The land values shot through the roof. The only way anyone could reasonably afford a house to purchase was through a bad loan. Either that or pay out the nose to a land lord to rent a house that you could instead, in theory, be making equity on.
I don't know if this was true in the US, but in the UK rental yields had long since fallen below mortgage interest rates. ie, the interest on an interest only mortgage was more than market rents. You could pay your rent and still have money left to put in to investments for the same price as your landlord could pay his capital cost and gain no new equity at all.
Houses are valuable for one reason: you can live in them. The rental market is the market in the right to live in houses and, together with the interest rate and expectations of future interest rates and rents, determines the fundamental value of houses. When your asset is priced so obviously above its fundamental value there's only one reason for believing you're going to make money: you pay a foolish price for your asset in the expectation of selling it for even more to an even bigger fool later. One of the worst aspects of this here has been generation of 40-50-something buy to let landlords who expected to make the next generation pay for their retirement by ripping them off by selling them overpriced housing when they retired.
As one of a younger generation who might normally have been a first time buyer by now I'm a little bit pissed off that our housing market has been utterly trashed by greedy bastards for the last five years. And I'll be even more pissed off if I see politicians bailing out mortgagees or trying to 'kick-start' the housing market before prices have reached an appropriate level. At least in the UK your liability under a mortgage isn't limited to your house...they can take your house, and still come after you for the rest if they feel like it.
The invisible hand of free markets probably works as long as...
The free market 'works' (in the sense of being as efficient as possible whilst saying nothing about fairness) if the conditions of the first theorem of welfare economics are met. There's a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTWE (though it's not Wikipedia's best...)
The conditions required are so excessively restrictive that no sane person could believe them to hold even approximately in the real world. It is, however, a solid starting point for studying deviations from them, and half of (the academic subject of) economics seems to be about doing this.
Several conditions have been mentioned in this thread. Banks and AIG, however, seem to have suffered particularly from principal-agent problems: agents (managers and employees) have been under an incentive not to act in the best interests of their shareholder. Read, for example, the section called 'Assumptions and Extraordinary Personal Profits' in this: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2084907/posts
Have you not seen Yes, Minister? Surely you know that the more inexpert you are the more likely you are to be right. That's why we put politicians in charge: they know nothing.
No, it isn't going to be printed. It's taxpayers money (or, rather, borrowed on behalf of taxpayers), not Federal Reserve money.
If the government gets their figures right there's no offsetting of the cost required. The mortgage repayments should cover the government debt repayment. Obviously, the figures won't be right...but they won't be 700bn USD wrong.
The US needs working financial institutions. The institutions need to be bailed out, or there'll be a huge chain of cutbacks and bankruptcies as companies find they can no longer borrow. I'm not just talking about banks here, but EVERY business. The US needs a functioning banking system.
Bailing out the institutions needn't be the same as bailing out their managers, shareholders or employees. You'll need experienced bankers to run those institutions, of course, so you may need to let off a good few of the less tainted....but I'm sure there's a pool of completely untainted bankers, too - those involved only in retail banking and not mortgages, for example.
It's not as if the 700bn is just going down the toilet...the US government would get a large amount of loans for that. The original intention was to buy them at roughly their true value so the taxpayer should get about 700bn back - with interest. There's still a good chance of a loss, of course (if defaults are higher than anticipated) - but not a 700bn USD loss. In the absence of someone with a few hundered billion dollars who feels like setting up a few new banks (and employing those no longer working for the stricken ones), I don't think you've got a better option.
Full reserve banking. Money which is lent out to one party is taken away from the lender for the period of the loan. With fractional reserve lending, the original lender still has access to their money through the bank's reserve, almost doubling the money with each loan. Then there's a race against the debt.
