Imagine, if you can, that corporations truly are like people. They would vary in their dispositions. Some would be selfish and short-sighted, caring only about their own immediate gain. Others would be more prosocial and far-sighted, genuinely caring about the world around them and willing to do their part to promote the common good. As with real people, the cooperators would be in danger of exploitation by the knaves, but they would also be able to protect themselves by banding together, establishing norms of proper conduct and punishing transgressors. That’s how individual cooperators manage to survive and even thrive in a Darwinian world. Why shouldn’t the same be true in a world of corporate people?
One person who is able to imagine this scenario is Per L. Saxegaard, a former Norwegian investment banker who decided to create the equivalent of a Nobel Prize to recognize enlightened business leaders. He does this through the Business for Peace Foundation, which was founded in 2007....
PLS: So, it struck me that what we need to focus on in business is to get these two curves, the “making money” curve and the “making a difference” curve, to come together. We need to make money while making a difference to other people; merging profit with a higher purpose, while acting ethically and responsible. We coined it to be businessworthy. All business people know the concept of being creditworthy. That’s about not losing other people’s money. Being businessworthy is about earning other people’s trust. You can’t buy trust. Others give it to you....Evonomics
It’s conventional wisdom in business circles today that corporate directors should “maximize shareholder value.” Corporations supposedly exist to serve shareholders’ interests, and not (or at least, not directly) those of executives, employees, customers, or the community. However, this shareholder-value dogma begs a fundamental question. What, exactly, do shareholders value?
Most shareholder-value advocates assume that shareholders care only about their own wealth. But it is increasingly accepted that the homo economicus model of purely selfish behavior doesn’t always apply. This possibility provides a challenge to the dominant business paradigm of “maximizing shareholder value:” the concept of the prosocial shareholder.
THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
The problem with the homo economicus theory is that the purely rational, purely selfish person is a functional psychopath. If Economic Man cares nothing for ethics or others’ welfare, he will lie, cheat, steal, even murder, whenever it serves his material interests. Not surprisingly, although homo economicus is alive and well in many economics departments, many experts today prefer to embrace behavioral economics, which relies on data from experiments to see how real people really behave. Behavioral economics confirms something both important and reassuring. Most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths....I can recall the look we gave each other when introduced to homo economicus in Econ 101.
According to NBER, the four longest expansions in U.S. history are:
1) From a trough in March 1991 to a peak in March 2001 (120 months).
2) From a trough in June 2009 to today, July 2018 (109 months and counting).
3) From a trough in February 1961 to a peak in December 1969 (106 months).
4) From a trough in November 1982 to a peak in July 1990 (92 months).
So the current expansion is the second longest, and it seems very likely that the current expansion will surpass the '90s expansion in the Summer of 2019....Calculated Risk
Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there’s no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China, and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies who control that empire are willing to threaten nuclear confrontation in order to ensure their continued dominance. All of their actions against Russia since 2016 have had everything to do with establishing long-term planetary dominance and nothing whatsoever to do with election meddling.
Those five things [analyzed above in the article] would need to happen before I’d be willing to jump aboard the “Russia! Russia!” train. Until then I’ll just keep pointing to the total lack of evidence and how very, very far the CIA/CNN Russia narrative is from credibility.Questioning the narrative and find it wanting.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, and I will keep saying it and saying it until it becomes mainstream conventional wisdom: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you....
As we learned in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, whenever you see all mass media outlets converge upon a single narrative, it’s time to crank your skepticism levels up to eleven....
The social engineers are so adept that self-identified progressives can be made to cheer for the FBI, self-identified nationalists can be made to cheer for neoconservative regime change agendas against Iran, and self-identified liberals can literally be made to fear a movement away from the possibility of nuclear holocaust....
Since cold wars per definition depend on non-military maneuverings, a much greater emphasis is necessarily placed on psyops and mass media propaganda than in a conventional hot war. Remain skeptical of everything you hear about Russia at all times, because I will say it again: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you....Two Big “Russia! Russia!” Stories Released Days Before Trump-Putin Summit
With Friday’s indictments of Russian intelligence officers, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump making clear that the “evidence” behind the indictments is as fraudulent as the intelligence alleging WMD in Iraq. It is being published exclusively here ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Monday.Consortium News
Mueller could not have picked a more auspicious date if he weren’t an ignoramus on the history of autocracy and democracy, European and American. For it is one day later, on July 14, when every year France celebrates the start of the French Revolution. The reason for the celebration is the end of abuse of power by kings and pretenders to state authority, and their replacement by the democratic rule of law. That revolution, like the annual celebration, isn’t quite over.
What Mueller did this year was to issue what was called, before July 14, 1789, a lettre de cachet – a letter with the royal signet or seal. In the French practice, this was a combination of indictment, conviction, and order for arrest, confiscation of property, and punishment of an individual, who had no right in law to know the charge against him; prove the evidence; appeal the sentence.
