John Aziz: Azizonomics

I am winding down Azizonomics, though, as I am sure you are already aware it has already existed in a winded down state for many years, particularly since I left The Week in 2014. I mostly started this blog in 2011 because I was concerned about the economy, and the future, and was reading a lot, and jotting down my thoughts. From today, I will be focusing on my new podcast: Cybernetics Chat. The focus of that is much more a mixture of techno-utopianism, ecology, science fiction, and...

I’m writing this months after the December 2019 General Election. In part, this is due to me being preoccupied with other matters. For instance, on the day of the General Election I was in hospital having surgery on my jaw. But it was also useful to get a bit of distance between then and now in terms of being able to process the events of the General Election. It was a resounding and stonking victory for Boris Johnson. The night of the 13th of December. I was sat at home dosing up on...

I haven’t written a post in a long time. My blog was mostly an attempt to piece together and understand the 2008 financial crisis, and the various consequences of it. One pretty big consequence, at least in my home country, the United Kingdom, has been Brexit. I didn’t vote in the 2016 referendum. Mostly because I was at that time I was living abroad in the United States with my father, having moved there the previous year, and I had trouble applying for an overseas postal vote. I probably...

Money has three principal functions: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. Secondary attributes that have aided the adoption of various forms of money include interestingness (“Ooh! Look how shiny that gold is!”), uniform divisibility, portability, resistance to counterfeit, and imposeability. That last one is important, because it is what makes state-backed fiat currency the dominant form of money in the world. The U.S. government is territorially and...

Armed with his famously short temper, and the kind of weapons of mass destruction that America once went to war to prevent men like him from obtaining Trump is quite possibly the man that will end civilization as we know it. His supporters are an unfortunate mix of three groups. (All three groups, of course, have some overlap). First, wealthy people, who care mostly for tax cuts and whether the president is deferential to big business. Second, not-so-wealthy suckers suckered by Trump’s...

Via Reuters: U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said on Tuesday that she does not believe that there will be another financial crisis for at least as long as she lives, thanks largely to reforms of the banking system since the 2007-09 crash. “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis?” Yellen said at a question-and-answer event in London. “You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes...

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He plans a 35% tariff on goods manufactured by American firms abroad: The U.S. is going to substantialy reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016 fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. …… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016 without retribution or consequence,...

This is a really important fact that people don’t talk about enough: McK & IMF: #immigrants (living not where born) account for 3.4% of world pop but produce 9.4% of world output/$6.7tn https://t.co/tcFELcPYid — Linda Yueh (@lindayueh) December 1, 2016 That is a huge gap. Immigrants’ economic output is almost three times their weight as a proportion of the population, a difference that adds up to $3 trillion annually. Why would this be the case? Well, immigrants are typically pretty...

To all who argued the financial world would’ve collapsed without the bailouts: The political world is collapsing now because of the bailouts — Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) June 25, 2016 The bigger picture of the early 21st century follows: Western nations experienced a massive blowout bubble of leverage, irrational exuberance, and Hayekian pseudo-money creation. Yet this money was not going to overwhelmingly productive causes. The real output of the Western world did not follow...