Presumably, most people would hand their savings to money managers who buy bonds, shares, mortgage backed securities and so on, just as they do now. Of course, people might find it convenient to trade with these in place of money...so you'd need careful legislation to prevent an equivalent to fractional reserve banking from being reinvented. Banks, of course, would have become little more than boxes full of cash, with strong locks on them, and a collection of secure vans to ferry it around for you.
Yes, under FRB, the amount of money in existence grows with each loan. But why is this a problem? The final amount of money in existence depends on the reserve ratio and M0....both of which are (as close to as matters) under the control of the monetary authorities. The central bank can stuff up the management of these, of course - but they can stuff up the management of M0 even without fractional reserve banking. Print a little more money than is justified by economic performance and population growth and you have a monetary boom and subsequent bust. Fail to print enough and you have deflation, a strong incentive to put money under mattresses rather than lend for investment, big problems for business that must repay loans increasing in real value (you can't have negative nominal interest rates), and a continuing redistribution of wealth towards the rich.
Also remember that the price level depends on the velocity of money, not just the quantity in existence. If a large enough number of people take a little more savings out from under their mattresses - or just spend their income a little more quickly than usual - then the economy experiences something indistinguishable from a rise in the money supply. The process should be familiar: firms each see this as greater demand in their own industry, raw material and labour prices are bid up as firms across the economy work extra-hard and compete for them, the price of all goods rises, people realise their extra income is a mirage as inflationary expectations pick up, demand stops rising, pay doesn't keep up with inflation expectations, demand falls.....monetary boom and bust.
Under Fractional Reserve Banking, boom/bust is the only way it goes. Smaller booms and busts usually, but boom/bust nevertheless.
Why? Describe the process you're suggesting, and why it wouldn't happen without fractional reserves.
Now that 95% of money is credit, and the only guaranteed money is cash; notes and coins. It's potentially a long long way down.
How do you get 95%? AFAICS, even M0:M3 doesn't get to 95%. In what way are notes and coins guaranteed?
Now... If you fancy changing the banking system and denying banks the ability to lend fractionally, the business cycle and the boom/bust nature of credit will change completely.
You'd have to create an awful lot of new M0. Someone would still have the impossibly difficult decision 'how much?'. And I don't see how this would end boom and bust.
In some ways money - even M0 - IS credit. You do something in the economy (grow some wheat, say) which entitles you to some consumption in return. You get little bits of paper to prove this. Later, you redeem these bits of paper for something you want (a chicken, say). Between the two transactions you're effectively 'owed' a chickens-worth by the rest of the economy. This is an awful lot like credit. In that time, the dollar could be inflated to worthlessness, the chicken price could skyrocket or the whole world could switch to Bashtravian Pogglebeads as currency - so it's not like there's no possibility of the loan going 'bad'.
I think the real cause isn't the fundamental nature of bank credit. I think it's the fundamental nature of people.
People overpaid for housing because they have misplaced notions of the momentum of house prices, because there's ACTUAL momentum in house prices, because they see others overpaying, because they don't have the sophistication to consider the fundamental value of what they're buying, because they're scared of being locked out of home-ownership forever, because bubbles go on longer than anyone expects so anyone screaming 'it's a bubble!' has long lost credibility by the time it bursts, and because they saw others paying foolish prices and then making a fortune when they sold to an even bigger fool later. I'm sure I've missed some reasons, but in short humans are stupid.
Yes, lending creates money - but only a limited amount of money. Banks must keep a certain amount of 'real' money (M0) for all of the deposits they hold and central banks limit how much of this there is. If the reserve ratio is 10% and there's 1bn USD or M0, then there will be (up to) 100bn USD of money.
Getting rid of this doesn't get rid of one fundamental question: how much money should there be? More money must be created all the time because of a growing economy and rising population - otherwise we'd have deflation and an entirely different set of economic problems. You can STILL end up creating too much and providing food for a bubble.
