The debate rages on over how to do proper accounting for financial institutions. After each major debacle, there is a stampede to some other method. Maybe the chronic problem is the ongoing assumption of modern accounting that every security has an instantaneous value based on its expected revenue and its ...read more

James Howard Kunstler has eloquently argued in The Long Emergency that cheap oil makes globalism possible.  Transporting goods across the globe costs energy, and, when energy costs enough, local production becomes more economical than global. For now and the near future, however, it still costs not only less money, but ...read more

A small community of people on a desert island would probably ration its resources very carefully, but would surely allow anyone who so volunteered to put as much time and effort as he wished into being productive, for whatever compensation he could negotiate with the others. The principle applies to ...read more