Laughter isn’t an easy thing to characterise, especially across cultures. I’ve spend enough time in non-English speaking places to realise that I’ll never really understand their humour, but I’ve spent far more time in English speaking places and still even there, I know that I have a different sense of what makes me laugh. Actually the more time I’ve spent in different places, I believe, the less I laugh – I mean an outright guffaw, a good solid belly laugh, an uncontrollable rollicking snort. I still find humour in lots of things – even more than before – but the burst of laughter that I would have served up as a kid no longer comes up.
Continue reading “Guffaw”Securing our future
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”