Ayn Rand is the guiding light for many current politicians and the super rich. Her words show a dispassionate outlook on human nature and thought that appeals to some and hated by others. Nasik Elahi
In it is a two part video uploaded to YouTube by warpicachu of Johnny Carson interview Ayn Rand in depth on her philosophy. She explains the core concept of her teaching, the central value, which is selfishness.
See the videos below the fold, and enjoy.
In the last few weeks while the most of the world was focused on Iran Nuclear deal, another mostly overlooked economic event was taking place that may have far reaching economic consequences. As per Larry Summers, ex-US Treasury secretary, “it may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system”. Many American allies, including Britain, France, Germany and Australia, who promised not to join the A.I.I.B, rushed to join it about 2 weeks ago before the deadline and ignored the pressure from Washington.
A.I.I.B is the brain child of China, mostly funded by China, for the development of infrastructure in Asia. The A.I.I.B came into being out of the frustrations with the governance of I.M.F., World Bank and Asian Development Bank which are dominated by the USA, Europe and Japan with little representations by China and other Asian countries. USA, Europe and Japan use these institutes to forward their own economic interests and benefit their own national companies to build projects supported by loans from World Bank and Asian Development Bank. Sometimes the projects are approved for developments which may benefit infrastructure companies, but which are controversial and not much beneficial to home countries.
The Managing Director of the IMF is always a European, the President of the World Bank is always an American and the President of the Asian Development Bank is always from Japan. Only a handful of countries from Asia benefit from Asian Development Bank. Japan has hold on its policies and money is awarded with strings attached that benefit mainly Japanese companies. The IMF and World Bank is no different either. In current Greece crisis, many German and French banks had lent large amount to Greece and were in trouble. If Greece defaulted, these banks would have been affected and indirectly would have adversely affected German and French economy. New loans were given to Greece from World Bank and IMF to mainly save these banks. Whatever money Greece received, was paid to German and French Banks and did not help Greece economy. Greece acted basically as a middle man to transfer money from these institutions to German and French Banks, which are stronger now, but Greece is still in serious trouble. These world institutes are acting to safeguard the interests of major shareholders and their companies and interests of home country takes a back seat.
Many countries, including China, have repeatedly advocated for reforms in governance of these institutes to increase representations from other countries and selection of officers on merit basis. But despite promises of reforms nothing much has materialized.
In 2013 China came up with the idea of a new parallel Bank, A.I.I.B to challenge these institutions in Asia. Such a bank was needed for China’s own economic interest also. In the next two decades, the Asia will need about eight trillion dollars to build its infrastructure. When China announced the creation of A.I.I.B and promised to fund it initially with its own fifty to hundred billion dollars, Washington opposed it and many European countries and Japan refused to join it under pressure from Washington. Many Asian countries joined it, and finally about two weeks ago to beat the dead line and afraid to be left out, many opposing countries changed their mind and joined it except Japan and Washington.
It was a humbling moment for USA when its closest allies like Britain, France and Germany changed their mind and abandoned Washington for self-economic interests. Larry Summer, ex Treasury secretary, titled his article in Washington Post “A global Wake up call for the USA?’ and advised west and USA to reform the I.M.F., World Bank and Asia Development which is long overdue.
The governance policies of A.I.I.B are still being formulated. If China follows its own advice that it was giving to other world institutions, it will be great news for the developing countries and it will either force the other world institutes to reform or become irrelevant . While building projects, the economic interests of the major shareholders of world institutes should not undermine the interests of the home country and a proper balance should be found. If A.I.I.B can accomplish it, it will be a game changer in world economic affairs that will loosen the hold of I.M.F, and World Bank, but it is a tall order.
Worth reading article on how slavery was the backbone of Capitalism in USA. Slavery was as common in Northeast as in Mississippi delta. Some excerpts from article;
“If capitalism, as many believe, is about wage labor, markets, contracts, and the rule of law, and, most important, if it is based on the idea that markets naturally tend toward maximizing human freedom, then how do we understand slavery’s role within it? No other national story raises that question with quite the same urgency as the history of the United States: The quintessential capitalist society of our time, it also looks back on long complicity with slavery. But the topic goes well beyond one nation. The relationship of slavery and capitalism is, in fact, one of the keys to understanding the origins of the modern world.”
