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Author: David James

  • ECONOMICS

    The flawed ideology of healthcare as business

    • David James
    • 28 May 2020
    5 Comments

    Calling healthcare a business was always logically flawed. Money is involved, but it is unlike any consumer product businesses. For one thing, the ‘customer’ in health does not decide what represents value, the provider (the doctor or equivalent) does. Patients may have a say, but usually only on the margin.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Taking a closer look

    • David James
    • 29 April 2020
    6 Comments

    The COVID-19 pandemic is starting to ease, but the economic and financial fall out has just begun. It is not as if the world economy was in good shape before economic activity was slashed and entire industries were shut down. Those fault lines are only going to worsen, and the consequences might be very dark.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The possible economics of COVID-19

    • David James
    • 01 April 2020
    4 Comments

    The world-wide chaos caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus has underlined a lesson that was only partly learned in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In a more interconnected world the understanding of system-wide risk needs to be much better than it is.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Be wary of a cashless future

    • David James
    • 03 March 2020
    10 Comments

    We live in an era of hyper-transactionalism, whereby most of what we do is subject to the exchange of money and market pricing. Whereas in the past much of humanity was bound to a political system, now most of us are bound to a globalised monetary system.

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  • ECONOMICS

    How climate change is remaking finance

    • David James
    • 04 February 2020
    3 Comments

    A shift is afoot in the west's financial markets that represents the most important economic change since the emergence of the new financial instruments in the 1990s that ultimately led to the global financial crisis. It is likely to result in a new way of thinking about money, which will change the substructure of developed economies.

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  • ECONOMICS

    It's the end of 'industry as usual', so what next?

    • David James
    • 22 November 2019
    5 Comments

    At the next global financial crisis, when questions about what we want our monetary system to do for us become a matter of survival, why not devise a transactional system that is not just geared towards the consumption of goods and services, but involves monetary exchanges for social goods, such as sustainable production, or civic benefit?

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  • ECONOMICS

    Ways out of the capitalist rabbit hole

    • David James
    • 21 October 2019
    5 Comments

    Recognising that financial systems are a human creation rather than natural systems governed by 'capital flows' would be an important step to conceiving a more robust and equitable system. To ask what kind of society we want and only then work out what we want money to do for us is to put the horse back in front of the cart.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Capitalism isn’t dead, it just smells funny

    • David James
    • 24 September 2019
    9 Comments

    It is easy to blame the financial sector — and the governments that were supposed to oversee the financial system but instead just washed their hands of it — for creating this global debt debauch. They certainly bear much of the responsibility. But in many ways the financial misbehaviour is as much symptom as cause.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Inside US and China's dodgy economies

    • David James
    • 07 September 2019
    6 Comments

    One of the ironies of the intensifying tariff war between America and China is that that neither of the two giants seems to have a viable economic model. Both countries' systems are based on dodgy financial engineering and printing money, or just inventing new types of money out of thin air.

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  • MEDIA

    The creators of fake news are winning

    • David James
    • 30 July 2019
    12 Comments

    They vastly outnumber journalists, their industry is far bigger than the shrinking media organisations, and the concentration of media ownership means that they can do deals with proprietors. Understanding that the trail with fake news leads to the spin doctors can be a useful way to detect what is, and is not, propaganda.

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  • ECONOMICS

    NZ's riposte to modern economic myths

    • David James
    • 02 July 2019
    5 Comments

    While money can be transacted for things that are bad — air pollution, road deaths, cigarette ads — as long as more transactions occur, it creates the illusion the economy is growing, which, ipso facto, is good. Thus, Japan's GDP rose sharply after the tsunami disaster. New Zealand's initiative will track better what is really happening in the country.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Lines drawn for Trump's economic war

    • David James
    • 07 June 2019
    5 Comments

    The globe is being split into two, with Australia nervously sitting between the two sides: America and China. At least we have a trade deficit with America so are not an immediate target. But we might want to consider becoming more self-sufficient and broadening our industrial base.

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