Finally, imagine if the bubble mentality didn't exist. The banks wouldn't have been able to lend the excessive amounts of money to homeowners, because they wouldn't have wanted the loans. (Given the chance, they'd have otherwise lent the same money to another bunch of idiots inflating another - possibly smaller - bubble, but we're supposing humans had become magically immune to this). So far as my (admittedly rusty) economics education tells me, the result would have been that less money creation by central banks would have been necessary to achieve the same level of interest rates, and the money supply would have risen more slowly. (AFAICS, that's because there'd have been less demand for money in the overnight inter-bank market, so, say, the US effective federal funds rate would have been lower, so the Fed would have need fewer open-market operations to keep the rate at its target).
Um, I'm kinda shocked that you believe the British TV news is unbiased.
He didn't say he did, just that it had a mandate to be. Actually, the requirement is one of 'due impartiality'. Whilst there's no obvious definition of 'unbiased', there are certain things you can't do in broadcast media. IIRC, you can't only ever invite Conservative spokesmen, you can't interview anti-airport protestors without offering the management a chance to respond and you most certainly can't say 'Vote Labour, we think they're best' (which print media do all the time).
Fox News/Sky (who broadcast it in the UK) have been censured by regulators in the UK in the past: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jun/15/broadcasting.ofcom.
It's not so much irresponsible as arrogant and greedy to expect tomorrow's governments to take money by force from other people to pay for a retirement you should have saved for yourself (and ever-increasing government debt is just this in disguise). Expecting the housing market to do the same thing for you didn't turn out to be too smart lately, either. There will always be people who, for some reason (whether stupidity, a short term outlook or tragic bad luck), can't support themselves and need public support. But don't expect more than a basic social security safety-net, and don't whinge when you have a retirement in poverty. Other than that, it's entirely up to you to decide how to spread your lifetime income across your life.
Pretty much all money is debt, yes (lent either by a bank to an individual from its deposits, or lent by a central bank to its banks or government) - but it doesn't have to be government debt! Central banks might typically get M0 money in to the economy by buying government debt with it, so a complete lack of government debt might mean a lack of suitable securities, but M0 is quite small (about 50bn UKP for the UK).
If government borrows less it just frees more of the capital in the economy for private sector or offshore lending. That's why high budget defecits reduce investment and increase the interest rates for a given level of inflation - because they make money available for lending more scarce.
A system which relies on ordinary limited liability companies honouring promises over fifty years (or even just twenty) is, frankly, idiotic. Joining a new pension scheme every time you change employer isn't too sensible any more, either, because some people end up with dozens of schemes each with different rules and exit charges. It's much more sensible for people to be in charge of their own pensions - choose provider(s) yourself, pay in what you like and if employers want to contribute as part of your remuneration then they can pay it straight in. And government can mandate that companies commission and pay in to a (personal defined-contribution) scheme if you don't say otherwise if they wish.
Try Wikipedia, it has articles on each of the things you list and lots more. Unlike projects' individual sites, it tends to start by telling you what each actually does. Most of them are hardly earth-shattering, it's just that Java developers seem to like assigning a silly acronym or coffee related name to every equivalent to a CPAN module.
'Deliverables on time' is a stupid metric of a programmer's performance because there is no standard size and quality of 'deliverable' and no unbiased way to determine 'on time'. How do you distinguish between the productivity of the programmer/environment/tools and the accuracy of the estimate of what 'on time' is?
If you're measuring a project as a whole it's more sensible because the project manager is responsible for both the estimate and the development work...but even then you might want a way to measure progress, and a way to tell the difference between low development productivity and poor estimation.
If the kid has any sense he'll ask for a jury trial. No, he won't opt for a jury trial because the offence is summary only and jury trial is not available. I don't know how it works in juvenile courts, but if he were charged as an adult he'd go before a magistrate - either a district judge (a professional lawyer) sitting alone or three lay magistrates (part-time volunteer non-lawyer judges with a professional legal adviser). It's a very minor offence in the scheme of things; it's the kind of thing large numbers of rowdy drunks get charged with on Saturday nights when they don't shut up when the nice policemen says so.
