1970s the security section of the SED’s Central Committee, in conjunction with the MfS, became the arbiter on travel and emigration. Indeed, the vast majority of its surviving files consist of alphabetized special pleading by citizens to travel west.

As long as the German question remained open, uncommitted East Germans might harbour hopes that the socioeconomic clock could be turned back. The SED’s Party Information labelled this the ‘it-could-turn-out-different’ attitude, a form of domestic Hallstein doctrine ascribed to wide sections of the rural population, the Mittelstand and intelligentsia. Pre-emptively, therefore, the party would follow each diplomatic initiative with a barrage of media coverage, and its agitators engaged the population in ‘discussions’, at the workplace or on the doorstep, often based on readings of the current diplomatic notes. Invariably, a party spokesperson was on hand to give the official view.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Although there are niche producers such as these in the USA, Italy and Japan, two-thirds of the ‘hidden champions’ come from Germany and the German-speaking areas of Switzerland and Austria. These ‘hidden champions’ are the stars of the Mittelstand, the small and medium-size companies that are the basis of Germany’s extraordinary strength in manufacturing exports. German exports per head are four times those of the USA and more than ten times those of China. The businesses of the Mittelstand are predominantly family-owned. ‘Hidden champions’ have little need of external capital – like quoted companies, they typically generate more than sufficient cash for their investment needs from their internal resources.

Since these figures relate to gross income, and benefits and top rates of taxation increased everywhere, the equalising effect was even greater than these figures suggest. Many people may be surprised that Germany in 1970 was significantly less equal than Britain, France or the USA. The main explanation is the success of that country’s largely family-owned Mittelstand, or medium-size business sector, which I will discuss further in Chapter 5. The egalitarian trends did not continue. In France and Germany they simply came to an end; these measures of income inequality have not changed since 1970. In Britain and the USA incomes of the top 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent have increased sharply.

WestLB, the Landesbank of North Rhine-Westphalia, was one of the prime European casualties of the global financial crisis, and the federal government took control of Commerzbank, the second-largest German bank. Yet the co-operative and savings bank sector, which provides around two-thirds of lending to the Mittelstand and is willing to provide long-term debt finance of a kind and on terms virtually unavailable to small business in Britain and the USA, emerged largely unscathed. Throughout financialisation, global investment banks have sought to promote the development of capital markets in debt and equity in Germany and have frequently found support for this objective from the European Commission.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

For a more detailed explanation, see the French Geological Survey’s public report: ‘Panorama du marché du tungstène’ [‘View of the Tungsten Market’], BRGM, July 2012. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, 2016. The Mittelstand may have won the battle, but they did not win the war. China has a keen interest in some of Germany’s star industrial robots, such as KUKA. See ‘Allemagne: le “Mittelstand” face à l’offensive chinoise’ [‘Germany: the Mittelstand faces the Chinese offensive’], Le Monde, 4 June 2016. Graphene’s applications are astounding: bendy mobile phones, see-through laptops, ultra-powerful nanoprocessors, or nanochips that can be inserted into the human body to detect cancers, and so on.

The Chinese feel like rare earths are to them what vineyards are to the French.’26 This strategy of moving up the ladder is not limited to rare earths. As early as the 1990s, a wave of concern rippled through the fabric of German small-to-medium-sized enterprises (known as the Mittelstand) specialising in the manufacture of machine tools. (Machine tools are used for factory work automation, from basic milling machines to ultra-connected machining centres.) The Mittelstand acted pre-emptively by gradually replacing humans with robots, allowing it to remain competitive to the extent that German industry still represents 30 per cent of the country’s GDP.27 Except that industrial robots require terrific amounts of tungsten.

‘They drove down tungsten prices [from 1985 to 2004],29 hoping that Westerners concerned about getting their raw materials at the best price would buy exclusively from the Chinese, and that competing mines would shut down.’30 We can guess what could have happened next: the Middle Kingdom — now the hegemonic power in tungsten production — would have used the same blackmail tactic to force the Germans to move their factories as close as possible to the raw materials. The Chinese would have crushed any German lead in the cutting-tools industry, and would then have made off with the machine-tools segment — a pillar of the Mittelstand. It would have been the hold-up of the century! But the Germans saw the Chinese coming, and aligned instead with other tungsten producers (Russia, Austria, and Portugal, among others). ‘They preferred paying more for their resources to sustain the alternative mines and not depend on the Chinese,’ the Australian consultant told me.31 No matter.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

This is the exact opposite of the almost century-long agreement in the Labour Party that the party did not concern itself with so-called “industrial questions,” notably about skills and vocational training; the whole issue of apprenticeships belonged to the craft unions, preeminently the engineers. This argument is reinforced by the fact that other social groups—for example, the Catholics, as well as the Protestant farmers, the Mittelstand, and so on—were already organized in their own parties; in general, representative parties can best expand support intensively within the broad social groups they represent. A similar argument applies to other protocorporatist countries, since they were characterized by representative parties linked to broad social groups.

Confessional parties were no exception: while Christian Democratic parties defended (within limits) the interests of the Church (though by no means always Rome) they were also, in the words of Manow and Van Kersbergen (2009), “negotiating communities” for the many different economic groups—handwork and the Mittelstand, smallholding peasants, larger peasants, Catholic unions, as well as landlords and sometimes business (see also Kalyvas 1996 and Blackbourn 1980). This reflected the fact that economic life was partially organized on confessional lines in the relevant countries. The adoption of PR in this setting did not require exceptionally rational forecasting: once the move to the national level of industry and politics made it apparent that the preexisting majoritarian institutions of representation were producing stark disproportionalities, PR was the natural choice to restore representivity.

The reason that Catholics with different economic interests remained with a party that is Catholic largely only in name is explained, we submit, by the interdependencies of these economic interests. The rural-urban, peasant-artisan-small employer-merchant cospecific asset network acted, if our hypothesis is correct, to create a peasant-Mittelstand constituency that had an incentive to remain within the Catholic party. Another way of putting this is to use Manow and van Kersbergen’s (2009) notion of Christian democratic parties as negotiating communities with a range of different economic interests in terms of income levels and hence redistribution, but also with a common interest in sharing and managing cospecific assets.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

In the United States, between 1980 and 2005, all net new private sector jobs were in companies less than five years old. By contrast, most large companies have tried to rationalize or downsize employment. German statistics also show small and medium enterprises as net creators of jobs in 2000–2005 (with a million new jobs) and large enterprises as losers (a loss of 800,000 jobs). German Mittelstand The German Mittelstand is geographically concentrated, above all in the south of the country, in the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (as well as to some extent in the southern states of former East Germany, Saxony and Thuringia). The historical heart of the German economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Rhine-Ruhr basin, was just as dominated by large companies as France.

In the 2000s, Landesbanken had engaged heavily via offshore vehicles (mostly in Ireland) in the US subprime market. The Sachsen LB and the LB Rheinland-Pfalz needed to be rescued with public money and were then consolidated with the more solid LB Baden-Württemberg (where the traditional Mittelstand orientation was much greater). Another Landesbank, West LB, required €8 billion of assistance. IKB bank, a German institution that had its roots in the public sector encouragement of Mittelstand finance, was bailed out in 2007 and then sold to a private equity firm. One of the few bankers worldwide to be jailed as a consequence of the crisis was Gerhard Gribkowsky, head of risk management at Bayern LB.

