NEWS: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Photo via The Economist.

"IT IS the economics book taking the world by storm. "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French last year and in English in March of this year. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it has prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. This newspaper has hailed Mr Piketty as "the modern Marx" (Karl, that is). But what’s it all about?" The Economist promises to explain this (massive) book in four decent sized paragraphs. E.T.P. 4'

NEWS: Why American Cities Are Fighting to Attract Immigrants

Photo via The Atlantic.

"Immigrants take our jobs. They don’t pay taxes. They’re a drain on the economy. They make America less … American.
You’ve probably heard all of these arguments, especially with the country recovering from a financial disaster. Indeed, they’ve been heard for a century or two, as successive waves of immigrants to this nation of immigrants have first been vilified, then grudgingly tolerated, and ultimately venerated for their contributions.
This time, too, there is ample evidence that immigrants are creating businesses and revitalizing the U.S. workforce. From 2006 to 2012, more than two-fifths of the start-up tech companies in Silicon Valley had at least one foreign-born founder, according to the Kauffman Foundation. A report by the Partnership for a New American Economy, which advocates for immigrants in the U.S. workforce, found that they accounted for 28 percent of all new small businesses in 2011." Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 8'

NEWS: Ten Everyday Items That Now Cost More Than the Monthly Minimum Wage in Venezuela

Chart via Bloomberg.

"As Venezuela's bolivar loses its value at an unprecedented rate, the purchasing power of ordinary citizens is going down with it.
While President Nicolas Maduro decreed a 30 percent increase to the minimum wage in May, the currency has plunged even more -- losing 88 percent over the past year in the black market where people and businesses go to avoid strict controls on dollar purchases.
It now takes 630 bolivars to buy $1 in illegal street markets, according to dolartoday.com. That means that Venezuela’s largest bank note of 100 bolivars now fetches less than 16 cents, and that the monthly minimum wage of 7,422 bolivars is worth a little over $11. or people in a country where inflation is under control and the currency is relatively stable, it can be difficult to fathom what this really means for everyday Venezuelans who are suffering from shortages of everything from milk to baby formula." To have a look at the relatively inexpensive items compiled by Bloomberg that cost more than a month's wages click here. E.T.P. 3'

PS. This article was written more than 2 weeks ago, probably the dollar is a lot more expensive now.

NEWS: Why the iPhone 6 Costs $47,678 in Venezuela

Photo via The Procrastinator (some) Times.

Using as an example the iPhone6 this Bloomberg article explains one aspect of the economical crisis and some of the bizarre consequences of the exchange control in Venezuela. "Maria Veronica Fernandez went to eight stores in Caracas to add her name to a waiting list for a mobile phone she didn’t even like. After she was robbed of her Samsung Galaxy S4 phone at gunpoint in May, Fernandez, 24, embarked on a shopping quest much too familiar for Venezuelans, who live with the world’s highest inflation, chronic food shortages and rampant crime. “It’s the same feeling of helplessness as when you have to go to three or four supermarkets looking for toilet paper or oil or flour,” Fernandez said. After a few weeks’ wait, she bought a Samsung Galaxy Fame -- a less-sophisticated phone with fewer features. “At least if this one gets stolen, it won’t hurt as much.” Read full article in Bloomberg. E.T.P. 4'


Note: We added this article for the 09 July as it is a variation of the same theme: another deep economic plunge.

You might also like this other Bloomberg article about how the bolívar keeps collapsing: "Venezuela’s largest bank note of 100 bolivars is now worth about 16 U.S. cents on the black market, following a 33 percent plunge in the past month." "Bank of America Corp. said last month that the country’s annual inflation reached 108.1 percent in May." Read full article in Bloomberg. E.T.P. 2'

NEWS: Venezuelan Officials Suspected of Turning Country into Global Cocaine Hub

Caracas. Photo: The Procrastinator Times.

So, this is one of these things that everybody kind of suspects but nobody can prove, FIFA-style scandal, sort of say. The Wall Street Journal is changing the state of things because according to their research the U.S. now has proof that some Venezuelan officials (on top of ruining the country) have turned it into a Cartel.

"U.S. prosecutors are investigating several high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including the president of the country’s congress, on suspicion that they have turned the country into a global hub for cocaine trafficking and money laundering, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the probes." Read full article in the Wall Street Journal. E.T.P. 5'

NEWS: The Mess in Venezuela and the 200% of inflation

Alejandro Toledo, former president of Perú and author of "The Shared Society", writes in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, an article that is both accurate and simple, and that it is also ambitiously untitled: How to Fix the Mess in Venezuela. A must-read. "The recent news from Venezuela has been troubling — and also far from surprising. As the Venezuelan economy continues to struggle and inflation pushes many of the most basic everyday needs out of reach of ordinary working people, President Nicolás Maduro has responded, not with a plan, but with a crackdown. It has included arresting Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas, and other opposition figures on questionable charges — to say nothing of the jailings of peaceful protesters.

