The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

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...

If we could plot "global anxiety over the end of times" (the end of human times, that is) on a time series graph, I would say that now we would be at --or close to-- an all-time high. Typhoon Yolanda's epic size and strength is indeed a reminder of how insignificant we are, which definitely does not help to calm that feeling of impending doom. End-of-the-world anxiety takes different forms. Economically speaking, the specter  deflation  is one of them. The New Normal , or the idea that we have reached a point from whence we will never achieve the growth rates of yesteryear is another. This idea, defined as a statistical regime change, can also be described as an inflection point, or the point at which the speed of growth decelerates going forward. In other words, the point at which the second derivative of GDP turns negative. The New Normal : The second derivative (the slope's rate of change) turns negative at L 1 The reason this inflection point occur...

It seems these days that the United States is not living its best days as the world's sole hegemonic superpower. From the way the Syrian crisis has been dealt  with, to the way the drone wars have changed the meaning of military conflict, to the embarrassing release of formerly secret espionage programs  that force the president to apologize to foreign leaders. The reputation of the U.S. seems to be taking beating after beating. Yet, despite all this, the role of the U.S. in the world is idealized by many in the U.S. as the paragon of collective virtue and liberty. American Exceptionalism  still thrives . The society of the rule of law --the Land of The Free. Outside the U.S., humankind yearns for a leader. A nation to look up to for guidance and hope --a preserver or global stability. The decades that followed the fall of the USSR have given way to the concoction of multiple purported superpowers that could, like Ivan Drago  to our beloved Rocky, crush the U.S. ...

The king of Qatar recently resigned from his post. According to the people with knowledge of the politics of the region, his health was in a very weak state, rendering the effectiveness of his actions meager. He declined in favor of his 33 year old son, who according to people in touch with the politics of the region has a very pro-western stance. Much like the abdication of the Qatari royal, the markets recently witnessed the initial steps leading up to the abdication of our monetary dictator. His actions were increasingly perceived as ineffective . Each decree carried less and less weight. After our MIT-trained monetary autocrat came out with the latest decree --that the Fed will very likely begin to withdraw the cash injections into the economy-- the markets reacted , although not exactly in the way our beloved leader wished . The old status quo , whereby the movements in the financial world were a direct consequence of the latest ruling of the monetary dictator, was shattered...

Elections are over. SuperPAC's bidding wars for the oval office have ended, marking the beginning of the new electoral cycle. The sheer cost of this year's election and its result prompts many questions. Will the Republicans have to rethink their stance and diversify their reliance on a shrinking white male voter population? Is the personalization of corporations ' influence on elections a pernicious one? Some people might be tempted to rationalize the astronomical figure by downplaying it. "America spends more on Halloween candy  than on political campaigns." That may be true, but what about the fact that campaign spending has grown 12.4 times faster than overall US population in the last 12 years? People still decided whom to vote for in 2000 with $6/per person spent by political campaigning. This time around they spent $13.34/per person. It is clear that the current election model, coupled with the  mediatization  of  politics, pro...

"One more round of QE  please. The world economy needs it. I am feeling the withdrawal." That is the market's plea to our MIT-trained monetary Dictator . The market's starvation for the much-needed next QE fix seems to be creating a never-ending game. "The market needs more accommodating monetary policy. We can't allow deflation to set in", the rational goes. The terror of deflation drives Central Bankers around the world into competitive devaluations, pushing everybody else into a self-accelerating monetary easing race that precipitates a monetary flood of epic proportions. USD $2.3 trillion in the United States. GBP £375 billion  in Great Britain. EUR €1.0 trillion in Europe via the ECB's LTRO , just to name a few significant examples. Central Banks around the world are forcibly participating in a game of one-upmanship , the likes of which we have never seen . Central Banks Balance Sheet size has almost tripled in 6 years. Graph by James Bi...

Are we all lazy creatures? Some would say we always look for shortcuts to obtain what we want --even in the most disciplined version of ourselves. The path of least resistance defines our every move. The behavior goes deeper than what we see in our penchant to become couch potatoes. The brain also is always looking for ways to do the same tasks in the most efficient (effortless) way possible. Amblyopia  is an example of the brain turning off the visual signal in one eye, choosing to overdevelop the other to compensate the loss of vision in the first one. There have been reported cases of people losing hearing in one ear without any apparent reason while at the same time overdeveloping the other ear. When the brain realizes that it can accomplish the same task with less resources, it appears it decides to shut down redundancies. But what happens when a redundancy in the brain is created by an external agent? Some discovery -fire-, some tool -utensils-, some technology created for...