Joelle Nebbe-Mornod's Library tagged policy → View Popular, Search in Google

Jan

2012

An Antidote to Urgency: How to Respond to the Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico

These are very valid human responses-I'd worry if we weren't feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again!

There's a big problem with urgency-it's always toxic. Like the black plumes of oil moving underwater through the Gulf, urgency blinds us. It pollutes our thinking, making it impossible to see clearly or to choose wise actions.

www.yesmagazine.org/...an-antidote-to-urgency

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thinking policy

These are very valid human responses—I’d worry if we weren’t feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again!

Feb

2009

Eurozine - Beyond transparency - André Orléan

www.eurozine.com/...2008-12-18-orlean-en.html

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policy law making regulation transparency open delicious

In other words, contrary to the received wisdom, stock markets do not produce conflicting opinions. They unduly favour mimicry among investors, not for obscure reasons of crowd psychology, but because that is what good sense dictates. Going against long-term market developments is too risky.
The explicit strategy was to create a single financial market where all stakeholders (banks, funds, companies, individuals, states) could share in all maturities (short-term, medium-term and long-term) using all the instruments available (stocks, bonds, derivatives and currencies). It was a world of universal interconnection and perfect, unhindered liquidity.
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- Keynes's basic position was that, if the future is entirely unknown, the idea of a correct valuation disappears. There are only subjective valuations. Moreover, for him the purpose of the markets was not to provide correct valuations, which do not exist, but to make investments liquid; in other words, to ensure that the securities they represent can be traded from stable foundations.
- For supporters of the efficiency paradigm, crisis is above all about opacity. The securitization of credit fails because it produces opaque securities whose risks cannot be assessed. To resolve a crisis there must be a return to transparency, they argue, and this is what regulation must impose on those involved. In other words, it is not the financial mechanisms themselves that are intrinsically at fault but securities, which were badly designed at the outset. This analysis does not question markets' efficient allocation of capital. The rationale behind universal interconnection allowing totally free movement of capital in all forms is not disputed.
- Transparency is not sufficient to ensure financial stability, because it is the financial mechanism itself that produces instability. Bubbles can form with absolutely transparent securities. The Internet bubble was a good example of this. During that episode, we witnessed the formation of an entirely transparent speculative bubble. Investors were well aware that they were buying securities from companies that had high deficits, but these deficits were interpreted by the markets as proof of their dynamism. Similarly, perfectly transparent sub-prime securities allegedly created a bullish bubble.