http://voxeu.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 6 August 2009

This column introduces timelines, produced by the New York Fed, that organise and illustrate policymakers’ responses to the global financial crisis. Over the past two years, and particularly since the intensification of the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008, new information has been released at an astonishing pace. Between the breaking developments in the markets and the vast array of policy initiatives across countries, it has become increasingly challenging to keep track of the complex and evolving response to the crisis.

http://voxeu.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 6 August 2009

Aid critics have recently been blaming aid as the source of Africa’s poverty. This column explains how Africa has long been struggling with rural poverty, tropical diseases, illiteracy, and lack of infrastructure and that the right solution is to help address these critical needs through transparent and targeted public and private investments. This includes both more aid and more market financing. It refers to D. Moyo and her recent book “Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa” see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dambisa-moyo/aid-ironies-a-response-to_b_207772.html 

http://www.theatlantic.com/  Reported here by: SPMG, 3 August 2009

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant. 

http://voxeu.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 4 August 2009 

Bank bonuses have been blamed for contributing to the crisis, and regulators and politicians are now demanding changes in compensation arrangements. Most of these calls are based on a misconception of the nature of financial risk, an inflated view of the efficacy of risk models, and an incorrect view of the incentive issues facing financial institutions. This column proposes reforms that would discipline senior managers by exposing them to the dangers of junior managers’ risk taking. 

http://voxeu.org/  Reported here by: SPMG, 3 August 2009 

There is a strong consensus that banks had insufficient reserves set aside for a rainy day and that they should be required to hold more capital. This column says we should differentiate institutions less by what they are called and more by how they are funded. Encouraging individual risks to flow to those who can absorb them would make the system safer and introduce new players with risk capacities. 

http://voxeu.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 3 August 2009

Banking sectors worldwide are still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis. This column presents a plan of how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks of toxic assets by transferring them into bad banks, an idea that is gaining popularity.

http://www.welchway.com/  Reported here by: SPMG, 3 August 2009 

http://www.themennonite.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 3 August 2009 

Mennonites don’t talk much about consumer desire. Some of us are good at consuming, and others are just as adept at critiquing such consumption. Many Mennonites…are some combination of both: blithely going about the business of trying to acquire more stuff even as we criticize everyone else for doing the same thing. As sociologist Juliet Schor found in one of her studies of U.S. consumption, 78 percent of respondents considered most North Americans to be “very materialistic,” but only 8 percent identified themselves as such…. 

http://voxeu.org/ Reported here by: SPMG, 2 August 2009 

Many blame executive compensation for encouraging shortsighted risk-taking. This column argues that compensation should be structured so as to provide incentives consistent with the firm’s position and long-term interest. It proposes “incentive accounts” that it says would be superior to existing compensation schemes.