A few straight talking pundits

As promised in the previous section, here is a selection of some of the people I rely on for getting the ‘big picture’, usually with some video clip to demonstrate who exactly they are and what we can learn from them in the macro assessment of the current state of affairs in the world (financial, economic, and beyond). More practical and specific references you will find mainly in the sections that follow.

Here is a 83 minute conversation (on Oct 28, 2008) with an extremely (although not always!) successful legendary market speculator, philanthropist, and political activist, George Soros, whose biggest ambition for himself is to get finally acknowledged as a philosopher whose financial successes originated from exactly his philosophy and broad historic understanding of societies. In the interview, you can get a glimpse into his ‘reflexivity’ theory explained in his most recent little book, readable and enjoyable,‘The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and what it Means’.

If you’d rather read on his views in a recent article, click here.

This interview with him below, 3 minutes on the ways out of the financial crisis, is from here

Had I actually written about what I found as some of the most fascinating readings in my professional progress in the last few years, readers would have surely seen reports on N. N. Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, and Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable See a 20 minute interview with him (on Dec 03, 2008) here

You can find the original interview (and the transcript, plus some good viewers’ comments!) here

… and another, shorter but extremely important, conversation with him and Benoit Mandelbrot (on or shortly before Oct 23, 2008):

You may have heard the name of John Mauldin, author of Bull’s Eye Investing and other books, and publisher of the excellent and free Investor Insight email weekly, subscribed by 1.5 million people worldwide. He is another of those whose foresight has been vindicated, and whose clear explanation of his working methods gives assurance that his ‘hits’ have been more than happenstances. It’s worth [paying attention to what he said about the outlook for the US economy in December, and how very cautiously optimistic he is these days.

Among market commentators from universities, Prof. Nouriel Roubini was perhaps the most vocal with dire warnings before hell broke loose. The once more ridiculed than respected Roubini (see his top rated website for a wealth of information and free subscription to their email newsletter) is considered a guru today. I’d like to invite you to watch a few conversations with him. The earliest one, a Charlie Rose interview” target=”_blank”> on Oct 14, 2008, is here:

while the next, a Financial Times interview on Dec 17, 2008 (in three short chunks) will open in separate tabs/windows if you click here (1), .. here (2), or here (3).

Roubini again, at the end of January, while at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Here is a short (6 min) CNBC interview with Roubini and Nobel laureate Michael Spence, on their outlook for 2009.
… and another short interview with him on Bloomberg News. These will not cheer you up, but you’ll probably find yourself better informed than by simply looking at the headlines, even today. He is not alone thinking that even the unprecedented stimulus already provided by governments may not be enough to stop the slide into long depression and chaos.

Another one with Prof. Roubini:

In the next, two-part clip, a group of CNBC people interviewed Roubini and Taleb together on Feb 09. I’ll refer back to this interview a few paragraph down, but you will not really appreciate what will come there, unless you watch, and form your own opinion about, it first.

Others are worried too. Paul Krugman in several of his regular New York Times articles expressed his concerns about the limitations of the new administration’s plans and actions.

Here is another example, again with two highly regarded economists, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Prof. Martin Feldstein. They had an interesting conversation about Obama’s economic stimulus package with Charlie Rose, … see the original (plus transcript) here.

One more, and more recent, interview with Stiglitz alone is originally from here

One of the most memorable events of the WorldFuture2006 Conference for me was David Walker’s keynote speech. He, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 until his resignation in 2008, spoke a shockingly (rather: refreshingly) different language than what you get from politicians and high-rank officials (at least while in office). He was long-term, responsible, big-picture, and clear. Having left GAO, he became President and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “dedicated to increasing public awareness of the nature and urgency of several key challenges threatening America’s future, and to accelerating action on them. … [via] … sensible, long-term solutions that transcend age, party lines and ideological divides in order to achieve real results.” Even if you are not a U.S.A. citizen, I suggest that you download their Citizen’s Guide to the Financial Condition of the United States Government. It was published in July 2008, based on long term trends and commitments, and the picture was scary even by then. In August, they released one of the best documentaries of 2008, I.O.U.S.A., short clips of which (together with more recent short interviews) are available on their website.

