In June of this year, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo Securities led managed a Aaa-rated securitised Social Bond issue, on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The deal raised $1billion, consisting of $300m thirty-year bonds and $700m fifty-year bonds. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the securitisation market faced significant criticism from regulators, policy makers, and many loud voices in the media, who charged that these structures were too complex for investors properly to understand and that securitised bonds spread risk widely and irresponsibly within the financial system. Nowadays, such views have come to be seen as hasty and ill-informed, an over-reaction, a paradigm case of blaming the message-bearer for bringing unwelcome news.
Continue reading “Securing our future”Dead presidents
The global financial response to the slowdown in economic activity has been nothing short of extraordinary. In the United States, over $3 trillion in money supply has been created, with a further $3 trillion in fiscal activity. Overseas, in China, in the UK, in Canada, in the EU, similar levels of new money have flooded the money system, courtesy of central banking policies tailored to system: quantitative easing in open monetary systems, reduced capital requirements and increased access to money creation programs for banks in closed systems paired with aggressive foreign exchange management. There is a lot more money in the system, but the implications of that are diverse, more so than the commentary one reads on Bloomberg or in the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading “Dead presidents”Your Crisis or Mine?
We are careless about the words we use and the way we use them. I don’t mean the evolution of language over time, the entrance of slang into our lexicon, or even the rampant misuse of there, their, and they’re, even though that last one drives me mad…but not angry.
Continue reading “Your Crisis or Mine?”Dead places
I live in a neighbourhood of Scarborough, Maine, called Blue Point. “Neighbourhood” is probably the wrong turn; to me, that inspires thoughts of a high street with shops that you walk to, corner stores and pocket parks and three-decker houses with three families per deck. Blue Point is a village in the old English meaning of the term – a collection of houses, with a few places of business and a church, between other villages, some of which might merit the title of town or borough, or might not. Blue Point is a village, and interestingly, it’s one of the many sites of the genocide of native Americans hundreds of years ago.
Continue reading “Dead places”Robots at the opera
Conflict between humans and machines has become a fertile theme for futurist science fiction. The Matrix films explore some philosophical issues about personal and political freedom, within the context of a brutal struggle between the subterranean community of human survivors and, at surface level, the tyrannical empire ruled by their electronic adversaries. By contrast, the Blade Runner films imagine a world in which ‘replicants’, designed and made by powerful corporations, serve humans through their work – mostly collaboratively, but sometimes not – while lacking the status and rights of ‘people’. If Matrix suggests a war for human survival once the machines have taken over, Blade Runner suggests a civil rights campaign for machines, in a world run by humans.
Continue reading “Robots at the opera”