Posted: September 22nd, 2009 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Business, Capitalism | Tags: Business, Capitalism, economics, Great Depression, Hyman Minsky, investing, linkedin | View Comments
I recently read the article Why Capitalism Fails by Stephen Mihm and was interested to learn about Hyman Minski, who, according to the article, was
…a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck… But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through…Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.
Minsky basically believed that the conservative fiscal stance which comes in the wake of a financial collapse, such as the Great Depression, would inevitably sow the seeds for the next crisis decades down the road. The main ingredients are time and short human memories, “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.” The article compares Minsky’s view to the one held by mainstream economics, that capitalism is self-regulating and self-stabilizing, known as the Neoclassical Synthesis.
Posted: April 15th, 2009 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Business | Tags: Business, finance, investing, mathematics, stimulus | View Comments
Ever since the current financial crisis began, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has been everywhere. His astute and irreverent analysis of why human psychology is ill-equipped to deal with very unlikely yet very impactful events has captured the attention of many who are searching for answers in uncertain times.
Mr. Taleb is in the headlines again with a Financial Times opinion piece entitled Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world, which lists some principles for preparing for, avoiding, and dealing with these unlikely events.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a “black swan” is any event which can have an extremely large impact, but is so unlikely to occur that it is considered impossible. According to Wikipedia: “The term Black Swan comes from the assumption that ‘All swans are white.’ In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.”
Posted: July 8th, 2008 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Business, Sustainability, Technology | Tags: cleantech, Energy, investing, linkedin, Sustainability, Technology, vc, venture capital | View Comments
This morning I attended SDForum.org’s quarterly Venture Breakfast, this time focusing on cleantech investing. The panel of speakers included Steve Bengston of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, David Horning from Palo Alto Investors, Steve Eichenlaub from Intel Capital, Peter Nieh of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matthew Trevithick from Venrock. The following are some interesting highlights:
About cleantech investing in general:
- The potential market for energy technologies is huge.
- New energy technology transitions will take decades to replace existing technologies, not the short adoption timeframes associated with typical Silicon Valley tech companies.