Mr. Maduro’s attempts to deflect criticism by pointing to aggression from the United States and international meddling — even if they were rooted in fact — would do nothing to solve Venezuela’s problems. If he were a serious leader, he would look first at the Venezuelan economy, which, in reality, is at least two economies, separate and far from equal. . . Fixing the economy, however, is only one of the tasks facing Mr. Maduro. The second is going to be tougher: He must shed the conspiratorial mind-set and authoritarian instincts he has carried over from the regime of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and accept that true democracy includes dissent, and that means he won’t always get his way." Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 5'

 Tim Worstall writes in Forbes: "This isn’t perhaps the sort of thing that we normally congratulate people on, managing to so entirely screw up a national economy so as to generate 200% annual inflation. But we really should give credit where such credit is due. It is an achievement to manage to follow economic policies that blockheaded so, in the spirit of being entirely fair, congratulations to Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism. It’s worth noting further that the reason for this stunning success of theirs is not because they’re a bit left wing, nor because they’ve tried to make the lives of the poor a bit better. It’s because they’ve ignored the most important rule of trying to run an economy, they’ve failed to understand that markets really do work. Something that we all need to recall in our own countries as various people tell us that we’ve got to excise market forces from one or another part of our own economies. There’s ways to deal with the effects that we don’t want from market forces: but ignoring or trying to abolish them leads to, well, to success like that that Venezuelan Bolivarian socialism is currently experiencing." Read full article in Forbes. E.T.P. 6' 

NEWS: Venezuela's Sanctions, Absurd Prices & Currency Circus

Illustration via The Economist.

"It was the kind of diplomatic clumsiness for which the United States has a unique capacity. On March 9th Barack Obama issued an executive order declaring “a national emergency” because of the “extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States posed by Venezuela. Really? Is Uncle Sam scared of a country with a government that is incapable of organising a reliable supply of toilet paper, an army whose best-known capabilities are coups, petrol smuggling and drug trafficking, and a president who spent most of January touring the world to beg for cash?
The explanation is that American law requires the administration to use such language if it wants to impose sanctions on individuals in another country. Congress has voted to do this in the case of Venezuela. Critics of this initiative argued that its only practical effect would be to give Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s embattled president, a propaganda tool. That is what it has done." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 3'

"Nowhere else has the collapse of oil prices has taken a higher toll than on Venezuela, where crude provides 95 percent of the country’s export revenue. Already facing recession, Venezuela is on the brink of economic collapse.
As that revenue dried up, the country has been thrown deeper into economic turmoil under President Nicolas Maduro. The economy is expected to contract by 7 percent this year, inflation soared to 69 percent—the highest in the world—and shortages of goods have forced shoppers to line up for hours at supermarkets to buy basic foods and products. The situation descended into the surreal earlier this week when the Prime Minister of neighboring Trinidad & Tobago proposed exchanging Venezuelan oil for Trinidadian tissue paper." Read full article in TIME Magazine. E.T.P. 2'

"In 2003, a beleaguered President Hugo Chávez imposed currency controls to try to hold down inflation and prevent a speculative run on the Venezuelan bolívar. Over the years that followed, these controls evolved into the byzantine tiered system by which the government’s oil dollars are sold at three different official prices — while hard-currency dollars fetch a fourth, higher price on the black market.

An importer who pledges to purchase basic necessities to bring into the country can buy a dollar for about six bolívars. But walk up to a bank teller and the same dollar costs 178 bolívars: nearly 3,000 percent more. For the 264 bolívars that it cost at the time of this writing to buy one black-market dollar, you could buy 42 dollars at the official rate." Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

"In the past 50 years, the number of people working in manufacturing, government, and agriculture jobs have all gone down or flat-lined. As technology infiltrates parts of the labor market that it could never reach before, employment of people who do repetitive or task-oriented jobs has seen less need for human oversight or action. And your job could very likely be next." Thor Benson asks in Fast Company what will the economy look like when the robots take your job? Read article here. E.T.P: 5'

Photo via The New York Times.

"A model of Vincent van Gogh’s left ear — you know, the ear — is on display at a German museum.

 Created using 3D printers and genetic material from a living relative of van Gogh, the Dutch painter, it was shaped to be the exact size of his ear and is kept alive in a nourishing liquid.

It is the first major work from the German-born artist Diemut Strebe, who is based in Boston. Ms. Strebe, 47, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that she had spent three years working with a team of scientists to regrow the ear that van Gogh is said to have cut off in 1888." This is definitely a really original way of procrastination I would say. Read article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 2'

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 1st of December Edition

EDITORIAL

First day of December! So many clichés to say about time and the future. I won't say any just because I promised last month not to do it. But I'm dying here people. In this week's edition of The Procrastinator we have an article about Bitcoin for everyone that, like me, still don't understand Bitcoin very much. Interesting articles about Design Thinking, GhostFood and about amazing/crazy plans for the Moon. In Dog We Trust introduce us to Eiconne and Pootle. And finally, cool projects in our Culture & Entertainment section; some lovely like Yoni Lefévre's Grey Power, some bonkers like James Franco & Seth Rogen's parody video, amazing example of massive procrastination.


Happy Sunday and happy reading! x


NEWS

Photo via The Economist.

I have to confess that I don't truly understand Bitcoin yet. I know. I'm making an effort here. This article helped me understand a bit more because it explains how it all began, its popularity and controversy, and I love how it starts: "ALL currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. Rather than relying on confidence in a central authority, it depends instead on a distributed system of trust, based on a transaction ledger which is cryptographically verified and jointly maintained by the currency’s users." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 8'

Photo via The New Yorker.

Gregory Gause explains in The New Yorker why the deal between the United States and Iran scares Saudi Arabia. "After the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany concluded a preliminary agreement with Iran on Sunday, it did not take long for regional critics of the deal to react. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, blasted the agreement as “a historic mistake.” Saudi Arabia, the other American ally in the Middle East worried about an opening to Iran, took a different approach, issuing a carefully worded statement that cautiously welcomed the deal." Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P.