08-09 Financial Crisis Subject Headings

Read up on the  2008 – 2009 crisis and figure out the housing bubble, derivatives, sovereign debt, personal debt, TARP and more. 

Our subject headings:

the best one: US Financial Crises

Global Financial Crisis

Financial Crises United States History

Austin Influencers on Social Media

If you're a charismatic, good-looking person who wants to blog or make videos about your clothes or  the restaurants you go to you might consider becoming an influencer.

Companies pay you to promote their products on social media but it looks all authentic and street and stuff because you portray yourself as just this cool person rapping about your life. Except your life has product placements.

Read all about it here – some people actually do this for a living.

My Favorite Easy Statistics Book

Need a little refresher on standard deviation, median, mode, sampling error and more?

This is my favorite, easy to read book for the rest of us - The Joy of Stats.

Covers basic and advanced statistical topics. Other books on stats are in the same area.

Margins in 10-K

10-Ks (a company's annual report) have a wealth of cool information.

Example: listing of profit margins for products.

In this example, here's the 10-K for VF Corp (VFC) the jeans company. Inside the report VFC lists the margins for its products, oftentimes breaking out brands and segments of its business.

10-Ks are long so do a ctr-f (find function) word search for margins

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American and Foreign Companies with Global Operations

Here's a database you may not have heard of. American and Foreign Companies with Global Operations.

Covers over 200 countries and 20,000 industries. A great way to do international business research or how to get a job living abroad.

Business in Movies: The Network Capitalism Speech

Here's the scene in Network where Ned Beatty explains the reality of capitalism and the illusion of democracy and the nation-state to a bewildered Peter Finch.

Book Review: Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, And Future Of Rationing

This is a short, well-written interesting book that presents rationing in a favorable light. 

We live in an increasingly managed economy and technocratic age, so the notion of planned economies is an important one. There are really two reasons to ration.  One is actual shortage of a good (such as fuel or food in wartime) and the other is a desire to alter human behavior by making something expensive or rewarding behavior. 

Very often, the free market can produce pretty strange results and the book provides some examples of this . Case in point - the case of quinoa. Cultivated for centuries by Peruvian highlanders, Westerners now outbid natives for the grain.  The result is a change in diet to other foods for the natives - ironic that while surrounded by fields of quinoa. Another example is Egypt, where the author asserts that there's much organic agriculture that is exported to Europe while Egyptians are forced to import bread of low quality.

So do you ration the imported food, the native food, what? And what would be fair and moral? This book will help you think about these issues.

The book also discusses when people will accept rationing and when will they reject it. Another concept discussed here is dealing with underground economies.

The author does not really address situations where rationing has failed or produced tragic outcomes.

The ethics of an unelected technocracy (who in reality are often immune or exempt from rationing) deciding what behavior is to be altered is also not addressed. It is, after all, basically a pro-technocrat, pro-rationing book.