In Academy Fellow Hazel Henderson’s book review of Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System, by Scott Patterson, she writes that the book “explores the colorful inner workings” of high-frequency trading “through a cast of improbable characters: the traders, programming geniuses, eccentric electronic market-makers, aggressive ‘algo-warriors,’ high-rollers and […]
Wall Street Computers Gone Wild
The fragmentation of the stock market and high-speed computerized trading have transformed the market into a “playground of Google – esque algorithms, powerful banks and secretive, fast-money trading firms.” You don’t want your 401(k) playing here. Gone are the days when human traders called the shots from the floor of the N.Y. Stock Exchange and […]
Ascent of the Phoenix: Global Reconstruction
We are on the verge of witnessing the birth of a new economic order from the ashes of the old. We’ve been a first-hand witness the last several decades to the dissolution of the old political and economic systems that brought us to this point. And we can now say with some confidence that the time has come for the existing economic order to pass away.
The Nuclear Nemesis Redux
April 9, 2012 Nuclear power creates unacceptable risks to our planet. Investing in nuclear energy undercuts our ability to solve our intertwined energy and climate change crises and increases the risk of cancer, nuclear terrorism and proliferation, and contamination from nuclear waste. Greenwashing at its worst The growing interest in nuclear energy has been bolstered […]
Japan’s Nuclear Kamikazes: A Morality Tale of Energy Madness
In the final stages of World War II, Japan found young men willing to give their lives in suicidal missions against Allied warships. Scarves tucked around their necks blowing in the wind identified them as men willing to die for their country. The modern day kamikazes are the men who have been sent day after […]
The Nuclear Nemesis
April 1, 2012 Nuclear power is not the answer to our energy needs or the climate change crisis. Nuclear power plants produce more greenhouse gas emission than wind, and certainly fewer than coal, but that is not the issue. Building new nuclear plants to try to reduce carbon emissions would irrevocably commit the world to […]
Nuclear “SpinCo”
The nuclear industry, like Wall Street, knows how to make money with other people’s money: move liabilities off balance sheet, use lots of borrowed money and leverage, don’t worry about loading too much debt onto the company as long as insiders can walk away with plenty of money and look to the fool taxpayer to […]
The Upcoming Nuclear Peril: Worse than the BP Oil Disaster
How many crises will it take? The recent destruction wrought by Big Finance and Big Oil will pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by Big Nuclear if we do not use the Gulf disaster as a transformational moment to end our dangerous addiction to dirty fuels and to reject the illusion that industry will […]
The Wisdom of Two Generals
We are bombing Afghanistan. We know that with all of our modern weaponry, we can’t reach Osama bin Laden in the caves where he lives. He is not exposed. Conversely, he and his terrorist associates can reach any tall building in America with a pickup truck full of a commonly available totally unregulated fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) […]