Robert Peston is a kind of modern broadcasting hero. The BBC’s Economics Editor is a popular, engaging and energetic figure who helps explain capitalism to the people of the UK. Sometimes though, he seems rather a worried man. He worries about the price of crude oil. He worries about the government deficit and the latest unemployment …
Advertising transcends its function as a managerial tool designed to influence consumption and also echoes, reproduces and taps into wider societal themes, values and trends. The debate and study of postmodern influences on marketing and its expression in advertising has gained a late momentum in the mid 1990s(1), though did not reach beyond being a …
The trick with the rabbit and the tricking rabbit Read More »
Interesting times call for interesting books. In Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis (2010) (and elsewhere) Anatole Kaletsky, Editor-at-Large of The Times, comes up with a thoughtful analysis of the past, present and future of global capitalism. Putting the events of the 2007-2009 economic crisis, epitomized by the fall of Lehmann Brothers, into a historical perspective, he writes:
A new era comes with new acronyms for new phenomena. We have already commented on the rise of the BRICs, which is an apt shorthand for Brasil, Russia, India and China, the economic powers to be (or that be). Yet there are also less flattering acronyms around. What to think of the PI(I)GS, for example. It …
At the beginning of the decade, just after the events of 9/11, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist Jim O’Neill coined the remarkably apt acronym BRIC to describe a group of nations that would become, in his view, the main contenders of Western economic dominance. This group consists of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), and, since the …
Last week the US Senate passed the Financial Reform Bill. After decades of Neoliberal deregulation, the legislation intends to re-regulate the free-floating financial system which was at the root of the 2008 crisis. Symbolically, therefore, the bill signals the end of the postmodern (late-capitalist) years of unbridled lending and unfettered trading. As CNN Money aptly …
