Finance Geek

Hex is a division of August Accessories who has been designing fashion accessory products for over 20 years. This newer division of the company aims to use their design experience to develop functional and attractive solutions for taking your tech with you, wherever you need to go. I tried out the Hex Fleet 15″ Laptop Tote and found that it did exactly what was promised.

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Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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Einstein may have worked in the patent office, but Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century didn’t have Google, Facebook and and other Silicon Valley giants stalking the earth in search of top science and engineering talent.

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The picture is grainy and the technology won’t last, but TV programming is here to stay.

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The big winners here are not the buyers, but the marketing departments that are only going to see their importance and budgets swell as they wage a war of words to secure long-term and lucrative cloud customer contracts.

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And now, as Monty Python used to say, for something completely different. Today I’m going to try a bit of political science.

Since I was an undergrad studying social and political science at Cambridge I have held the view that capitalist democracies are like fine wine –they get better with age. As I’m writing I’m temporarily wishing I wasn’t British. Britain is the oldest democracy on the planet and I’m conscious that this post could come across as a piece of intellectual nationalism. It isn’t, and I don’t think that the UK is a better country than many others. I do, however, think that over the last 250-300 years that our capitalist-democracy has been in existence the British public has come to trust that it works for the general good of the country rather than for the individuals at Whitehall and that has given us a stability that is sadly missing in many other countries.

In recent months the lack of trust that Greek voters have in their relatively young democracy and its politicians has made resolving the crisis there more challenging than it would otherwise have been, and one of the greatest tragedies of the last century was installing capitalist democracies in countries that weren’t ready for them. Particularly in ex-commonwealth countries in Africa and in Eastern Europe where democracy slipped into bloody dictatorship.

I’m writing this today having read the following passage in Geoffrey Miller’s Spent which explains why capitalist democracies don’t work without appropriate accompanying social institutions (note that free markets/capitalism and democracy are twinned concepts – you can’t have one without the other):

prosperity requires more than just free markets. First it requires the rule of law: good governance to enforce fair, stable laws regarding property rights, human rights, and social stability … Second, it requires sociocultural traditions of accountability, transparency, morality, and trust in politics and business. Third, it requires behavioural norms of valuing education, ambition, initiative, hard work, politeness, peacefulness, and social networking.

I would posit that all of these requirements improve with the longevity of the capitalist democracy. It takes time to build trust, and the more trust there is the less that cronyism, corruption and other forms of abuse are tolerated.

This line of thinking has important implications for policy in the middle east and Afghanistan, and even for Europe where the key institutions need time to develop legitimacy.

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The financial headlines are delivering a persistent message. New York, and all those who live and work in the self-proclaimed financial capital of the world, is showing rising signs of financial irrelevance. Sure, the New York-based stock and bond markets have been gyrating with their usual velocity, processing news, fear, and greed. But increasingly, it [...]

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In “The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing” statistician and United Nations health economist Howard Friedman compares the United States to 13 other wealthy nations in five key categories: health, education, safety, democracy and equality. His analysis and conclusions are alarming: the U.S. has fallen far [...]

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Well, Obamacare is now official, which means that a lot more people in the United States will have health insurance. And it also means a lot more people will be paying more taxes. (You didn’t think Obamacare was free, did you?) Here are some of the new taxes you’re going to have to pay to [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In 2006 Ford (F) was hemorrhaging money and desperate to save itself. The 103-year-old company embarked on a turnaround plan that affected every division of the Michigan-based automaker. Ford sold off its luxury European brands, cut its workforce by a third and put up its cherished assets as collateral [...]

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