Regular readers of Planet Ponzi will remember that I’ve got a thing about inflation. You know: inflation is bad, printing money makes more of it, isn’t it about time we stopped making a bad problem worse? Trouble is, though, constant repetition of a theme gets boring after a while. Yes, fuel prices are up. Yes, […]
Apple Inc. is a phenomenon. One of the most remarkable companies in history. It makes products which I personally adore. It has revolutionized so many consumer markets, it’s hard to overstate the company’s effect on our lives. Steve Jobs once said he wanted to put a ding in the universe. And, in his unkindly shortened […]
Hometrack, a property analytics business, recently reported a 0.2% increase in British house prices, the first such rise in 20 months. The company’s peculiar response to that unimpressive piece of data is that prices will continue to hold firm in the coming months, though, in a brief spasm of honesty, the company goes far enough […]
Teen hit The Hunger Games tells of a world where starving children in a post-apocalyptic world are forced to battle each other to the death, for the entertainment of a small coterie of the wealthy and powerful. The book is by Suzanne Collins, who published her novel one day before Lehman Brothers collapsed: the moment […]
Doing God’s Work: Can you spot the difference? It’s OK for firms to make money. That’s what they’re there to do. But real firms, durable ones, the ones who care about their reputation, their future, and the generations that come after, have figured out that you need to take care of yourself by taking care […]
The Obama campaign has launched a new film. It’s beautifully shot. (No wonder: Davis Guggenheim was the director.) It’s beautifully narrated. (No wonder: Tom Hanks is behind the mike.) It’s got a beautiful story arc. Lighting’s great. Hey, I’m no judge of these things, but whoever they got to do hair and make-up probably did a great job […]
The financial turmoil of recent years has produced an outpouring of op-eds, news stories, books and essays seeking to document and analyze the unfolding disaster. Some of the material has been written by insiders, some by those from the outside. Some by experts, some by astonished laypeople. It’s a mass of material which can, remarkably, […]
Osborne is like a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing: So let’s score his performance
by Mitch Feierstein about 14 years 5 months ago
Budgets are overhyped. Half serious policy announcement, half political theatre. Truth is, almost everything that matters in the government’s fiscal policy was set out in June 2010. Back then, George Osborne announced the pace of the fiscal tightening which would dominate the next five or seven years. The events of today have, very largely, simply […]
Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein CHARLES Ponzi, an Italian, landed in Boston in 1903 with $2.50 in cash. He died in in poverty in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, but he left a legacy – the Ponzi scheme. Desperate to get rich, Ponzi discovered that Italian prepaid stamps – the sort used to […]
What is it? Is it something in the water of Downing Street? Some as-yet-unnamed version of Stockholm Syndrome where the victims fall in love with their captors? Or is hypocrisy in fact a contagious disease? Something passed on by one government to the next, along the with the grace-and-favour mansions and the limousines. I […]