Printed in the United States of America 13579108642 Contents 1 Introduction 1 PART I: POWER SHIFTS AND GERMAN-FRENCH DIFFERENCES 2 Power Shifts 17 Lethargy of European Institutions 18 The First Power Shift: From Brussels to National Capitals 20 The Second Power Shift: To Berlin-Paris and Ultimately to Berlin 27 After the Power Shift 33 3 Historical Roots of German-French Differences 40 Cultural Differences 41 Federalism versus Centralism 43 Mittelstand versus National Champions 48 Collaborative versus Confrontational Labor Unions 51 Historical Inflation Experiences 54 4 German-French Differences in Economic Philosophies 56 Fluid Traditions: Switch to Opposites 56 German Economic Tradition 59 French Economic Tradition 67 International Economics 74 PART II: MONETARY AND FISCAL STABILITY: THE GHOST OF MAASTRICHT 5 Rules, Flexibility, Credibility, and Commitment 85 Time-Inconsistency: Ex Ante versus Ex Post 86 External Commitments: Currency Pegs, Unions, and the Gold Standard 89 Internal Commitments: Reputation and Institutional Design 91 Managing Current versus Avoiding Future Crisis 94 6 Liability versus Solidarity: No-Bailout Clause and Fiscal Union 97 The No-Bailout Clause 98 Fiscal Unions 100 Eurobonds 111 Policy Recommendations 115 7 Solvency versus Liquidity 116 Buildup of Imbalances and the Naked Swimmer 117 Solvency 118 Liquidity 119 Crossing the Rubicon via Default 125 Sovereign-Debt Restructuring and Insolvency Mechanism 126 Fiscal Push: Increasing Scale and Scope of EFSF and ESM 127 Monetary Push 131 Policy Recommendations 133 8 Austerity versus Stimulus 135 The Fiscal Multiplier Debate 137 The Output Gap versus Unsustainable Booms Debate 143 Politics Connects Structural Reforms and Austerity 145 The European Policy Debate on Austerity versus Stimulus 148 Lessons and Policy Recommendations 153 PART III: FINANCIAL STABILITY: MAASTRICHT’S STEPCHILD 9 The Role of the Financial Sector 157 Traditional Banking 159 Modern Banking and Capital Markets 162 Cross-Border Capital Flows and the Interbank Market 166 10 Financial Crises: Mechanisms and Management 173 Financial Crisis Mechanisms 175 Crisis Management: Monetary Policy 185 Crisis Management: Fiscal Policy and Regulatory Measures 194 Ex Ante Policy: Preventing a Crisis 206 11 Banking Union, European Safe Bonds, and Exit Risk 210 Banking in a Currency Union 211 Safe Assets: Flight-to-Safety Cross-Border Capital Flows 222 Redenomination and Exit Risks 226 Policy Recommendations 233 PART IV: OTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES 12 Italy 237 Battling Economic Philosophies within Italy 237 Mezzogiorno: Convergence or Divergence within a Transfer Union 239 Italy’s Economic Challenges 242 Politics and Decline 245 13 Anglo-American Economics and Global Perspectives 249 Diverging Traditions 251 The United States: The Politics of Looking for Recovery 261 The United Kingdom: Brexit and the Politics of Thinking Outside Europe 267 China and Russia 279 Conclusion 286 14 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) 287 The IMF’s Philosophy and Crisis Management 289 The IMF’s Initial Involvement in the Euro Crisis 295 The IMF and the Troika 300 A Change in the IMF’s Leadership 304 Loss of Credibility: Muddling Through, Delayed Greek PSI 306 15 European Central Bank (ECB) 313 The ECB before the Crisis: Institutional Design and Philosophy 315 The ECB’s Early Successes and Defeats 325 The ECB and Conditionality 331 Lending and Asset Purchase Programs 343 Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) for European Banks 368 Taking Stock: Where Does the ECB Stand?


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

Despite this, Britain is still the eleventh largest manufacturer in the world, after India, largely because planes, cars and drugs are still made here by high-tech robots in co-operation with precision engineers. Our MPs have jealously looked to Germany’s Mittelstand, the substantial but unsexy ‘middle group’ of businesses that accounted for 52 per cent of the country’s output in 2011. Mittelstand businesses have fewer than 500 employees and a turnover below €50 million; they make unrivalled glass eyes or movie cameras or fish feed and then export them to the world. Freed of London, a family-founded business that makes specialised shoes needed in great quantities, is what a British Mittelstand firm would look like. There have been advances in pointe-shoemaking since 1929: US-based Gaynor Minden produces shoes with an ‘elastomeric’ toe of urethane foam which is supposed to never soften and St Petersburg’s Grishko adds silver to their shoes for its antibacterial properties.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that manufacturing jobs in the UK have diminished from 1 in 4 to 1 in 10 in a report of April 2009 called ‘The Future of UK Manufacturing: Reports of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated’. The Manufacturer magazine classes the UK as the eleventh biggest manufacturer in the world using figures from the World Bank and Wikipedia, and my definition of the Mittelstand is borrowed from the Financial Times lexicon. Details about Gaynor Minden and Grishko’s shoes can be found on their websites. The myth of Pygmalion first appeared in Book Ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the quotes from Capek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots come from Acts One and Three of the Dover eBook edition.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

One of the biggest, most successful manufacturers in Ravensburg was a family enterprise that eventually renamed itself Ravensburger.7 It resumed its production of puzzles and children's books, a business that continues to this day. And in Friedrichshafen, ZF, a subsidiary of the Zeppelin Foundation, re-emerged as a manufacturer of car parts. Companies like these, often from Germany's famous Mittelstand, i.e., the small and mid-sized businesses that form the backbone of the German economy, played a critical part in the post-war economic transformation. The Glorious Thirty Years in the West For many people living in Europe—myself included—the relief of the end of the war soon made way for the fear of another one.

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which as the name implied focused on a common market for a few key resources, had in the preceding years evolved to become the more all-encompassing European Economic Community (EEC). It allowed for a freer trade of goods and services across the continent. Many Mittelstand companies used that opening to set up subsidiaries and start sales in neighboring EEC countries. It was thanks in part to this increase in intra-regional trade that growth could continue in the 1970s. But some economic variables with a critical effect on growth, employment, and inflation, such as the price of energy, were not favorable.

Møller–Mærsk) [Denmark], 90, 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Mærsk Drilling, 205 Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møler ship, 200 Mærsk Oil, 205 Mærsk Tankers, 205 Magellan, Ferdinand, 101 Maisonrouge, Jacques, 11 Ma, Jack, 128 Majendie, Adam, 229 Majority Action, 216 Malaysia economic recession (1997) in, 98 inclusive approach to government in, 186 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 Maluku islands spices, 97 MAN Energy Solutions (Denmark), 117–118 Mao Zedong, 56, 57 Marco Polo, 99 Marriage rights (Singapore), 123 Marshall, George, 6 Marshall Plan (US), 6–7 Marx, Karl, 105, 131 Massey University, 223 Maybach (German manufacturer), 4 Mazzucato, Mariana, 112, 184–185, 191, 234 McKinley, William, 133 McKinsey's Global Institute, 197 Medicaid, 135 Medicare, 135 Megacities, 159 Mellon, Andrew, 132 Mercedes (Germany), 9 Merkel, Angela, 79, 81, 83 #Me Too movement, 250 Mexico health coverage disparities in, 43 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Micronesia, 181 Microplastics pollution, 50 Microsoft (US), 69, 126, 127, 137, 143, 209, 211 EU's anti-competition ruling against, 139–140, 141 Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows products of, 139 Middle Eastern countries emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 OPEC membership among, 12 Migration increasing tendency of countries to stem, 177 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 Migration Agency (IOM) [UN], 52 Milanovic, Branko, 45, 46, 84, 137, 138, 173 Milanovic's First Technological Revolutions, 45fig–46 Minimum rights rules (European Parliament) [2019], 243 Les Misérables (Hugo), 131 Mittelstand (Germany), 7, 12 Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering (Schwab, Kroos, Maschinenbau-Anstalten), 174, 175fig Modi, Prime Minister (India), 68 Modrow, Hans, 78 Mohammed, 99 Møller, A. P., 199 Møller, Arnold Mærsk Mc-Kinney, 203 Møller, Peter Mærsk, 199 Møller–Mærsk (Denmark), 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Moments of Life app (Singapore), 232 Monopolies antitrust legislation breaking up, 132–134, 135–136 AT&T, 127, 135 Big Tech, 127–129, 140–142, 145, 211 the EU Commission's Microsoft ruling on its, 139–140, 141 European regulators on the abuses of, 209 evolution of factual oligopolies of, 140–141 Microsoft successfully resisting breakup, 139 of the robber barons (19th century), 132–134 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 134 See also Competition Moran, Daniel, 160 Morgan, John Pierpont, 132 Moynihan, Brian, 214, 249, 250 Muslim traders (Middle Ages), 99–100 MYCL (Indonesia), 93–94, 96, 98, 114 MyInfo Business app (Singapore), 232 N Nadella, Satya, 69 Nagasaki bombing (1945), 5 Nanyang Commercial Bank (Hong Kong), 57–58 Narayen, Shantanu, 69 NASA's Earth Observatory, 160 National Academic of Sciences (US), 166 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 22, 44 National government.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

One of the biggest, most successful manufacturers in Ravensburg was a family enterprise that eventually renamed itself Ravensburger.7 It resumed its production of puzzles and children's books, a business that continues to this day. And in Friedrichshafen, ZF, a subsidiary of the Zeppelin Foundation, re-emerged as a manufacturer of car parts. Companies like these, often from Germany's famous Mittelstand, i.e., the small and mid-sized businesses that form the backbone of the German economy, played a critical part in the post-war economic transformation. The Glorious Thirty Years in the West For many people living in Europe—myself included—the relief of the end of the war soon made way for the fear of another one.