While consumer disinterest, etc., can have an effect, it is important in our society that the government -- which creates such 'immortals' -- regulate them quite carefully. To assume that market forces are alone sufficient to deter their excesses is just wrong. Of course they need regulation - which is why how people vote is important, because those at the top of corporations often have too much political influence through them and so the regulations can be insufficient. But those regulations need to consider that a corporation, in itself, can't be punished. Taking money from it can work because it harms, somewhat indirectly, those who control it via pressure from shareholders and the CEO job market. But compare fining a corporation to disciplining or disbarring a few individual lawyers for abuses and I can guess which would have the greatest effect on corporations' use of courtrooms.
Oh, the CEOs are sentient, but the CEOs are not the corporations. CEOs act in their own interests not the shareholders, though the two may have many things in common. If suing furthers the CEOs career and financial interests now but may threaten the corporation's profits longer term, then suing is what they will do. CEOs aren't in complete control, either. If lawyers in the organization see some juicy career opportunities from the corporation using law more then they may do what they can to make that happen - even if it isn't in the shareholders' interests. After all, lawyers don't tend to advise their rich clients not to sue...
Yes, it is our fault but not for the reason you give. It is our fault because we give corporations, an immortal entity, the rights of a mortal man. Worse, because those corporations have no motivation beyond greed, they wield their power to feed that greed even to the detriment of real people. Corporations don't have motivations; they're not sentient. The shareholders, directors and employees choose how they act, are through whom they act and who take their profits have motivations. They're not sinister supernatural beings; they're just collections of humans being collectively human and responding to the incentives put on them and that they put on each other. And, of course, real humans are greedy, especially when they don't see the sharp end of their greed. If you want to change the behaviour of corporations you have to do it by changing the incentives on real people. And that can only be done through people - en masse - voting, buying, working and investing differently. It isn't going to happen by everyone pretending they're battling a monster from outer space.
Where this idea that a person can make a one-hit-wonder and be paid perpetually for it is so wrong it is laughable. In no other industry do you find employees being paid beyond what they actually worked much less having that paycheck go to their heirs well after their death. So a creator exchanges rights in his creation for a claim on future profits from it...what's 'laughable' about that? It's a perfectly sensible way for a publisher and creator to come to a deal in the face of massively differing opinions of the worth of what's being sold. They're are plenty of reasons for altering copyright, but they're mostly to do with balancing deadweight loss with incentives to create....how people are paid certainly isn't amongst them.
So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?
If the shop, or the call centre, or the IT helpdesk, or the school, or the train service, or the TV station, or wherever it is you work starts at 9 then you start at 9. Some people can be more flexible, but many can't, and if you solve the coordination problem by government dictat for those who can't then those who can may as well follow.
You've missed something fundamental: there's more than one of them. They don't operate with one mind or behave in the same way. 'They' are not going to suddenly 'become part of society' because most already are; and the most that already are will become normal adults and the criminal children will turn in to criminal adults. Blasting noise at all young adults, children and babies in the area just isn't an acceptable answer to some teenagers being arseholes. Put it this way: if a number of adults of the same age as you started dropping litter, smashing bus shelters and threatening passsers-by (including you), would you accept being driven out of your local public spaces as part of the solution? And that's not even mentioning the effect on local residents, pets and wildlife.
When I look at it that way it makes a whole lot more sense from a practical point of view to modify my behavior to simply use less energy.
Question: Why?
Seriously, what's the point? How are you going to be better off if you use less energy? What do you gain? What does anyone gain? You gain only the money you save. Everyone else in the world gains a tiny amount from the reduced emission of carbon and of locally dangerous pollutants. Precisely the problem of externalities is that the consumer (and supplier) has no rational self-interested incentive to reduce consumption if the benefits to himself from that consumption are lower than the benefits to everyone else from him not consuming. Overall humanity might experience greater welfare if we consumed less oil, coal and gas; individually we do not. (Though, of course, to define 'overall welfare' we have to make the impossibly difficult decision of how we combine individual welfare in to an overall measure: is my welfare more important than an African's? is mine now more important than mine in twenty years? is ours more important than our grandchildren's? etc).