The Mueller indictment of twelve officers of the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff) is a fresh US-Government style lettre de cachet. It names the men accused, their crimes, and the punishment. The penalties include “upon conviction [the twelve] shall forfeit to the United States any property, real or personal, which constitutes or is derived from proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of such violation, and any personal property that was used or intended to be used to commit or to facilitate the commission of such offense.”Dances with Bears
Mueller has neither the power nor the intention of trying the accused, or the particulars of his lettre, in an American court of law. This is why on July 13 he intended to violate the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, first introduced in Philadelphia on June 8, 1789, just a month before the lettre de cachet lost its power in Paris. The Fifth Amendment says noone shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”...
The timing of the announcement was clearly intended to embarrass Trump as he was meeting the Queen and to undermine his upcoming meeting with Putin on July 16. The indictments may also have been meant to embarrass Russia two days before the World Cup final to be held in Moscow....
“In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence, yet you don’t use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods,” [former CIA officer Larry] Johnson said.
If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.
Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made....
In both the IRA case and Friday’s indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia’s guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller’s mission would appear to be accomplished....
It is not only allies of Trump, as the Times thinks, who believe the timing of the indictments, indeed the entire Russia-gate scandal, is intended to prevent Trump from pursuing detente with nuclear-armed Russia. Trump said of the indictments that, “I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance — a very good relationship with President Putin.”
There certainly appear to be powerful forces in the U.S. that want to stop that....Consortium News
NOTE: There will likely be various amendments made to this article over the next 24 hours.Disobedient Media
This is the sort of political climate that the Trump administration has been forced to deal with for almost two years – a non-stop full court rush from the Democrats.
And now, when there is a chance for the smallest breakthrough in US-Russia relations, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, rolls out charges against 12 Russian military officials, thereby severely polluting the atmosphere for the Putin-Trump summit.
Clearly, something has got to give one way or the other. The fate of relations between the world’s two premier nuclear powers can no longer be held hostage to poor-sport Democrats who simply do not know how to lose an election with grace.Strategic Culture Foundation
The theme of the book is corruption, and its co-evolution with the Indian economy as the ‘licence raj’ restrictions were progressively removed, and new sectors like telecoms grew dramatically. In this new world, the super-wealthy businessmen and the politicians found they needed each other: the deployment of legislation and contracts helped the former, the opportunity to take part in business helped the latter. As one of the interviewees puts it: “They [the politicians] are saying: ‘We don’t want briefcases full of cash and Swiss bank accounts and all that any more. We want to own businesses ourselves. We want equity stakes.”...The Enlightened Economist
Banks do not lend out reserves and a particular bank’s ability to expand its balance sheet by lending is not constrained by the quantity of reserves it holds or any fractional reserve requirements that might be imposed by the central bank.— Nathan Becker (@netbacker) July 14, 2018
"The debt is between two and a half to three times global GDP, which is an historical high. Debt to GDP throughout the developed world is higher than it has ever been, and it continues to grow. Why? Because money continues to be conjured up and rendered cheap for the participants at the top of the financial system. The banks, the major corporations, the people who make money out of that, and it hasn’t washed down to the rest of the economy. This is why most people feel this anxiety about another potential financial crisis, but also about what happens every day in their own pocketbooks.So, it is worse. These central banks today, 10 years after the financial crisis occurred, that was supposed to be an emergency situation. They have $21 trillion worth of conjured money in return for debt assets, stocks and corporate bonds around the world.If they pulled that plug, if they were to take down any of the $21 trillion, even a little bit . . . it would begin to create a major rupture in the financial system. This is why I say the central banks are the market. Without them, the markets would be nowhere near these highs. If they pulled their help and subsidies, the market would plummet really quickly.”
"Central Banks Are The Market" & Nomi Prins Warns "It Can't Go On Forever“We will eventually get a crash because, at some point, the amount of quantitative easing, or conjured money to buy assets out of the market to pump up the...financial system, will come to this head where even though these major central banks are continuing to dump money in.There will be ruptures at the bottom of the economy . . . even though they are borrowing cheap money, they just can’t make enough money to service very cheap debt. Consumers, who are at all-time debt highs, don’t have enough to continue to service their debt. When these things happen at the same time in terms of lack of payments, delinquencies and defaults, then money will be taken out of the stock markets to plug the gap, and then the stock market comes down. It will start with debt disintegrating, defaulting or having delinquencies...The behavior that happens after this is the seizure of credit and lack of confidence everywhere. When the cracks start, they will get bigger and bigger faster, and that’s when we have a crash.”
In Losing Military Supremacy, his latest, groundbreaking book, crack Russian military-naval analyst Andrei Martyanov deconstructs in detail how, “the United States faces two nuclear and industrial superpowers, one of which fields a world-class armed forces. If the military-political, as opposed to merely economic, alliance between Russia and China is ever formalized – this will spell the final doom for the United States as a global power.”Asia Times
The US deep state (its influential bureaucrats) may be wallowing in perpetual denial, but Trump – after many a closed-door meeting with Henry Kissinger – may have understood the suicidal “strategy” of Washington simultaneously antagonizing Russia and China....
This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since March 2018. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast is not an official New York Fed forecast, but only an input to the Research staff’s overall forecasting process. For more information about the model and variables discussed here, see our DSGE model Q & A.FRBNY — Liberty Street Economics