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which as the name implied focused on a common market for a few key resources, had in the preceding years evolved to become the more all-encompassing European Economic Community (EEC). It allowed for a freer trade of goods and services across the continent. Many Mittelstand companies used that opening to set up subsidiaries and start sales in neighboring EEC countries. It was thanks in part to this increase in intra-regional trade that growth could continue in the 1970s. But some economic variables with a critical effect on growth, employment, and inflation, such as the price of energy, were not favorable.

Møller–Mærsk) [Denmark], 90, 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Mærsk Drilling, 205 Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møler ship, 200 Mærsk Oil, 205 Mærsk Tankers, 205 Magellan, Ferdinand, 101 Maisonrouge, Jacques, 11 Ma, Jack, 128 Majendie, Adam, 229 Majority Action, 216 Malaysia economic recession (1997) in, 98 inclusive approach to government in, 186 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 Maluku islands spices, 97 MAN Energy Solutions (Denmark), 117–118 Mao Zedong, 56, 57 Marco Polo, 99 Marriage rights (Singapore), 123 Marshall, George, 6 Marshall Plan (US), 6–7 Marx, Karl, 105, 131 Massey University, 223 Maybach (German manufacturer), 4 Mazzucato, Mariana, 112, 184–185, 191, 234 McKinley, William, 133 McKinsey's Global Institute, 197 Medicaid, 135 Medicare, 135 Megacities, 159 Mellon, Andrew, 132 Mercedes (Germany), 9 Merkel, Angela, 79, 81, 83 #Me Too movement, 250 Mexico health coverage disparities in, 43 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Micronesia, 181 Microplastics pollution, 50 Microsoft (US), 69, 126, 127, 137, 143, 209, 211 EU's anti-competition ruling against, 139–140, 141 Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows products of, 139 Middle Eastern countries emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 OPEC membership among, 12 Migration increasing tendency of countries to stem, 177 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 Migration Agency (IOM) [UN], 52 Milanovic, Branko, 45, 46, 84, 137, 138, 173 Milanovic's First Technological Revolutions, 45fig–46 Minimum rights rules (European Parliament) [2019], 243 Les Misérables (Hugo), 131 Mittelstand (Germany), 7, 12 Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering (Schwab, Kroos, Maschinenbau-Anstalten), 174, 175fig Modi, Prime Minister (India), 68 Modrow, Hans, 78 Mohammed, 99 Møller, A. P., 199 Møller, Arnold Mærsk Mc-Kinney, 203 Møller, Peter Mærsk, 199 Møller–Mærsk (Denmark), 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Moments of Life app (Singapore), 232 Monopolies antitrust legislation breaking up, 132–134, 135–136 AT&T, 127, 135 Big Tech, 127–129, 140–142, 145, 211 the EU Commission's Microsoft ruling on its, 139–140, 141 European regulators on the abuses of, 209 evolution of factual oligopolies of, 140–141 Microsoft successfully resisting breakup, 139 of the robber barons (19th century), 132–134 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 134 See also Competition Moran, Daniel, 160 Morgan, John Pierpont, 132 Moynihan, Brian, 214, 249, 250 Muslim traders (Middle Ages), 99–100 MYCL (Indonesia), 93–94, 96, 98, 114 MyInfo Business app (Singapore), 232 N Nadella, Satya, 69 Nagasaki bombing (1945), 5 Nanyang Commercial Bank (Hong Kong), 57–58 Narayen, Shantanu, 69 NASA's Earth Observatory, 160 National Academic of Sciences (US), 166 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 22, 44 National government.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Schmidt, and Colin Vance, “Economic Impacts from the Promotion of Renewable Energy Technologies: The German Experience,” November 2009, http://www.rwi-essen.de/media/content/pages/publikationen/ruhr-economic-papers/REP_09_156.pdf, p. 15. 38Ibid., p. 14. 39Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, “German Mittelstand: Engine of the German Economy,” (undated), https://www.bmwi.de/English/Redaktion/Pdf/factbook-german-mittelstand,property=pdf,bereich=bmwi2012,sprache=en,rwb=true.pdf, p. 3. 40BDEW Bundesverband der Energie- und Wasserwirtschaft e.V. (Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries), Strompreisanalyse März 2015, https://www.bdew.de/internet.nsf/id/9D1CF269C1282487C1257E22002BC8DD/$file/150409%20BDEW%20zum%20Strompreis%20der%20Haushalte%20Anhang.pdf. 41Eric Heymann, “Carbon Leakage: A Barely Perceptible Process,” Deutsche Bank Research, January 23, 2014, p. 1. 42Ibid., p. 9. 43Ibid., p. 8. 44Ibid., p. 1. 45Eric Heymann, “Capital Investment in Germany at Sectoral Level,” Deutsche Bank Research, January 9, 2015, p. 7. 46Ibid. 47Ibid., p. 1. 48Rupert Darwall, Central Planning with Market Features: How Renewable Subsidies Destroyed the UK Electricity Market (London, 2015), pp. 14–15. 49Bill Peacock and Josiah Neeley, “The Cost of the Production Tax Credit and Renewable Energy Subsidies in Texas,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, November 2012. 50Vladimir Rakov and Martin Uman, Lightning: Physics and Effects (Cambridge, 2003), Table 1. 51Mark Mills, “The Clean Power Plan Will Collide with the Incredibly Weird Physics of the Electric Grid,” forbes.com, August 7, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2015/08/07/the-clean-power-plan-will-collide-with-the-incredibly-weird-physics-of-the-electric-grid/ (accessed October 2, 2015). 14.

A 2009 study found that the EEG increased the profits of Italian and Spanish coal-burning utilities, boosting the profits of Enel and Endesa by 9 percent and 16 percent, respectively.37 Overall, the paper came to a damning verdict on Germany’s renewables policy: “the EEG’s net climate effect has been equal to zero.”38 The most lasting damage caused by Germany’s failed climate policies is likely to be on the German economy. The EEG exemption was structured to benefit large energy consumers. This put the vast majority of small- and medium-sized businesses—the famed German Mittelstand, contributing to over half the nation’s total economic output and generating two trillion euros of annual revenues—on the hook for the rising costs of Energiewende.39 In the eight years to 2014, electricity prices for businesses consuming between 160 to 120,000 megawatt hours (MWh) a year increased by 35 percent, a lower rise than for households, as they did not have to foot the bill for exempting the largest electricity consumers.40 The value of the 90 percent exemption created a perverse incentive to overconsume electricity to keep above the threshold.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

They invest in R&D and design in order to produce cutting-edge products, in organisational development and training to increase factory productivity, and in software and data not only related to their own production but also as an adjunct to the physical goods they sell. If we consider rich countries that are thought to have particularly healthy manufacturing sectors, we usually find a story of sustained and distinctive investment in intangibles. The consultant Hermann Simon’s exploration of the German Mittelstand—Germany’s cadre of profitable, globally competitive medium-sized manufacturing businesses—finds that the sources of their profitability include a commitment to research, development, and innovation; strong, durable, information-rich relationships with suppliers and customers; and excellent workforce skills and organisation: all intangible assets.40 The success of the so-called developmental state in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be impossible without heavy investment in intangibles such as R&D, process design, and training that led to the emergence of globally competitive manufacturing businesses in sectors from shipbuilding to semiconductors.

