More from the World Forum on Enteprise and the Envirionment. Professor Kathy Willis says (and I paraphrase crudely) that increased carbon emissions may not necessarily lead to desertification as widely predicted, but may instead lead to more ‘woody cover’ i.e. forests in e.g. the world’s tropical areas… Her evidence is quite convincing, drawing on previous […]
Listening to Dr Simon Stuartof IUCN – Species Survival Commission… has great slides, which hopefully will be on the website. Tracking birds as biodiversity indicator, measuring extinction..Notes significant and largely irreversible extinction trends..Amphibians, rapid decline..reef-forming corals, the most threatened… Sturgeons, Cycads, Sharks and rays….mangroves… State of biodiversity going down, pressure on biodiversity going up, our
I am privileged to be a speaker at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, hosted by Sir David King of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford. Sir David today has a column in the Guardian in which he calls on Prime Minister David Cameron to exercise leadership on the global
Some of our friends were irked by my observation this week that Paul Krugman is: “an extremely controversial figure for Keynes scholars. He champions a mainstream interpretation of Keynes’s work known as the neo-classical synthesis” Many rightly applaud him for using his platform at the New York Times to defend further fiscal stimulus in the
Bernard Madoff’s 90ft yacht ‘Bull’ is offered for sale in Monaco for €3m this week. Image source: associated press. I learnt to my cost that the role of Cassandra is no fun. Why “Apollo’s cursed gift is a source of endless pain and frustration.” While it is possible to note that the ‘tectonic plates’ of
The olive grove harvest. Image source: www.oxfam.org As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Greece: the Greeks are doing the one thing that hurts bankers most – they’re turning down invitations to their party. In my book, ‘The coming first world debt crisis‘ I tried to spell out what actions individuals could take to defend
Unemployment poster ‘jobless men keep going, we can’t take care of our own’, 1931. We write to encourage you – to urge you on in your resistance. In your defiance, you understand Greece is slave to the interests of private wealth. You must understand too that it is private wealth that needs Greece. Greece does
An open letter to the people of Greece: restore the Drachma Read More »
Irish Finance Minister Noonan and Luxembourg Treasury Minister Frieden attend an EU finance ministers meeting in Brussels. Image source: www.reuters.com I find it hard to write about the crisis in Greece….because the tragedy unfolding there is so reminiscent of the tragedies that unfolded in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia in the 80s and
Bankers: draining funds from taxpayers courtesy of finance ministers Read More »
Like Catholics organising a conference on Protestantism and excluding Protestants, the Cambridge organisers of a conference to ‘celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’, have excluded Keynes scholars. By contrast, most of those who will address the conference subscribe to the ‘classical’ theory that Keynes thought he had
Cambridge excludes Keynesians from conference on Keynes Read More »
The BBC Radio 4’s ‘World Tonight’ yesterday devoted the whole of their news programme to the question of global food security, and invited yours truly to comment throughout. I focussed on Goldman Sachs’s Global Commodity Index – (about which you can read more here in Foreign Policy) not very different from the ‘Collateralised Debt Obligations’
