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The House is on Fire!
An English translation of Feu en la demeure !, posted on my French blog on February 25.
Ladies and gentlemen of the European regulatory authorities, I am today turning to you: the house is on fire!
Demands that Greece lowers its civil servants’ wages will not save her. Your prodding Greece to tackle tax…
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Update on where we stand
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August 4th, 1789
Cityislander’s imaginative translation of “La nuit du 4 août” at the French end of this blog. Many thanks to him!
Exactly 220 years ago (the French Revolution), on the night of August 4th, 1789, the question certainly was not about systemic risk. Yet, on that very night, an event of systemic magnitude occurred:…
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Why we need to find something else
A reader of my French blog has taken the trouble of translating my most recent Friday video in English. Many thanks to him!
NEWS is conveyed by letter, word or mouth
and comes to us from North, East, West and South” (Witt’s Recreations). . . but mostly from the Paul Jorion blog…
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What went wrong. An anthropologist’s point of view.
Here is the communication I made on March 3rd to the Socialist members of the European Parliament in Brussels as my contribution to the one-day conference entitled “Closing the casino: building a fairer and stronger real economy”
Modern societies of European origin were historically built according to a tripartite structure composed of warriors-raiders, priests…
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The danger of half-truths in a time of crisis
Published in Le Monde – Economie, March 2nd 2009 (transl. Danielle Goodman)
Let’s assume that governments are actively concerned with the interests of the populace at this very moment – an ardent hope of mine. To succeed, their actions have to benefit from a certain surprise effect so as not to be thwarted in advance…
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Report and Recommendations Pursuant to Section 133 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008: Study on Mark-To-Market Accounting
The SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) along with the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) have just released their report on the valuation of financial products (Fair Value).
The subject is what I discussed in « Juste prix » et « juste valeur » and in L’implosion. La finance…
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Le Monde, October 12th
Here an account of my column in Le Monde on the concept of a new Bretton Woods.
Bretton Woods 2.0 – Paul Jorion on The Financial Crisis
Paul Jorion wrote a column in Le Monde a few days ago concerning the prospects of a new Bretton Woods (never mind that the original died…
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Friday Market Monitor (AM 580 CFRA), on October 17 at 2 PM (EST)
I was Walter Traversy’s guest on CFRA a news only radio station in Toronto, between 2 and 2:30 PM.
The podcast is here. I’m talking in the second part of the program … just after the weather report. But hear Walter introduce me in the nicest way at the very beginning.
I’m…
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What have anthropologists to tell about the subprime crisis that no one else has said before?
Finance is in shambles. It has remained until now under the close supervision of economic and financial theory. In recent years, due to the overbearing dominance of views developed under the umbrella of the “Chicago School” of economics, finance has been regarded as explainable through the combination of a very simplified version of psychology: that…
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The willing catalyst
On September 5th, I wrote on my French blog : “D’ici à la fin du mois il semble donc bien que les conditions d’un krach soient réunies”, meaning in proper English:
It seems therefore that from now until the end of the month the conditions for a crash are being met.
The…
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Foresight and Despair
A review of my just published book L’implosion. La finance contre l’économie: ce que révèle et annonce “la crise des subprimes” by Adrien de Tricornot in Le Monde, dated June 16th (translation by Jiro Tanaka – many thanks Jiro!)
Foresight and Despair (“Oracle, ô désespoir !”, pun on a famous line from Corneille’s play…
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The cunning of Reason
The very justification of a Human Complex System’s approach to the operation of human societies, implying a continuous explanatory spectrum from the individual (particle) to the cultural or societal levels (field), is offered by Hegel when he writes in Reason in History (*) that
… human actions in history produce additional results, beyond their…
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The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy
My new book called “The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy – What the subprime crisis reveals and foretells” (L’Implosion, La finance contre l’économie – Ce que révèle et annonce la crise des subprimes) will be published on May 4th. The publisher is Arthème Fayard, one of the top French publishers who will realize here a…
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The subprime crisis in 2007
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2008’s new fad: “rating cliffs” and “credit cliffs”
Do you know what will be all the rage in 2008 in the wake of the subprime crisis? “Rating cliffs” and “credit cliffs” when firms that have seen a slow erosion of their credit will all of a sudden drop like a stone. As I devoted a whole chapter to the subject back in 2003…
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The long-term goals of businesses
Businesses don’t seem to have any long–term goals apart from staying in business. They no doubt provide benefits to their shareholders and executives during their lifetime but why they aim at persisting in their existence with little reflection devoted to the “why?” of it is far from obvious. There is a clear analogy here with…
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Stock prices and the shape of randomness
I remember an illustration in an article by Heinz von Foerster in the 1960s. In the first picture, a set of tiny cubes were represented, piled up in a random manner. The reader was told that these were steel cubes magnetized on one of their sides. The second picture showed what had happened after the…
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The credit crunch’s cogwheels
Collective human phenomena are as a rule tricky to analyze and consequently tough understanding and explaining. The reason is learning. Even if at its core a process remains simple, people learn: they observe how things work and they adapt. Adaptation in its turn modifies the process and initiates an endless dynamics of change. Such feedback…
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Now that the housing bubble has burst, who’s to blame?
Blame is flying in all directions: mortgage lenders had stopped bothering whether or not borrowers could repay as they were passing the buck to Wall Street anyway; Wall Street firms were using subprime mortgages of any denomination as innocuous stuffing in Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs); regulators failed to curb the worst forms of abuse –…