The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

The dollar. The intangible monetary construct concocted  in its paper form in 1861 to finance the civil war is arguably the United States' most precious asset. Its solidity is underpinned by an enviable  rule of law . It gives good ol' U.S. of A the blessing of perennially low interest rates (which elevates the standard of living of Americans to the tune of $100bn annually ), and the ability to throw in the trash can any resemblance of fiscal restrain. Why be frugal when normal market rules don't apply to you? After all, there is no such thing as a U.S. Treasury bond market " vigilante ." Not in the same way they exist  for any other --more normal-- sovereign bond markets, anyway. We live under a de facto Dollar Standard. Nations hoard greenbacks to bulk up reserves (save some very wacky exceptions ) to have dry powder to prop up (or push down , as recently seen) their currencies when they're under attack, or to buy imported goods. It is a very exorbitant p...

It appears that "hacking" is in the news  lately. Often . And I mean,  big time . The meaning of the word is almost unanimously attached to an act of law-breaking with the clear, malicious intent of stealing someone else's property. But not everyone  grants this buzzword a bad meaning, no. The Zuck is famous for turning its meaning around to make it appear something idealistic --grandiose even. "Hacking," he says, is the trade of heroic, altruistic visionaries who are doggedly determined to make the world a better place --for example, by attempting to  bring internet to the entire Saharan Africa. Forget about the fact that starving people in poor countries and desolate refuge camps can't sustain on a kilobyte diet. Internet, the wacky  technorati  elite trumpets, is to become the end-all-be-all of human prosperity. Hacking, the way I understand it, is gaining access to the inner workings ("the code") of something to be able to manipulate it fo...

We hear it all the time: the Internet is becoming more and more important in our lives. We read news on it, we socialize , shop, bank , and get an increasing share of our entertainment from it. A whole parallel cyber-universe coexists with the brick-and-mortar (often more boring) reality we brave every morning we step out of our beds. The Wachowsky brothers were not that crazy after all. We choose to live in a computer-generated reality -- a "Matrix" called Internet. Our Facebook self is nothing but our own residual self image --the "Neo" version of ourselves. One would think the parallelisms between cyberspace and real life should extend to many more areas. If there is a marketplace in cyberspace -where you can get anywhere from a prostitute to a Bentley- and a bunch of social networks where humans interact -some even find their soul mates-, the same natural/legal rights and social institutions that underpin growth and stability in the brick-and-mortar world ...