“In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.”
For the first half of the 19th century, slavery was at the core of the American economy. The South was an economically dynamic part of the nation (for its white citizens); its products not only established the United States’ position in the global economy but also created markets for agricultural and industrial goods grown and manufactured in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves. In an important book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013), Johnson observes that steam engines were more prevalent on the Mississippi River than in the New England countryside, a telling detail that testifies to the modernity of slavery. Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but as its very essence. To slavery, a correspondent from Savannah noted in the publication Southern Cultivator, “does this country largely—very largely—owe its greatness in commerce, manufactures, and its general prosperity.”
Much of the recent work confirms that 1868 observation, taking us outside the major slaveholding areas themselves and insisting on the national importance of slavery, all the way up to its abolition in 1865. In these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just shaping but dominating it.
Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible. For full article click link below.
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/150787/
Posted by F. Sheikh
An important event which both China and USA wants to keep quiet. Some excerpts from article;
Without fanfare—indeed, with some misgivings about its new status—China has just overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy. This is, and should be, a wake-up call—but not the kind most Americans might imagine
For one thing, China did not want to stick its head above the parapet—being No. 1 comes with a cost. It means paying more to support international bodies such as the United Nations. It could bring pressure to take an enlightened leadership role on issues such as climate change. It might very well prompt ordinary Chinese to wonder if more of the country’s wealth should be spent on them. (The news about China’s change in status was in fact blacked out at home.) There was one more concern, and it was a big one: China understands full well America’s psychological preoccupation with being No. 1—and was deeply worried about what our reaction would be when we no longer were.
Tectonic shifts in global economic power have obviously occurred before, and as a result we know something about what happens when they do. Two hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain emerged as the world’s dominant power. Its empire spanned a quarter of the globe. Its currency, the pound sterling, became the global reserve currency—as sound as gold itself. Britain, sometimes working in concert with its allies, imposed its own trade rules. It could discriminate against importation of Indian textiles and force India to buy British cloth. Britain and its allies could also insist that China keep its markets open to opium, and when China, knowing the drug’s devastating effect, tried to close its borders, the allies twice went to war to maintain the free flow of this product.
Britain’s dominance was to last a hundred years and continued even after the U.S. surpassed Britain economically, in the 1870s. There’s always a lag (as there will be with the U.S. and China). The transitional event was World War I, when Britain achieved victory over Germany only with the assistance of the United States. After the war, America was as reluctant to accept its potential new responsibilities as Britain was to voluntarily give up its role. Woodrow Wilson did what he could to construct a postwar world that would make another global conflict less likely, but isolationism at home meant that the U.S. never joined the League of Nations. In the economic sphere, America insisted on going its own way—passing the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and bringing to an end an era that had seen a worldwide boom in trade. Britain maintained its empire, but gradually the pound sterling gave way to the dollar: in the end, economic realities dominate. Many American firms became global enterprises, and American culture was clearly ascendant.
We should take this moment, as China becomes the world’s largest economy, to “pivot” our foreign policy away from containment. The economic interests of China and the U.S. are intricately intertwined. We both have an interest in seeing a stable and well-functioning global political and economic order. Given historical memories and its own sense of dignity, China won’t be able to accept the global system simply as it is, with rules that have been set by the West, to benefit the West and its corporate interests, and that reflect the West’s perspectives. We will have to cooperate, like it or not—and we should want to. In the meantime, the most important thing America can do to maintain the value of its soft power is to address its own systemic deficiencies—economic and political practices that are corrupt, to put the matter baldly, and skewed toward the rich and powerful.
A new global political and economic order is emerging, the result of new economic realities. We cannot change these economic realities. But if we respond to them in the wrong way, we risk a backlash that will result in either a dysfunctional global system or a global order that is distinctly not what we would have wanted
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2015/01/china-worlds-largest-economy
Posted by F. Sheikh