See intellectual property rights (IPRs) Jefferson, Thomas, 184–85 Jennings, Will, 29 Jensen, Thais, 273n47 Jiang, Wei, 160 job conditions, 31–32 Johnson, Boris, 257–58 Johnson, Noel, 250 Johnson, Simon, 85 Johnstone, Bob, 145 Jona-Lasinio, Cecilia, 45 Jorgenson, Dale, 270n6 Juicero, 79 Kadyrzhanova, Dalida, 152 Kariko, Katalin, 22 Katz, Lawrence, 126 Kay, John, 36, 162 Kerr, William, 204 Keynes, John Maynard, 25, 148 Khan, Lina, 212 Khan, Zorina, 133 King, Mervyn, 36, 162 Kirzner, Israel, 124 Kleiner, Morris, 135 Kling, Arnold, 10, 85–86 knowledge economy, 54–56 Kortum, Sam, 176 Koyama, Mark, 250 Kremer, Michael, 265n1 Krieger, Joshua, 58 Krugman, Paul, 25, 189 Kuhn, Peter, 32 Lachmann, Ludwig, 124, 269n6 Lakonishok, Josef, 156 Leacock, Eleanor, 91 Leamer, Ed, 36 left-behind places, 28, 40, 76, 185, 195, 201–6 legitimacy, 143–44 Lerner, Josh, 172, 176 Leth-Petersen, Soren, 273n47 Lev, Baruch, 157 Levitt, Theresa, 268n24 Lian, Chen, 152 libertarianism, 250, 252 lighthouses, 100–104, 268nn24–26, 268nn30–31 Lindberg, Erik, 268n24, 268n29 Lindbergh, Charles, 140 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 3, 82, 83f Lost Golden Age, 37–40 Ma, Song, 160 Ma, Yueran, 152 Machin, Stephen, 232 Machlup, Fritz, 54–55 Manthorpe, Rowland, 257 market segmentation, 223 Markovits, Daniel, 32, 72–73, 231, 233 markup, 214–15 markups hypothesis, 46–47, 46f, 217–18 Marshall, Alfred, 64–65 Mass Flourishing (Phelps), 136 Matthew effect, 158, 189–90 Mauro, Paolo, 179–80 May, Theresa, 257 Mayer, Marissa, 208 Mazzucato, Mariana, 123, 136–37 McAfee, Andrew, 39–40, 59 McNally, Sandra, 232 McRae, Hamish, 28 mean reversion, 156 Meritocracy Trap, The (Markovits), 32, 72–73 Metcalfe, Robert, 277n22 metric tide, 128 Milgrom, Paul, 142, 245 Minoiu, Camelia, 152 mismeasurement hypothesis, 40 Mittelstand, 57 Mokyr, Joel, 43, 242, 258 Mondragon Corporation, 204–5 monetary policy, 14, 162–74, 168f, 170f monopolies, 211–12 Moore, John, 91 More from Less (McAfee), 59 Moretti, Enrico, 28–29, 186, 190 Motion Picture Patents Company, 2–3 movies, 2–3 Myers, John, 197 Nanda, Ramana, 172, 273n47 Narrow Corridor, The (Acemoglu and Robinson), 96 Nelson, Richard, 108 Nelson, Robert, 199 New Geography of Jobs, The (Moretti), 190 New Institutional Economics, 84 New Public Management, 252, 254 NIMBYism, 194–95, 200 Norquist, Grover, 252 North, Douglass, 10, 88, 92, 250 Occupy Wall Street, 148 Olson, Mançur, 110–11, 267n15 Open Data movement, 139 OpenSAFELY, 129 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 32 Orteig Prize, 140 Osborne, Matthew, 225 Ostrom, Elinor, 85, 106 pandemic.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

A family office platform facilitates networking so that families can benefit from each other’s experiences, coinvest, and leverage buying power. A Saudi Arabian family in the oil business might share insights on commodity prices, while a German industrialist provides intelligence on potential acquisition targets in the highly coveted German Mittelstand companies. A British billionaire can invite other families to participate in his socially responsible infrastructure investments, while an Indian entrepreneur might look for coinvestors in the telecom sector. The point is to obtain original information directly from the source rather than secondary, diluted information from a third party with incongruent interests.

., 209 McKinsey, 87, 115, 152 Meade, Michael, 201 Media scrutiny, 136–137 Meditation, 62, 70 Medley, Richard, 43 Mentoring gap, 154–155 Meritocracy, 71, 80, 83, 213 Meriwether, John, 207–209 Merkel, Chancellor Angela banker interactions with, 174 at Davos, 114 in Euro crisis, 177 general references to, 39, 61, 193 Josef Ackermann and, 142–144 Merrill Lynch, 56, 179, 183 Merton, Robert, 52, 208 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit, 76 Metzler, Jakob von, 136 Microsoft, 153 Middle East, 171 Milgram, Stanley, 18 Miliband, Ed, 137 Milken, Lowell, 191 Milken, Mike, 63–64, 129, 190–193 Milken Institute, 190, 192 Min Zhu, 27 Mindich, Eric, 109, 170 “Mind-reading,” 149 Minimum wage, 211 Minorities discrimination against, 148 integration of, 226 old boys’ network exclusion of, 82 Misinformation, 41 MIT. See Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mitchell, David, 87 Mittelstand, 123 Money. See also Wealth creation of, 32 network power of, 31 status associated with, 22 Mongolia, 171 Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., 110 Monoculture, 227 “Monopoly power,” 224 Monti, Mario, 84 Moore Capital, 109 Morgan Stanley, 89, 139 Moyers, Bill, 164 Moynihan, Brian, 115 Mozambique, 171 Murdoch, Elizabeth, 115 Musk, Elon, 69 Musk, Justine, 69 Myspace, 100 N Nadella, Satya, 153 National Bureau of Economic Research, 86 National Economic Council, 39, 165–166, 168, 184, 186 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 171 Nazre, Ajit, 201 Negotiation, 153 Netherlands, 120 Netscape, 199 Network(s).


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

‘Microsoft’s Nadella Taps Potential of Industrial Internet of Things’. Financial Times, 22 April. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c8e2e1d0-0861-11e6-a623-b84d06a39ec2.html (accessed 30 June 2016). Webb, Alex. 2015. ‘Can Germany Beat the US to the Industrial Internet?’ Bloomberg Businessweek, 18 September. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-18/can-the-mittelstand-fend-off-u-s-software-giants- (accessed 29 May 2016). Wheelock, Jane. 1983. ‘Competition in the Marxist Tradition’. Capital & Class, 7 (3): 18–47. Wile, Rob. 2016. ‘There Are Probably Way More People in the “Gig Economy” Than We Realize’. Fusion. Accessed 24 March. http://fusion.net/story/173244/there-are-probably-way-more-people-in-the-gig-economy-than-we-realize (accessed 29 May 2016).


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Walking through the neighborhood in the university district of Bologna, Italy, where I lived during my time there as a professor, I am struck by the number and variety of locally owned bookstores, grocery stores, and myriad other specialty retailers that would never stand a chance in the United States. Germany, Switzerland, and Austria are home to millions of what are called the Mittelstand, family-owned businesses of small to moderate size that tend to measure their impact across generations rather than quarters and refuse to be acquired by larger firms. As firms have gotten bigger, they have also taken a larger share of the profits generated in the economy. The companies on the original Fortune 500 list earned a combined $8.3 billion in profit in 1955 (approximately $79 billion in 2019 dollars).

Li, Robin Lillis, Paddy Lincoln Tunnel LinkedIn Lionel lobbying Lockheed Martin Loeb, Daniel Lord Mayor of London Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Luckey, Palmer Luff, Jonathan Luxembourg Lyft Lynch, Chris Macau Macy’s Ma Jun Malaysia Maniam, Aaron Mao Zedong Marcario, Rose market consolidation Marlboro Marxism Maryland mass mobilization Mattatuck Manufacturing Company Mauritius McCartin, Joseph McMillon, Doug Meany, George Medicaid Medicare Mehlman, Bruce Merck Merck, George W. mergers and acquisitions. See also market consolidation Mexico MI6 Michigan Microsoft Middle East. See also Gulf States; specific countries migration Miliband, David military power, traditional minimum wage Minnesota minority groups MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Mittelstand Molson Coors Monaghan, Paul Mongolia monopolies Montserrat Mook, Nate Morehouse College Moscow Narodny Bank Mounk, Yascha Mountaire Farms Mugabe, Robert Mussolini, Benito Namibia NASA National Guard National People’s Congress National Science Foundation Native Americans Nazism Nelson, Gaylord Netherlands New Deal New Jersey Newmark, Craig New Zealand Nigeria Nike Nixon, Richard Nordic countries.


pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

This has always puzzled and saddened me, partly because I believe that a business loses something when it goes public but also because so many of these businesses end up in foreign hands, losing their way and ending up as vassal companies. Entrepreneurial family businesses, on the other hand, may be handed down through generations. Britain has remarkably few compared with other countries. In Germany, for example, there are the famous Mittelstand, medium-size private businesses, often multigenerational, as well as giants like BMW and our competitor Bosch. France has big family-owned fashion houses, Italy and Spain the same. The U.S. has the largest number of family businesses in the world, including Mars and Cargill, the agri-chemicals business.

