Satyajit Das, “Banks Aren’t as Safe as They Think”
(Bloomberg, 9 August 2018)
The former banker explains why, in his opinion, measures taken to prevent another financial crisis may just be adding new risks. He’s particularly concerned about the focus on banks having to raise collateral requirements. This short article (reads in 4-6 min) may be a bit technical, but it is an important read at a time when the collapse of the Turkish Lira is raising fears of losses spreading to European banks and beyond.
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Jake Werner, “China Is Cheating at a Rigged Game”
(Foreign Policy – metered paywall, 8 August 2018)
This is a dense piece that offers an interesting and controversial framework to think about the relations between China and the US. The academic asserts that the trade war is a sign of a global system gone wrong. He worries about the growing consensus in the US that the Chinese are conducting trade in a predatory manner and that the time for confrontation has arrived. In his opinion, vilifying China is “a substitute for facing honestly the urgent need to transform the nature of global growth” because for China, the central question is not trade but development (reads in 8-10 min).
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Miriam Posner, “See No Evil”
(Logic, 31 August 2018)
This longish article (reads in about 10 min) explains in great detail the immense intricacies of today’s supply chains and makes us realize why they are so difficult to disentangle. The industry of supply chain management (SCM in the jargon) is both vast and secretive; what we call a global supply chain looks more like “a network of waterways, with thousands of tiny tributaries, made up of sub-suppliers trickling into larger rivers of assembly, production, and distribution.” Supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A small apparel company might have 50,000 suppliers in its supply chain!
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Keith Kahn-Harris, “Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth”
(The Guardian, 3 August 2018)
From vaccines to climate change to genocide, a new age of denialism (an expansion or intensification of denial) is falling upon us. This excerpt from a book to be published in September looks at the reasons why we’ve failed to understand a phenomenon that has moved from the fringes to the centre of public discourse, helped in part by new technology. A timely and rich read (more than 15 min).
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Ben Yagoda, “Your Lying Mind”
(The Atlantic, 31 August 2018)
This is a quick review of the many cognitive biases (the shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and predictions) that trick our brain and affect our decisions. We are hardwired to delude ourselves, but can we do anything about it? Probably not. As Kahneman, the great behavioural scientist says: “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.” Other scientists beg to differ. This rather long article (around 15 min read) shares the latest research.
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