In a market without externalities, we don't need to care if someone consumes more because they automatically have paid for the cost of the additional consumption.
I'm not sure I like this way of putting, though it's not exactly incorrect, because it can lead people to fallacies such as 'if we tax fuel to help the environment then it only works if we spend the revenue on abatement'. It's not OK because someone has paid, it's OK because the fact that he was willing to pay the social cost (ie, the production cost plus externalities) demonstrates that the benefit to himself exceeds the cost to third parties.
There's no such thing as overconsumption. What you're really concerned about are externalities.
It works just fine if you define overconsumption as 'consuming product at a level which is beyond that which maximizes human wellbeing, and therefore reducing consumption provides an economic benefit'. Of course, most people don't, not least because most people don't think deeply enough about what they're saying to realise they need a definition at all.
It is, though more so in the short term than long term. Remember that, when choosing jobs and housing, people will take in to account the regular journeys they have to make. When the UK train network all went to pot after the Hatfield crash a few years ago some people moved house or job to avoid the need to travel that way. Expensive car transport could do the same (though, to be honest, it isn't all THAT expensive as a proportion of income). And, of course, in the very long term younger people starting their first jobs might be more inclined to develop different habits or put off buying a car for longer (maybe not in the US....it doesn't seem to be optional there). I didn't have one until 26, because I didn't really need or want one and based my choice of home around not having one.
Here are the numbers for a 10% increase in fuel prices (from 'Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with Respect to Price and Income: A Review', http://www.cts.ucl.ac.uk/tsu/papers/transprev243.pdf):
(a) Volume of traffic will fall by roundly 1% within about a year, building up to
a reduction of about 3% in the longer run (about 5 years or so). (b) Volume of fuel consumed will fall by about 2.5% within a year, building up to
a reduction of over 6% in the longer run. (c) Efficiency of the use of fuel rises by about 1.5% within a year, and around 4%
in the longer run. (d) Total number of vehicles owned falls by less than 1% in the short run, and by
2.5% in the longer run.
It may be inelastic, but these falls are not trivial.
You save documents less than every five minutes?? Wow! On a Windows PC?
I've long had a habit of pressing the save shortcut after every change I make. A sentence just doesn't feel 'finished' until I've pressed the save key...
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The land values shot through the roof. The only way anyone could reasonably afford a house to purchase was through a bad loan. Either that or pay out the nose to a land lord to rent a house that you could instead, in theory, be making equity on.
I don't know if this was true in the US, but in the UK rental yields had long since fallen below mortgage interest rates. ie, the interest on an interest only mortgage was more than market rents. You could pay your rent and still have money left to put in to investments for the same price as your landlord could pay his capital cost and gain no new equity at all.
Houses are valuable for one reason: you can live in them. The rental market is the market in the right to live in houses and, together with the interest rate and expectations of future interest rates and rents, determines the fundamental value of houses. When your asset is priced so obviously above its fundamental value there's only one reason for believing you're going to make money: you pay a foolish price for your asset in the expectation of selling it for even more to an even bigger fool later. One of the worst aspects of this here has been generation of 40-50-something buy to let landlords who expected to make the next generation pay for their retirement by ripping them off by selling them overpriced housing when they retired.
As one of a younger generation who might normally have been a first time buyer by now I'm a little bit pissed off that our housing market has been utterly trashed by greedy bastards for the last five years. And I'll be even more pissed off if I see politicians bailing out mortgagees or trying to 'kick-start' the housing market before prices have reached an appropriate level. At least in the UK your liability under a mortgage isn't limited to your house...they can take your house, and still come after you for the rest if they feel like it.
