Credit Default Swaps – Explained
Chad Gesser is right, this is a very good and short (and yes, simplified, but it has to be if you’re going to make it short) explanation of this specific aspect of casino capitalism – CDS – that...
View Article“Beyond a Certain Level, Connectivity Becomes a Hazard”: Volcanoes and Subprimes
The title from this post is borrowed from a column by George Monbiot in The Guardian referring to what the volcano eruption and financial crisis have in common: strained system, pushed to the limits....
View ArticleBook Review – This Land is Ours
Wendy Wolford‘s This Land is Ours: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil is a much more pessimistic book than the one I previously reviewed. Here again, Wolford writes about the MST,...
View ArticleAccumulation by Dispossession and Savage Sorting
Saskia Sassen (2010), “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,” Globalizations, March-June 2010, Nos. 1-2, pp. 23-50. “Here I explore the possibility...
View ArticleMarket Failures and Inefficiencies, Culture and Control
A while back, Brooke Harrington, over at Economic Sociology, posted on how the best products do not always prevail on markets, using as example the Qwerty keyboard. It is a familiar story that,...
View ArticleThe F!@# You Conception of Control – Avoiding Customers Edition
This couple of stories do not really have anything new but it clearly illustrates what I have come to call the f!@# You Conception of Control, that is the idea that it becomes the accepted norms that...
View ArticleThe F!@# You Conception of Control – Broadband Edition
In totally unsurprising news… “Britons are not getting the broadband services they are being sold, suggests a government report. Ofcom’s analysis of broadband speeds in the UK shows that, for some...
View ArticleThe Sociology of Everything – Panhandling
It is an obvious thing to say that economic exchange do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded into the social structure and cultural norms and scripts. Examples of this abound… Over at the always...
View ArticleThe F!@ck You Conception of Control – The Big Squeeze Edition
As this article from Le Monde details, airlines offering cheap airfares are poised to make big money by squeezing passengers of as much money as possible to the creative use of fees on… well…...
View ArticleBook Review – Les Rémunerations Obscènes
Philippe Steiner‘s Les Rémunerations Obscènes is a pamphlet more than a book per se. With a 134 pages of text, it a short and clear read on the topic of the stratospheric compensations received by...
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