Two top economists (one a Nobel prize winner) provide an excellent analysis of the current financial crisis. While they don’t say it, it also points to a counter-intuitive solution to the problem. Its all in the hands of the American consumer.
Their main hypothesis is that this current meltdown is very similar to the meltdown that led to the Great Depression. Both were caused by massive consumer debt.
“It appears that we’re witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.” Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, in The Wall Street Journal.
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Every once in a while I feel compelled to put my economics degree to use. This is one of those times.
There’s a tremendous amount of pain around the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I don’t want to belittle or take attention away from that pain. I have been in two market collapses myself (Latin American stock markets in 1994 and the internet business in 2001) and it is not fun.
But there is a silver lining in the collapse of Lehman. Lehman’s bankruptcy, along with Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch and Bear Sterns disappearance are the end a particular type of business: the large scale broker-dealer investment bank. These banks made huge amounts of money in secondary markets for stocks, bonds and financial products derived from other underlying assets. The money in these markets is primarily traded among participants in those markets. It does not directly go to the companies, governments or people whose name might be on those assets.
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YouTube would be a bad move for Google.
It is bad for shareholders since it makes Google less competitive on search since it provides a disincentive to make any advances in search technology. It also may create additional legal exposure for Google in terms of click-fraud lawsuits.
It is also bad for advertisers since it dilutes the value of Google’s ad distribution network. Advertisers are the life-blood of Google’s revenue model.
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Does Google’s very economic model cause it to violate its principle to “do no evil?”
In all fairness, the same question could be asked of all automated ad distribution networks, not just Google’s Adwords program.
Looking at how the ad networks work, it seems that the more content there is on a subject (that is, the more popular or broad a keyword is), the more competition there will be for producers of that content to get noticed.
Therefore, producers will bid-up the price of an ad on that keyword. Is this the most efficient way for searchers to find relevant results?
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Mark Phillips
I am the product manager and lead spokesperson for Vertabase. Its my job to make sure the Vertabase approach to project management gets out there and that feedback from our customer’s and the market make it back to the engineers who build the great products we sell. I spend a lot of time traveling, talking to customers, users groups and conferences in the US and Canada primarily about project management, time management and getting more done.
I write about those same topics on this blog and in other places including a regular column for Fusion Authority. My work has been published in publications like C|Net, ComputerWorld Magazine and the Financial Times. News about Vertabase (which my team generates) has been in almost every major project management magazine, vertical industry magazine (e.g. the insurance industry, banking industry, education, municipal government, oil and gas, etc.) and local newspaper around the United States.
Besides project management I am an active member of Adobe Technology related communities. This includes ColdFusion, AIR and the Creative Suite group of products like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.
Before getting into project management and software I worked on Wall Street as an economic and financial analyst. Those topics are still very dear to me. Sometimes, on this blog, you’ll find that I can’t help but comment on economic and financial events going on in the world. But I do stay away from politics (on the blog).
Philosophically, the Vertabase approach to project management comes from over 15 years of real world experience helping thousands of people at hundreds of companies get more done -everyday. It has been used to produce projects for companies like MTV, Young and Rubicam, Sesame Street and the State of California. It is based on having to produce high quality work with limited resources. It is built on making it easy to get project related information, track information and use that information for intelligent reporting and decision making.
I hold a Masters degree in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors of Science [Econ] in Philosophy and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I live in Michigan with my wife and kids, our dog and a fish.