The invisible hand of free markets probably works as long as...
The free market 'works' (in the sense of being as efficient as possible whilst saying nothing about fairness) if the conditions of the first theorem of welfare economics are met. There's a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTWE (though it's not Wikipedia's best...)
The conditions required are so excessively restrictive that no sane person could believe them to hold even approximately in the real world. It is, however, a solid starting point for studying deviations from them, and half of (the academic subject of) economics seems to be about doing this.
Several conditions have been mentioned in this thread. Banks and AIG, however, seem to have suffered particularly from principal-agent problems: agents (managers and employees) have been under an incentive not to act in the best interests of their shareholder. Read, for example, the section called 'Assumptions and Extraordinary Personal Profits' in this: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2084907/posts
Why do you put "experts" in quotes?
Have you not seen Yes, Minister? Surely you know that the more inexpert you are the more likely you are to be right. That's why we put politicians in charge: they know nothing.
If the government gets their figures right there's no offsetting of the cost required. The mortgage repayments should cover the government debt repayment. Obviously, the figures won't be right...but they won't be 700bn USD wrong.
Bailing out the institutions needn't be the same as bailing out their managers, shareholders or employees. You'll need experienced bankers to run those institutions, of course, so you may need to let off a good few of the less tainted....but I'm sure there's a pool of completely untainted bankers, too - those involved only in retail banking and not mortgages, for example.
It's not as if the 700bn is just going down the toilet...the US government would get a large amount of loans for that. The original intention was to buy them at roughly their true value so the taxpayer should get about 700bn back - with interest. There's still a good chance of a loss, of course (if defaults are higher than anticipated) - but not a 700bn USD loss. In the absence of someone with a few hundered billion dollars who feels like setting up a few new banks (and employing those no longer working for the stricken ones), I don't think you've got a better option.
Full reserve banking. Money which is lent out to one party is taken away from the lender for the period of the loan. With fractional reserve lending, the original lender still has access to their money through the bank's reserve, almost doubling the money with each loan. Then there's a race against the debt.
Presumably, most people would hand their savings to money managers who buy bonds, shares, mortgage backed securities and so on, just as they do now. Of course, people might find it convenient to trade with these in place of money...so you'd need careful legislation to prevent an equivalent to fractional reserve banking from being reinvented. Banks, of course, would have become little more than boxes full of cash, with strong locks on them, and a collection of secure vans to ferry it around for you.
Yes, under FRB, the amount of money in existence grows with each loan. But why is this a problem? The final amount of money in existence depends on the reserve ratio and M0....both of which are (as close to as matters) under the control of the monetary authorities. The central bank can stuff up the management of these, of course - but they can stuff up the management of M0 even without fractional reserve banking. Print a little more money than is justified by economic performance and population growth and you have a monetary boom and subsequent bust. Fail to print enough and you have deflation, a strong incentive to put money under mattresses rather than lend for investment, big problems for business that must repay loans increasing in real value (you can't have negative nominal interest rates), and a continuing redistribution of wealth towards the rich.
Also remember that the price level depends on the velocity of money, not just the quantity in existence. If a large enough number of people take a little more savings out from under their mattresses - or just spend their income a little more quickly than usual - then the economy experiences something indistinguishable from a rise in the money supply. The process should be familiar: firms each see this as greater demand in their own industry, raw material and labour prices are bid up as firms across the economy work extra-hard and compete for them, the price of all goods rises, people realise their extra income is a mirage as inflationary expectations pick up, demand stops rising, pay doesn't keep up with inflation expectations, demand falls.....monetary boom and bust.
Under Fractional Reserve Banking, boom/bust is the only way it goes. Smaller booms and busts usually, but boom/bust nevertheless.
Why? Describe the process you're suggesting, and why it wouldn't happen without fractional reserves.
