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Few persons, even legal scholars, realize that sovereign bankruptcy has a long history. Far from a pie-in-the-sky scheme conceived in the 1980s by international lawyers such as Christopher Oeschli and economists such as Jeffrey Sachs that later inspired the failed IMF Krueger proposal for a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, the concept of sovereign debt bankruptcy and discharge (write-off) has an ancient and little known history. My new INET working paper sets out this history for the first time.

Expertise is broken. Trust is eroding. Enough is enough.

While helping at his family’s restaurant, author Ray Boshara has gotten to know the workers and has ideas that speak to their financial aspirations and struggles.

I would like to propose a new term: outrage dividend.

Outrage dividend is the boost in reach that content which elicits strong emotional responses often gets on social media and other content sharing platforms.

This boost can be related to human nature — an outrage-inducing article will get shared more. It can also be caused by the particular set-up of the platform a given piece of content is shared on — Facebook’s post-promoting algorithm was designed to be heavily biased to promote posts that get the “angry” reaction.

A tale of two media outlets

Imagine two media organizations.

A Herald is a reliable media organization, with great fact-checking, in-depth reporting, and so on. Their articles are nuanced, well-argued, and usually stay away from sensationalism and clickbaity titles.

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All my life I’ve known I was “creative” and “different.” Only recently have I realized that I’m both neurodivergent and bisexual. In my youth, as I struggled with drugs, alcoholism, depression, and underemployment, it never crossed my mind that I was neurodivergent—not that the term existed then. Even after I was diagnosed with an Anxiety […]

The post I’m Here appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same.

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The depth of the U.S. securities market helps ensure dollar hegemony

1. The Ukraine Crisis and Dollar Supremacy

Since the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and the subsequent rise of the world economy as a single market-based operational totality, its monetary counterpart has been a unipolar currency system centered on the US dollar as the premier vehicle currency in the private sector, as well as the premier reserve currency in the official sector. The hegemony of the dollar has survived several global economic shocks, including that of the financial crisis of 2007-9. Whether the system can survive the seismic shocks stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is now under active debate.

I thank Philos Lysandrou and Anastasia Nesvetailova for their response to my essay on the dollar in a multi-polar world. Our conclusions are broadly similar, though a reader of the Lysandrou/Nesvetailova essay alone might be forgiven for thinking that sharp differences exist.

For instance, L/N characterize my view in these words: “He sees the confidence in the dollar as something highly fragile because it apparently lacks any material substance to back it.” I searched my text for the words “fragile” and “fragility.” They were not to be found. On the contrary, L/N quote the following passage but omit both a crucial intermediate sentence and also the conclusion, which are included in bold below:

Frank McCourt discusses his work to reinspire hope in the American experiment, and to build the framework necessary for that better tomorrow.

Last week’s WTO 12^th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in Geneva concluded with pro-corporate, anti-worker, and anti-development outcomes on all major issues of access to medicines, agriculture, digital trade, and the future of the WTO itself. The spin of “unprecedented outcomes” of MC12 is a cynical ploy to paper over major differences to bolster the institution’s flailing reputation.

The agreements should herald a warning to all: rich country governments professing new commitments to sustainable and worker-centered trade are just as likely to push anti-development outcomes and cosmetic window-dressing when it comes to protecting Big Business profits above the public interest. Their version of WTO “reform” will facilitate the further deterioration of multilateralism and cement-in discredited pro-corporate rules on globalization.

MC12: Setting the Scenario

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As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same.

In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom.