Guide To Modern Bank Holding Companies

This is a really good overview of the modern financial structure of what are essentially old-school bank holding companies.

It's a walk-through of how to track who owns what and whom and subsidiary trees – which can be quite complex.

Book Review: And The Money Kept Rolling In (And Out)

In the early 2000s, middle class Argentinians regularly awoke to find scavengers going through dumpsters looking for plastic bottles. In many cases, these scavengers had once lived in the same neighborhood or one like it. Looting, fires and civil disturbance were regular features on the evening news.

The culprit? Argentina's currency had collapsed and set loose a disastrous inflation rate that decimated the savings of normal people. Read the book for the gory details of a too large government, national debt, and an ill-thought basis for currency exchange.

The situation is not completely analogous to the issues the United States faces now. Argentina's problems were caused by pegging its weakening national currency to the dollar. Nevertheless, the episode does show what lurks under the delicate threads of currency valuation, debt and ultimately savings and societal trust.

And the Money Kept Rolling In is recommended as a lesson in national finance policy. For any student of Latin American economic history, it's a must read.

Vemma Temporary Halted Due to Pyramid Scheme Allegation

I wrote earlier about the Vemma energy drink business model controversy. A court has agreed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and temporary halted Vemma operations due to concerns about the company being a pyramid scheme.

Read more about this issue here.

Protecting Traditional Knowledge From Copyright

Corporations occasionally try to copyright traditional knowledge, culture, and/or technology.

India has taken the step of creating the traditional digital library which documents traditional knowledge.  This makes it more difficult for corporations to take traditional knowledge and claim that purely for themselves. 

Case in point: the recent case where Colgate Palmolive attempted to copyright a product that used traditional Indian spices - and apparently nothing else. Read about the case here, in which Colgate did not prevail.

Data Planet and dataZoa Make Big Data Easy

It's the age of big data.  And learning to make attractive graphs and charts for presentations as an important job skill.

But data planet and dataZoa make it easy for you.  These databases allow you to easily import data from several different sources and easily make charts and graphs.  True, there's a way to do this in Microsoft Excel but it is much easier in these two databases.

Data-Planet Statistical Datasets

dataZoa

MRI + Migration - Save Your Data

MRI/ University Reporter will change platforms on June 30 with no information carrying over from the old platform, and no redirects for the URL.  There’s a message on the database page to alert anyone who uses this regularly.   You need to export any saved data before June 30^th. 

MRI+ University Reporter from Mediamark Research Inc.  

Subjects:	Consumer demographics, psychographics/lifestyles, product & brand usage, and media preferences based on a national probability sample of 27,000 households. Although MRI provides marketing research for a wide variety of products, it does not analyze all consumer items. Please see the MRI Internet User Guide for help or watch our YouTube video.
Formats:	Full text.
Coverage:	2001 to last year.

Koch Support of Florida State University Economics Department

Presented for your information.  The Economics Department at Florida State University will apparently be largely funded by the Koch family.  This support will include strict oversight of publications and hires by the department by the Koch foundation. 

Please read the article for more information.