The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.
Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium?
We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn’t work as money.
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/the-next-generation-of-microfinance.html
Visionary Kushal Chakrabarti is providing a solution. design mind ON AIR’s Chris Sallquist spoke with Kushal, the founder and CEO of Vittana, a person-to-person micro-lending Web site that makes it possible for students, wanting to go to college in developing countries, to get loans.
The Centre for Independent Studies 2010 John Bonython Lecture with Niall Ferguson. Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy - whether the result of arrogance or naivety - contribute to the downfall of civilisations? Today Professor Ferguson will argue that great powers or empires are in the strict sense of the word, complex systems. Made up of very large numbers of interacting components that are quite asymmetrically organised. In other words, he continues, their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Moreover imperial falls are nearly always associated with fiscal crises, when there are dramatic imbalances between revenues and expenditures. Thus alarm bells should be ringing in Washington DC but what does that for mean for Australia?
Financial Markets with Professor Robert Shiller Yale University
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/iphone/departments/econ/econ252.html
Tagged with psychology behavioral finance financial markets