See Dyson Farming Faurecia 217 Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios 288 Fenlands 247 Fiennes, Ranulph 128 Finch, John M. 74 First World War (1914–18) 51, 60, 179, 245, 252 Flos 281 focus group–led designing 45 Ford, Henry 44, 119, 214, 255 Foster, Norman 26, 28, 30, 120 Foxconn 59 France, Dyson in 174, 181, 183–84, 232 Friends 188 Fry, Jeremy 104, 268 Amway lawsuit and 95 Ballbarrow, offers to back 61, 84 influence upon JD 44–6, 67, 78, 86, 120, 147–48, 292, 306 JD begins to work for 32–34 Le Grand Banc and 60 motorized wheelchairs and 92, 94, 303 Prototypes Ltd 90 Sea Truck and 32–35, 37–39, 46, 49, 51–2, 59, 60, 61, 120 Fuller Brush company 90 Fuller, Buckminster 26, 30–31, 32, 52, 124, 142, 233 Fuller, Thomas 268 Furst, Anton 30–31 Gammack, Peter 104, 108, 179, 297 Chelsea Flower Show garden and 137 DC01 and 113, 127 DC12 and 186 DC35 Digital Slim and 154, 156, 158 Digital Motor and 148 EV, Dyson (electric vehicle) (N526) and 221, 222, 224 Pure Hot + Cool purifier and 164 recruited by JD 98–99, 104 Supersonic hairdryer and 170 Garbstore, The 300 Garnett, Andy 46, 184 gas-filled shock absorbers 41 General Electric (GE) 58 Genius of Britain 123 geodesic domes 30, 31, 142, 268 Germany, Dyson in 183–84 G-Force 94, 96–97, 186, 187, 299, 305 Gloster Meteor 57 Good Morning America 164 Goodwood Revival 56 Google Glass 141 Gordon, Alexander 200 Gove, Michael 269, 271, 272 Great Exhibition (1851) 262–63 Great Smog (1952) 209 Great Western Railway 261 “greenwash” 123, 226, 243–44 Gresham’s School 5–7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 142, 245, 289–91 Dyson Building 289–90 Gresley, Sir Nigel 40–41 GUS (General Universal Stores) 109–110 Gustin, Daniel 73 Habitat (exhibit), Montreal Expo 277 Hall, Jerry 138 Hardie, George 27 Harrison, George 49 Harvey Norman 183 Hastings, Sir Max 256 Heath, Edward 64 Heinkel 178 57 Henry IV, King of England 89, 159 HEPA filters 133, 161–62, 165, 235 Heyerdahl, Thor 61 Hill, Jane 27 Hillman Imp 267 Hitler, Adolf 43, 56 Hockney, David 17, 27, 28 Honda Accord 53 Civic 67 50 Super Cub 19–20, 22, 185 Honey, Jim 137, 138 Hoover 57, 82–83, 89, 107, 110, 116 Junior 82–83, 84, 85 hovercraft 6, 35, 91 Howe, Elspeth 118 Howe, Geoffrey 118 Hughes, Lucy 288 Hullavington Airfield campus, Dyson 177, 189, 198, 199, 224, 225, 228–34, 231, 235, 241, 278 Hunt, David 109, 111 Hunt, Tony 30, 31, 90, 120, 121 hydrolastic suspension system 51 ICI 68 Ideal Home Exhibitions 90 Imperial College London 26, 98–99, 127, 177, 262, 274, 282, 284 Dyson School of Design Engineering 177, 282 India, Dyson in 202–3 Indonesia 193, 194–95, 203 Industrial Revolution 40, 42, 248, 261, 265, 283, 296 infrared tracking technology 289 “Ingenious Britain: Making the UK the leading high tech exporter in Europe” (JD report) 270 injection molding 68–70, 133 Institute of Mechanical Engineers 43 Institution of Civil Engineers 43 International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 204, 206 Iona Appliances 97–98, 99, 100, 102, 105 Isle of Wight Pop Festival (1970) 64 Issigonis, Alec 17, 26, 37, 38–39, 50, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 78, 88, 216, 217, 267 Jacob, Lord Justice Robin 158 Jaguar 8, 53, 74 D-Type 16 Mark 2 51 XJS 224 XK8 224 James and Deirdre Dyson Trust 288 James Dyson Building for Engineering, Cambridge University 281–82 James Dyson Foundation 239, 267–68, 271, 272, 273, 275, 281–2, 283, 284, 389–90, 313 Japan DC12 designed for 151 Dyson cyclone vacuum motor sourced from 123, 145, 147 Dyson Japan 185–87, 188, 194, 215 G-Force and 95, 96, 97, 99 Jaray, Paul 233 JCB 122, 293, 295 jet engine 56–58, 122, 148, 151, 265, 266, 293 JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) 225 John Lewis 113, 115, 116–18, 119 Johnson, Boris 233 Johnson, Jo 273–74, 275 Johnson Wax 99, 182 Jones, Allen 28 Junkers, Hugo 230, 232 Jupp, Simeon 98, 99, 104, 113 Kalms, Stanley 119 Karajan, Herbert von 54 Kettering, Charles 214 Kevlar 91, 268 Kier & Co. 232 Kimberly-Clark 162 King, Sir David 131, 211 King, Spen 223 King’s Road, London 23, 27, 300 Kirby 90 Kirk-Dyson 63, 64–80 Ballbarrow and see Ballbarrow cyclonic separators, first use of 73–74 JD ousted from 78–80 origins of 63, 64 Trolleyball and 77–78 Waterolla and 77, 77 Kirkwood, Stuart 70 Kite Light 21 Kleeneze Rotork Cyclon 89–90 Klimov, Vladimir Yakovlevich 58 Knickerbocker Corporation 74 Kon-Tiki raft 61 Kuenssberg, Laura 238 Lagerfeld, Karl 170 Lamella hangars 232 Lamont, Brian 109–110 Land Rover 47, 49, 94, 217, 223, 225 lean engineering 123–24, 244 Le Corbusier 24, 28 Ledwinka, Hans 233 Lee Hsien Loong 225 Lee Kuan Yew 190 Lefèbvre, André 50, 55, 87–88 Le Grand Banc 60, 61, 94 Lightcycle task lamp, Dyson 202–3 Linacre, Edward 287 Linolite 120, 121 Linpac 104, 249 lithium-ion batteries 152, 159, 175, 177, 212, 213, 214, 224 Littlewood, Joan 31–32 Littlewoods 109, 110, 115 Ljungström, Gunnar 50 London Fire Brigade 48 London Olympics (2012) 42 Lutyens, Edwin 230 Lux meters 289 MacDonald, Ramsay 230 Magès, Paul 41, 55 Maigue, Carvey Ehren 286–87 Malaysia 39, 125, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 198, 281 Malmesbury campus, Dyson 78, 130, 137, 150, 170, 182, 189, 192, 195, 241, 245, 274, 275, 277, 279, 293, 299 D4 building 211 DIET Village 276, 277, 279 D9 building 126 The Hangar 125 Lightning Café 126 Morris Mini Minor at 54 origins of 78, 120–25, 120–21 renewal of offices and upgrading of laboratories 198 Rolls-Royce RB.23 Welland at 56 management structure, Dyson 237–38 manufacturing, British attitudes toward 39–44, 57–59, 64–67, 189–93, 203–8, 236–41, 259, 260–91 Maple Tree 200–1 MarinaTex 288 Masaru Ibuka 54 May, Theresa 203, 225 McCullin, Don 127 Mechanics’ Institute 261–62 Meikle, Andrew 248 Meningitis Research Foundation 288 Michelin 55, 217, 277 middle-class buyers, Dyson products and 119 Mig-15 fighter 58 Millennium Experience 263 Minards, Ian 223–24 Mini 17, 26, 28, 29, 38, 45, 49–51, 53, 54, 55, 88, 125, 216, 217, 267, 293–94 Ministry of Defence 91, 228 Minoru Mori 186 MIRA (Motor Industry Research Association) wind tunnel 221 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 282 Mittelstand (medium-size private German businesses) 295 Miyake, Issey 139–41, 186 Model T, Ford 214 MOM 288 monocoque 51, 224 Moore, Charles 135, 137 Morris Marina 53, 67 Mini Minor 54 Minor 12, 17, 28, 43, 53 1100 37, 51 Oxford 22 Traveller 17 Morris, Estelle 269 Morita, Akio 38 Morton, Lord 121, 122 Moulton, Alex 51–53 Moulton bike 52–53, 268 Moulton, John Coney 51 Mr.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

In Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain and France, community and agricultural cooperative banks make up as much as 64% of the banking market.10 Locally focused mutual banks increase the democratic oversight of the depositors and ensure that money deposited is then lent out into the local economy. This is one of the ways that the German Mittelstand tier of SMEs has been developed and financed, and is key to reflating an economy at the scale of a combined authority. The CSBA says that in contrast to the bailouts needed in the UK and elsewhere, small local banks in Germany were able to continue lending as usual throughout the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, enabling them to avoid the predicament that engulfed their larger competitors.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

The state and the communities must guard against letting the officials feel that they are being given up to the storms of economic developments without protection. The same went for white-collar staff in industry, who, unlike their manual co-workers, were unwilling to compromise their hard-won and precious social standing by going on strike for higher wages. As for small businessmen and craftsmen, the backbone of the much-admired German Mittelstand, many found their businesses shut down as inessential to the war effort, starved of raw materials diverted to more vital sectors or simply bereft of customers.22 They represented millions more Germans subjected to dramatically reduced incomes and loss of status – and accordingly ripe to blame those seen as profiteering.

A sample of working-class families’ living costs, for instance, reveals that rent made up 19.7 per cent of expenditure in 1907, 8 per cent in 1917, 7.3 per cent in 1919, and, at the climax of the inflation, a mere 0.3 per cent!22 This was, of course, bad news for landlords. While it might be that they were able to pay off mortgages quickly because of the inflation, the financial return on their properties was miserable. Landlords, often not wealthy people but simply once-prosperous members of the Mittelstand – skilled artisans, shopkeepers, small tradesmen – who had invested in rental property as a form of saving and supplementary income, made up yet another aggrieved class in Weimar Germany. Given the virtual cessation of residential construction during the war, and the lack of incentive to build for rent after peace came, the housing shortages, particularly in the big cities, became even more chronic.


pages: 166 words: 49,639

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

Not surprisingly, the business underperformed and he was replaced. Another characteristic of top managers is that they manage for the long term. Sudden strategic moves to suit quarterly targets or shorter-term bonus measures are damaging. Family stewardship often beats publicly traded or private equity as a form of ownership for this reason. Germany’s Mittelstand companies, which are principally family owned, are the backbone of their economy: often world-class operations that adopt prudent financing, and invest in capital expenditure and research and development. Incentives at all levels tend to be long term. The best managers have real domain knowledge.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

In a similar fashion, productivity in the UK increased by 80 per cent between 1973 and 2011 (although it is still low by the standards of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) but the hourly compensation of the median worker went up by only 10 per cent in real terms. All over the world – including in socialist Sweden and Mittelstand Germany – top earners and top jobs have been doing just fine, while for a lot of people in the middle and bottom, earnings and wealth haven’t increased at all in real terms since the 1970s. There are other forms of inequality that no one is thinking about at play here too. As a general rule, technology empowers those who have either the money or the skills to take advantage of it.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

The American middle classes may not have suffered so badly economically— although that situation may be changing as the economy ceases to generate adequate numbers of "middle-class" jobs—but the nation's openness to immigration means that the middle classes have suffered even more from demographic pressure and the cultural tension and change that immigration has encouraged. This clash has generated much of the electricity which drives the turbines of nationalism and other radical political tendencies across the world. A classic example is the role of the endangered and declining nobility, peasantry and traditional middle class (Mittelstand) of Germany in generating German "radical conservatism," and the new nationalism which was its intimate partner, in the later nineteenth century.14 These social strata generated movements which often combined radical economic protest against the new capitalism with intense nationalism and cultural conservatism.15 And as the example of the Prussian nobility shows, absolute decline does not necessarily have to occur to drive an old elite in a radical direction—the threat can be enough.

Cf. Bennett, Party of Fear, pp. 27-182; Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, pp. 19-23. 13. Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment, p. 32. 14. See John Weiss, Conservatism in Europe, 1770-1945: Tradition, Reaction and CounterRevolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 71-89. For the role of the small town Mittelstand and the effects on later German nationalism of the destruction of 239 N O T E S TO P A G E S 93-96 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. their ancient social and political order by the modern state, see Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648-1817 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially pp. 405-431.


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

The success in forklift trucks was replicated in other industries and across their supply chains. Germany has been brilliant at identifying and exploiting specialist high-quality export niches with a global market, and has spawned a range of medium-sized companies, the so-called Mittelstand, to supply these markets with items ranging from conveyor belts to industrial springs. One company has cornered the world market in antennae for skyscrapers. The top Mittelstand companies adhere to the ‘80 per cent model’ – an 80 per cent global market share, and 80 per cent of production exported. Such products are rarely glamorous, but all, in retrospect, are rather obvious commercial bets as emerging economies develop.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

The list includes schools, hospitals, sports teams, clubs, even families; once these had reached what seemed to be the optimum size any further addition would be pointless, might even be damaging. For these organisations the key question was not bigger but better, which, of course, begged the question, better in what way? We are back to those unanswered questions, why? what? and for whom? Better not bigger is also the watchword of many of Germany’s Mittelstand family businesses. These medium-sized businesses, mostly family-owned and mostly in manufacturing, are the mainstay of the German economy. They treat debt with suspicion, invest for the long term and shun the stock market. The market leaders in many niche products, their aim is to do one thing really well.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The biggest were the “universal banks” that managed to be commercial banks, investment banks, and investment trusts all rolled into one. (J. P. Morgan achieved something similar, but only by getting around state laws, rather than being encouraged by them.) Deutsche Bank (formed in 1870) and Dresdner Bank (1872) concentrated on financing large-scale industry, leaving smaller banks to concentrate on the Mittelstand of medium-sized family firms that also powered the country’s success. In 1913, seventeen of the biggest twenty-five joint-stock companies were banks. Universal banks financed almost half of the country’s net investment. Bankers also sat on the supervisory boards of all Germany’s great industrial companies, providing advice and contacts as well as capital (it was the bankers that organized Siemens’s merger with German Edison in 1883).


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

In these cases, blood ties may not be the enemy of clean and open corporate governance, particularly in cases where the family has stepped back to play an ownership and oversight role in a publicly traded company, leaving the management of the company in professional hands. This can be a strong combination because the family keeps the company focused on the long term, and the market keeps it open to scrutiny. This, for example, is the model in Germany, were billionaire families control some of the world’s most productive companies, including many of the Mittelstand companies that drive the flourishing manufactured export sector and are more a source of pride than resentment. This also seems to be the case in Italy and France, which have seen quite a few new names appearing on recent billionaire lists. Many of these new entrants derive their wealth from old family companies and have risen slowly from the multimillionaire ranks to the billionaire lists.

This move has been attacked as a “beggar thy neighbor policy” by fellow members of the Eurozone, who now share a continental currency with Germany and can no longer respond to falling German labor costs by allowing their own national currencies to fall. But Germany has also pushed reform in many other ways: It has a core of medium-size industrial companies known as the Mittelstand, whose family owners are known for thinking in the long term, and they have made smart strategic use of the abundant supply of cheap, well-educated labor that opened up to them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many have invested in new factories in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as in the United States and China, effectively exporting the German industrial model. 2010 was the first year in which German car companies made more cars abroad than at home, helping to forge what is arguably the leading global industrial power.


