CSB Commentary
A Meeting of the Minds: Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Piketty
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) is a French historian and political thinker who is best known in the United States for his book Democracy in America, which was published in 1835 following a trip to study the U.S prison system. Coming from Old Europe where wealth inequality was extremely large, he was impressed by the more…
Read MoreA European Perspective on the Future of the Euro Area
A few weeks ago I wrote on this same blog that the main economic problem facing Europe was Immigration. However, I do not want to leave the readers with the impression that the current financial crisis is any less important and critical. Thus, I will now focus on that other problem, as if the first…
Read MoreAre Financial Markets Efficient?
The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) was developed in the 1960s to rationalize the empirical observation that security prices fluctuate randomly. According to EMH, the random character of security prices is simply a reflection of the fact that security markets are efficient. In efficient markets, new information comes to the market erratically and gets quickly reflected…
Read More3D Printing: Localized Production in a Globalized World
3D printing is the way goods will be produced in the world of information technology. The goods would be produced in great quantities, yet they need not be mass produced; each item produced could be customized by simply tweaking software to suit the needs and specifications of a specific customer. And the goods could be…
Read MoreEurope’s Main Economic Problem May Surprise You
On February 9, 2014, just over 50 percent of Swiss citizens voted in favor of a referendum restoring quotas for immigrants coming from other EU countries. Switzerland, a country of eight million, is not an EU member but has negotiated several agreements with the EU guaranteeing the free movement of goods, services, people and capital…
Read MoreWhy Are There Generational Cohorts?
Do you ever find yourself wondering about someone else’s behavior, speech, or dress? “What were they thinking?” “Did you forget you were coming to work today?” “Did you really think that was going to work for you?” Often, this happens when we look across generational boundaries. Simply put, generational cohorts are groups of people who:…
Read MoreSpread Spectrum
Spread spectrum is probably today’s most important wireless networking protocol. As unlikely as it might seem, a 26-year-old Hollywood movie star, a screen siren named Miss Hedy Lamarr, invented spread spectrum. In 1942 during World War II, she and a partner (who was a music composer and producer) received a US patent (#2,292,387) for inventing…
Read MoreThe Broken Window Fallacy and Keynesian Economics
Critics of Keynesian economics often use the so-called broken window fallacy, advanced in the 19th century by the French economist Frederick Bastiat, to reject the role of government spending in stabilizing the economy. According to this fallacy, if a hooligan breaks the window of a bakery, the subsequent repair expenditures by the baker will have…
Read MoreEmerging Markets: Recipe for a Sustainable Growth
After a bullish performance for more than the last decade, the emerging markets are again slowing down due to external pressures exerted by the global markets. Their aggressive growth was fueled by strong commodity prices, thanks to double digit growth of China compounded by easy and cheap capital partly due to low interest rates in…
Read MoreHow Much Data is BIG Data?
A Fair Question. Everyone in business is talking about Big Data, but the term is impenetrably, wonderfully vague in common use. Certainly, it means dealing with large amounts of data, but businesses have been struggling with processing large amounts of data for eons. The current emphasis on ‘Big data’ has to be more than just…
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