Top Financial Stories 2016

I generally ask myself at this time of year what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.

Of course, I choose the ones I do largely because they illustrate an important theme, and in the list below I'll spell out and boldface the theme. Yet the theme itself isn't the story.

January: Collective bargaining. The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Jan. 11th about public sector unions, mandatory fees, and the economics of the free-rider problem. In the spring, after Scalia's death, it splits 4-4 on the subject.

February: Economics of crude oil. Iran takes a stand-offish posture toward the efforts of other oil-producing nations to cut production, wants to get itself back to pre-sanctions levels.

March: Smartphones and privacy. The face-off on iPhone encryption and the demands of the FBI go before the U.S. Congress as this month begins. Later in the month, FBI backs away, says it may have found another way.

April. Rise of Social Media. Twitter wins a bidding war for the right to stream regular season NFL games. This is illustrative of the way social media are taking over general entertainment functions, esp. in the US.

May. Commodities. After a long downturn, basic commodities seemed to be on an upswing by May, indicated for example by Rio Tinto's $5.3 billion expansion of a copper mine in Oyu Tolgoi, in Mongolia. And by agricultural pricing.

June. European Union. Britain votes to leave, 52/48, in a referendum with enormous implications for the whole continent and beyond.

July. Africa. Protesters in Zimbabwe demand that Robert Mugabe step down, due to deepening economic dysfunction. Some of his staunchest supporters, the war veterans, desert him.

August. Economics of health care. The degree to which the unfolding of Obamacare has not gone as planned, or advertised, becomes conspicuous, and makes a rather late but potent appearance in the Presidential campaign. In November, Trump will become President elect, with a mandate to "repeal and replace," whatever exactly that means.

September. Latin America. The People's Republic of China cuts off new loans to Venezuela, worsening the latter country's economic crisis.

October. Market structure issues. A London-based trader, Navinder Singh Sarao, loses in his efforts to avoid extradition to the US. Sarao is blamed by many for the 2010 Wall Street "flash crash."

November. Marijuana. Several states in the US vote on two distinct tiers of proposals to legalize (at the state level) the MJ industry. Most of these proposals for liberalization are approved.

December. Automation. Uber removes its self-driving cars from the streets of San Francisco one month after launching the program there, vowing to reconsider how it can comply with California regulations. The incident reflects the way in which automation is poised to wreak havoc on various legal and social structures, and the sometimes-successful pushback by those structures.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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