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255699242_Why_Do_Credit_Rating_Agencies_Issue_Unsolicited_Ratings_And_Why_Do_Issuers_Solicit_Ratings_If_They_Can_Get_Them_For_Free. Gantz, John, and David Reinsel (2012) ‘The digital universe in 2020: big data, bigger digital shadows, and biggest growth in the Far East’, https://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf. Geiger, Theodor (1930) ‘Panik im Mittelstand’, Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 7/10 (pp. 637-54). Gilbert, Paul (2000) ‘The relationship of shame, social anxiety and depression: the role of the evaluation of social rank’, Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 7/3 (pp. 174-89). Gillespie, Tarleton (2012) ‘Can an algorithm be wrong?’


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

In the UK, and to a lesser extent the US, the investment process was much more dominated by impersonal institutions obsessed with short-term returns and with little interest in the individual companies in which they invest.328 In continental Europe, in contrast, companies have been under less pressure for short-term performance from their shareholders and the banks that have supported them. A large chunk of Germany’s banking system consists of a network of regional banks aimed at supporting the Mittelstand, local small and medium-sized businesses. In the UK, small firms have suffered from the increasing concentration of financial power in the large London-based boardrooms. An empirical study of the United States found, for the period from 1973 to 2003, a negative relationship between the growth of ‘financialisation’—the growing importance of financial markets—and the real economy, leading to a decline in real investment at the firm level.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Unlike the preceding period, it was a time when people contended that “small is beautiful” (to quote the title of another influential book, by Ernest F. Schumacher, published in 1973). The future no longer seemed to belong to industrial giants like IBM, Boeing, Ford, and Westinghouse. It was a time to celebrate the flexibility and small scale of the German Mittelstand (mid-sized manufacturers) and the family enterprises in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Japan’s rise began to look unstoppable. No one took notice of China yet. And of course the end of communism was not foreseen at all. A final wave of literature that I want to mention here is from the 1990s. It was dominated by the Washington Consensus (a set of policy prescriptions that emphasized deregulation and privatization) and the forecasting of the “end of history” (the title of an influential 1989 article by Francis Fukuyama, leading to the book The End of History and the Last Man [1992]).


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

Famous for its budget wrangles, its extremes of partisanship, gerrymandering, and money politics, its pathetic levels of voter participation, its ruinous ballot ­initiatives, its absurdly complicated structure, and its crumbling infrastructure, California government has been big, broke, and inefficient. The gap between Palo Alto and Sacramento is repeated all across the West: Wall Street operates in a different time zone from Washington, D.C.; Bavaria’s Mittelstanders, Milan’s fashion moguls, and Soho’s multimedia entrepreneurs work to different rules (and hours and pay) from the politicians in Berlin, Rome, and Whitehall. But there is no political distemper that cannot be found in its most extreme form in California. It is hard to think of anywhere else where the rhetoric of small government and the reality of big government have collided so spectacularly—and where the failures of Milton Friedman’s half revolution have been demonstrated so clearly.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

In any case, if the exceptional openness of the British economy to foreign ownership has contributed to the decline story the bigger share of blame must lie with that familiar bogeyman of short-termism: the narrow focus on shareholder returns and the active market in corporate control stimulated by investment banks in the City of London that often creates a disincentive to plan and invest long. The Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model puts British businesses at a disadvantage compared with their competitors in Europe and Asia. German companies, particularly the Mittelstand of medium-sized family businesses, tend not to be quoted on the stock market. Managers can plan ahead—in developing new export markets, for example—without fear of a takeover, losing their job, or losing out on bonuses. The greater weight that shareholders, and stock market sentiment, have in big British businesses means managers are often on a treadmill of maximising short-term earnings.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

Such experiences were repeated in different corners across the country. France launched plenty of small firms, especially after it simplified the registration of new companies under Nicolas Sarkozy, when the country introduced the ‘auto-entrepreneur’ regime for new microbusinesses. But it singularly failed to develop a French version of the German ‘Mittelstand’, those mid-sized, export-oriented, mostly family-run industrial firms. The competitiveness of French industry, and with it economic growth, seemed to be on a path of inexorable decline. Between 2005 and 2010 France’s share of world exports shrank by almost 20 per cent, a decline exceeded within the eurozone only by Greece.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

By some measures it is ranked as the world’s most innovative economy.70 Nearly 25 percent of German GDP is in manufacturing (in the United States, for comparison, manufacturing makes up only about 15 percent of output). The World Bank’s 2016 Logistics Performance Index ranks Germany’s logistics performance and infrastructure as the best in the world.71 Eight of the world’s one hundred largest companies are German, and the country also boasts a highly successful Mittelstand, or group of globally successful small and middle-sized firms. Of the world’s roughly 2,700 “hidden champions”—firms that are in the top three in their industry and first on their continent and have less than €5 billion in sales—almost half are in Germany. By one estimate these relatively small firms have created 1.5 million new jobs, grown by 10 percent per year, and registered five times as many patents per employee as large corporations.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

NoFi was founded in 1927, in Bremen, at the height of the Weimar Republic. For most of its existence, the small bank had been a bit of a disaster, struggling from one near-collapse to the next and switching owners every few years. It had just a handful of branches and a few dozen staff. The bank took deposits from ordinary Germans, made loans to Germany’s Mittelstand group of small businesses, and provided financing for mortgages and car buyers too. Since the 1960s, NoFi had also been a provider of factoring services. Over the past few decades, NoFi had been passed from new owner to new owner. Each time, a different strategic plan was put in place, but the bank mostly languished.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

Here, it’s whether Obama or Pelosi or Reid is “winning” or “losing,” without all that much interest as to what exactly is being won or lost. Here I could talk politics with H. and S. and many others without anyone ever mentioning the name of “Schroeder” or “Kohl.” Ah, I wish I could explain it. Well, let me try an example from that first night. We were talking about the Mittelstand, the middle-sized manufacturers. “They’re being cut out by the government,” S. said. “Cut out of what?” I said. “Research. Basic research. Now the global companies get it all.” “Do the two of you—do you really think this will affect your lives?” “Of course,” S. said, and looked annoyed. “The problem is, Germany is not interested in research—” “Who is?”


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Despite these challenging times, Schumpeter witnessed the impressive wholesale reinvention of business, which fed into his theory of ‘creative destruction’ where the innovators flourish. Small and medium-sized German businesses, mostly family owned, upgraded their operations and became known globally for their quality. Many of these Mittelstand companies are still around today, for example Hohner harmonicas, Krones labelling machines and the Jil Sander fashion label. Big businesses also reinvented themselves. Five of Germany’s ten largest firms manufactured steel at the time of his move to Bonn. By the time he left, several had merged to become Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), which was the biggest steel and mining company in Europe.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Despite these challenging times, Schumpeter witnessed the impressive wholesale reinvention of business, which fed into his theory of ‘creative destruction’ where the innovators flourish. Small and medium-sized German businesses, mostly family owned, upgraded their operations and became known globally for their quality. Many of these Mittelstand companies are still around today, for example Hohner harmonicas, Krones labelling machines and the Jil Sander fashion label. Big businesses also reinvented themselves. Five of Germany’s ten largest firms manufactured steel at the time of his move to Bonn. By the time he left, several had merged to become Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), which was the biggest steel and mining company in Europe.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

All figures below taken from this paper unless stated otherwise. 48 Ibid. 49 See for example Wong (2017) 50 Bloom et al. (2020) 51 Cowen (2011) 52 Ibid., pp. 14–15. These figures are calculated by Cowen in 2004 dollars. 53 Thanks to Mikko Packalen for this and many other suggestions. 54 See for example Erixon and Weigel (2016). It could be argued that European innovation is concentrated in smaller companies like those forming the German Mittelstand. However that then prompts the question of why Europe cannot scale innovative companies – another but related problem in executing big ideas. 55 Erixon and Weigel (2016), p. 11 56 Greenspan and Wooldridge (2018), p. 395 57 Naudé (2019) 58 Cowen (2018a), p. 6 59 Ibid., p. 73., see also Shambaugh et al. (2018).


