Legalization and Regulation

Marijuana prohibition currently costs American taxpayers almost $42 billion a year. Compare this negative cash flow to the projected tax benefits of legalization – between $2.4 and $6.2 billion annually – and it becomes obvious why Milton Friedman and more than 500 other respected economists publicly support the legalization of marijuana. | via Reality Catcher

The Sucker Bait Called Hope

Consequently, we’ve not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack [...]

Are entrepreneurs capitalists?

Entrepreneurs, for example, work in the early stages of their company’s growth at the same level as third-world laborers. Many hours are spent at almost no remuneration to nurture the concepts that will later – it is hoped – produce livelihoods for many. Working for nearly nothing is a very common entrepreneurial strategy that flies [...]

Poems for Times of Turmoil

What does poetry have to do with the serious financial havoc the world has been enduring? Does anyone have time to consider a confection of art — spun from the imagination — while we face the chilling reality of lost homes, tattered businesses, or a compromised future? “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
We seem [...]

J.S.G. Boggs and the Funny Money

If you still cherish any illusions about the absolute value of money, or art, for that matter, start thinking about J.S.G. Boggs’ bills. Boggs made his first bill in 1984–unintentionally so, and without the faintest notion of the never-ending lawsuits, the media attention, and the extraordinary prices that his bills would generate in the years to follow.

Poems on the Credit Crunch

To celebrate National Poetry Day, BBC News website readers have been sending in their poems on the credit crunch.
via BBC

Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

Last night at a poetry reading marking the release of the 2008 Best American Poetry anthology the distinguished poet and Finding Forrester star Charles Bernstein delivered a stirring plea for swift intervention to stave off the subprime poetry crisis:

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

New Wall Street crisis will create a new financial world order, says RCM CIO

As the sell-off in global markets continues, RCM’s CIO for Europe Neil Dwane believes the aftermath of Monday’s events will lead to the formation of a ‘new world order’, in which the remaining financial giants will flourish.
via CityWire

Impacts of the Financial Crisis

Only a small fraction of funding by investment banks, mortgage companies, brokerages, equity funds, hedge funds, commodities futures speculators, etc., comes from actual investor capital. The rest—up to ninety-seven percent, in the case of commodities futures contracts—is credit self-created by the banks.
Where did the banks get this credit? The answer is that they simply cranked [...]