Here is a 30 minute version of it:

Source: http://www.iousathemovie.com/

In the following panel discussion you can listen to David Walker, then (in Sept 2007) still as head of GAO, …

… but actually you might prefer going to the source, since there you can find the searchable transcript as well.

Finally, let me draw your attention to the website of Weiss Research. Martin Weiss and his associates have also been a regular source of useful information, knowledge and insight for me in the last several years.

First, another 32 minute Charlie Rose interview, on April 16, 2008, with Jeffrey Sachs, on the occasion of publishing his latest book, Common Wealth: Economics for a crowded planet. Sachs is a renowned economist, but definitely not a narrow-minded one.

If the clip below doesn’t work, you can try the original source here.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is another who does very high level integration of fields that many still do not recognize as interrelated.

The following lecture by him, available originally here from TVO, is an excellent summary of planetary issues that serve as the background to the current financial and economic crisis. He, author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization, is talking here about how our world faces an unprecedented convergence of natural, social and economic stresses, including worsening energy scarcity, changing climate, rapid population growth and widening gaps between rich and poor, which could ultimately lead to the breakdown of world economies and political systems. But he is not a hopeless alarmist; in fact, he argues that in times of crisis people often show their greatest capacity to change their institutions and behaviours.

Prof Henry Mintzberg is not an economist either. He’s a well known professor of management, whose opinions I learned to respect during many years. Last time I listened to him was in an interesting Globe and Mail interview on the ‘turbulent times’ we live in, at the end of October, in the Talking Management series. In it, he expressed what is overlooked by many, namely, that - to quote the title of the transcript -, what we are going through is A Crisis of Management not Economics. I hope neither the article nor the video version will be removed too soon, but in case they will, here are some excerpts from the transcript of the conversation:

“everything was short-term and everybody is under pressure and everybody is meeting their targets for each short-term period and so they were not managing. It is a management problem from beginning to end, and I do not think this is a banking problem or a finance problem. I think that this attitude towards management pervades the entire economy”

“I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word ‘community-ship’, which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.”

“The American economy is dreadfully weak and the famous American management is absolutely dysfunctional now with the whole emphasis on leadership, on short-termism.”

“Now we have to learn again that uncontrolled international markets are dangerous, but we are in a bad situation because the United Nations is not in a position to control things, the international agencies sure as hell are not going to try to impose regulations because globalization has basically been a free-range for global corporations to do whatever they damn well please with nobody controlling them.”

“I am not a big fan of public markets for raising capital in the stock market the way that it is now. I think that it has been horribly dysfunctional, very short-term, and very superficial. Naive and inexperienced analysts come almost dictating to corporate chief executives about what they should be doing, at least with regards to down-sizing and things like that. I think that is absolutely dysfunctional.”

“I think that there are many more long-term, sustainable manners of raising capital through patient capital, patient capital investors perhaps the sort of Warren Buffett type of person, I do not know, through co-ops. There are amazingly successful business co-ops such as Mondragón in the Basque country that has something like eighty thousand employees and is totally a co-op. There are lots of other ways of stimulating and encouraging the private sector or the business sector without this nutty form of capitalism that we are stuck with.”

Two more interviewees, Bill McKibben and Lester Brown, whom you should definitely be familiar with. Both are prolific and excellent writers (several of Brown’s books can be read online as well at the Earth Policy Institute website), and - especially Lester Brown - have contributed a lot to a better world as leaders of progressive organizations as well.

Lester Brown, April 2008:

Find original source here.

Find original source here

The Worldwatch Institute is another key organization where one can learn a lot about the major social, technological, and natural trends that shape our future. Their State of the World annual reports and Vital Signs series are invaluable sources. Similarly, the biannual Living Planet Reports from the World Wildlife Fund are publications everybody should know about.

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After weeks of brooding, post was finally published on March 8, 2009