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

German capitalism mixes seemingly impossible ingredients, like strong trade unions and efficiency, high-cost workers that also compete in manufacturing, and generous unemployment benefits alongside low levels of unemployment. It also has a strong base of independent, small and medium-sized family-run manufacturers called the Mittelstand. (Literally, the middle class.) This is partly the reason that Germany overtook China in 2017 with the world’s largest trade surplus.62 Germany’s economic strength is a result of its own particular circumstances. In the mid-1990s, it suffered with the twin problems of high debt and high unemployment.


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

This dynamic Central European industrial complex is becoming a key global manufacturing base, focusing on precision machinery and chemicals as well as autos and electronics, that generates 42 percent of the European Union’s entire manufacturing value-added exports.60 This competitive cluster, drawing investment from throughout the world, is sourcing increasing quantities of components in China, while Chinese firms move up the value chain into Central Europe by acquiring German Mittelstand (small and medium-sized) manufacturers and robotics firms as well.61 German logistics firms like DHL and DB Schenker Logistics, as well as massive Chinese intermodal transport conglomerates like COSCO and China Railway Corporation, compete to control railways and ports, with the BRI conferring major strategic advantages on the Chinese.62 Arctic Transit Routes There are, finally, also the transit routes from Northeast Asia to Europe across the Arctic seas, recently termed the “Polar Silk Road” by the Chinese government.63 These routes are also shorter than the traditional maritime routes around the southern rim of Eurasia, and could be efficient if only frigid conditions did not block the way.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

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

According to the WTO, 80 percent of global trade is supported by financial institutions, but postcrisis regulations (such as Basel III, which requires banks to hold more capital onshore) inadvertently choked this crucial conduit between the financial sector and the real economy that helps companies produce exportable goods and has proven to be a reliable investment given its low default rate. Funds such as the European Investment Bank and the Abraaj Group have stepped in to back region-wide funding exchanges for the Middle East and Africa so that SMEs can more easily raise capital. Germany has five times more such Mittelstand companies than the entire United States (which has four times as many people), indicating a much greater emphasis on rooted entrepreneurs such as toolmakers who can benefit from trade finance to expand to growth markets in Asia. The spread of European SMEs into Asia and ASEAN SMEs into the rest of Asia, Africa, and back to Europe is a testament to how channeling global capital to local companies creates real and productive new flows.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The German model of codetermination, which gave an extensive role to unions in corporate management, and high wages and generous social benefits (including large profit-sharing payments) helped ensure peaceful labor relations. Unlike contemporary American manufacturers, Volkswagen did not fear that workers might take advantage of concentration to disrupt production and force their will on the company.58 Though the Mittelstand of small and medium-sized enterprises continued to dominate the West German and later unified German economy, there were, besides Volkswagen, some manufacturers with very large plants. The chemical giant BASF, once part of IG Farben but reformed as a separate entity after World War II, concentrated production at its long-established complex along the Rhine in Ludwigsafen.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Lufthansa is Europe’s biggest airline by passengers, but lags far behind Easyjet by profits.469 Majority-state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which owns Arriva in Britain, is Europe’s biggest railway operator, but far from its best. While Germany has plenty of big companies, it is perhaps best known for its mid-sized ones, the Mittelstand. These are mostly manufacturers which focus on machinery, auto parts, chemicals and electrical equipment. Many have carved out specialised niches so narrow that they face little global competition. Their perceived virtues – notably the patient, long-term view that these often family-owned firms can take – contrast with the adrenaline-rush, rollercoaster ride of Anglo-American financial capitalism.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, 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 Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

West Germans owned just 200,000 cars in 1948 but 9 million by 1965.14 The West German economy became an export machine, driven by the production of capital goods. An enduring aspect of the German system was that the big manufacturers had a strong relationship with a group of smaller suppliers, known as the Mittelstand. The French economy laid a greater emphasis on planning than did the German, and had particular success in car manufacturing, thanks to Citroën, Peugeot and Renault. Italy had its strengths in Fiat, the car manufacturer, chemicals companies like Edison, and the fashion industry. The Netherlands had Philips, the electronics group, a successful chemicals industry, and, from the late 1950s onwards, enjoyed a gas boom.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

Because they were export oriented, the potential inefficiencies of domestic monopoly were minimized; large German firms were kept honest by large firms in other countries rather than by each other. Although the German economy is dominated by large firms, it (like Japan) also has a large and dynamic small-firm sector, the so-called Mittelstand. Family businesses are as prevalent and important in Germany as anywhere else; indeed, there are more cases of families’ retaining management control of large businesses in Germany than in the United States.12 But the family has never constrained the creation of large, professionally managed firms to the degree it has in China, Italy, France, or even Britain.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

MIT Technology Review, 21 Mar. 2016 <https://www. technologyreview.com/s/601081/the-rise-of-data-capital/> (accessed 8 Dec. 2017). Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998. Mitchell, William J. E-topia. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000. Mitchell, William J. Me ++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. Mittelstand, Brent Daniel, Patrick Allo, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Sandra Wachter, and Luciano Floridi. ‘The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate’. Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–21. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 470 Bibliography Mizokami, Kyle.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The affected plant got other models to work on and other jobs—so no one was losing.”22 Motivated by an eagerness to strengthen the domestic employment base, enterprises in northern Europe do not offshore with the same vigor as American firms. Journalists at the Economist examined offshoring in some detail in January 2013, concluding that “European firms had been off-shoring less in the first place,” than American firms in recent decades: “Cultural factors are partly responsible; Germany’s mittelstand or mid-sized family firms, for instance, sell their products globally but are more inclined to make things in their own backyards.”23 Perhaps the most thorough studies of offshoring in the family capitalism countries and Reagan-era America have been done by Bronfenbrenner and Luce. Drawing on their data, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard with the Washington-based Institute for International Economics determined that offshoring is considerably less prevalent among European firms than American ones.


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

This share excluded many emerging market stocks that remain inaccessible to global investors and remains well below the 30% share of emerging countries in global GDP. • Privately held enterprises may, on aggregate, be as valuable as publicly traded stocks. Vissing-Jorgensen–Moskowitz (2002) estimate that in the 1990s nonpublicly held equity by U.S. entrepreneurs was similar in size to the public equity market. Asian family enterprises, German “Mittelstand”, and sovereign assets are global examples of wealth not captured in listed equities, but I have not seen good estimates. The values could be very high, but in any case these are not investable. • Combining major fixed income market indices, the global bond markets amounted to $40.3 trillion in December 2009.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

On July 30, IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG (IKB), a small German bank, announced that it expected to suffer large losses on its subprime investments.2 The Düsseldorf-​based IKB was a strange presence in the US subprime business. Owned principally by the government’s development bank, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), IKB was set up to lend to Germany’s small and medium-​sized companies, the fabled Mittelstand. But intense competition from other German banks had curtailed profitable lending opportunities at home, and the US subprime market was irresistible.3 To make its subprime investments, IKB had borrowed from the so-​called asset-​backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. In the ABCP market, “conduits” run by asset managers connected borrowers such as IKB to major “real money” investors, including insurance companies and pension funds.4 When IKB announced its large losses, the real money investors became worried that other borrowers might harbor similar problems.5 The investors instructed the conduits to pull back, and the $1.2 trillion ABCP market began to collapse (figure 5.1).6 The consequences were far-​reaching.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

But as Germany’s own most perceptive economists point out, those surpluses are as much the result of repressed imports as of roaring export success.41 The inexorable slide of corporate Europe down the global rankings is clear for all to see. Though we might wish otherwise, the world economy is not run by medium-sized “Mittelstand” entrepreneurs but by a few thousand massive corporations, with interlocking shareholdings controlled by a tiny group of asset managers. In that battlefield of corporate competition, the crises of 2008–2013 brought European capital a historic defeat. No doubt there are many factors contributing to this, but a crucial one is the condition of Europe’s own economy.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

In Germany the Central Association of German Traders and Businessmen (1899), the German Central Association for Trade and Business (1907) and similar organizations acted to defend the economic interests of their members. Well before the turn of the century these were describing themselves as representatives of the Mittelstand, the ‘middle order’, which they contrasted with the workers on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and aristocracy on the other. Competition from large-scale industry and from socialist consumer co-operatives drove members of these associations to the right of the political spectrum and infused them with a dose of paranoid antisemitism, though this has sometimes been exaggerated by historians.