Now that 95% of money is credit, and the only guaranteed money is cash; notes and coins. It's potentially a long long way down.
How do you get 95%? AFAICS, even M0:M3 doesn't get to 95%. In what way are notes and coins guaranteed?
Now... If you fancy changing the banking system and denying banks the ability to lend fractionally, the business cycle and the boom/bust nature of credit will change completely.
You'd have to create an awful lot of new M0. Someone would still have the impossibly difficult decision 'how much?'. And I don't see how this would end boom and bust.
In some ways money - even M0 - IS credit. You do something in the economy (grow some wheat, say) which entitles you to some consumption in return. You get little bits of paper to prove this. Later, you redeem these bits of paper for something you want (a chicken, say). Between the two transactions you're effectively 'owed' a chickens-worth by the rest of the economy. This is an awful lot like credit. In that time, the dollar could be inflated to worthlessness, the chicken price could skyrocket or the whole world could switch to Bashtravian Pogglebeads as currency - so it's not like there's no possibility of the loan going 'bad'.
People overpaid for housing because they have misplaced notions of the momentum of house prices, because there's ACTUAL momentum in house prices, because they see others overpaying, because they don't have the sophistication to consider the fundamental value of what they're buying, because they're scared of being locked out of home-ownership forever, because bubbles go on longer than anyone expects so anyone screaming 'it's a bubble!' has long lost credibility by the time it bursts, and because they saw others paying foolish prices and then making a fortune when they sold to an even bigger fool later. I'm sure I've missed some reasons, but in short humans are stupid.
Yes, lending creates money - but only a limited amount of money. Banks must keep a certain amount of 'real' money (M0) for all of the deposits they hold and central banks limit how much of this there is. If the reserve ratio is 10% and there's 1bn USD or M0, then there will be (up to) 100bn USD of money.
Getting rid of this doesn't get rid of one fundamental question: how much money should there be? More money must be created all the time because of a growing economy and rising population - otherwise we'd have deflation and an entirely different set of economic problems. You can STILL end up creating too much and providing food for a bubble.
Finally, imagine if the bubble mentality didn't exist. The banks wouldn't have been able to lend the excessive amounts of money to homeowners, because they wouldn't have wanted the loans. (Given the chance, they'd have otherwise lent the same money to another bunch of idiots inflating another - possibly smaller - bubble, but we're supposing humans had become magically immune to this). So far as my (admittedly rusty) economics education tells me, the result would have been that less money creation by central banks would have been necessary to achieve the same level of interest rates, and the money supply would have risen more slowly. (AFAICS, that's because there'd have been less demand for money in the overnight inter-bank market, so, say, the US effective federal funds rate would have been lower, so the Fed would have need fewer open-market operations to keep the rate at its target).
Um, I'm kinda shocked that you believe the British TV news is unbiased.
He didn't say he did, just that it had a mandate to be. Actually, the requirement is one of 'due impartiality'. Whilst there's no obvious definition of 'unbiased', there are certain things you can't do in broadcast media. IIRC, you can't only ever invite Conservative spokesmen, you can't interview anti-airport protestors without offering the management a chance to respond and you most certainly can't say 'Vote Labour, we think they're best' (which print media do all the time). Fox News/Sky (who broadcast it in the UK) have been censured by regulators in the UK in the past: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jun/15/broadcasting.ofcom.
It's not so much irresponsible as arrogant and greedy to expect tomorrow's governments to take money by force from other people to pay for a retirement you should have saved for yourself (and ever-increasing government debt is just this in disguise). Expecting the housing market to do the same thing for you didn't turn out to be too smart lately, either. There will always be people who, for some reason (whether stupidity, a short term outlook or tragic bad luck), can't support themselves and need public support. But don't expect more than a basic social security safety-net, and don't whinge when you have a retirement in poverty.
Other than that, it's entirely up to you to decide how to spread your lifetime income across your life.
Pretty much all money is debt, yes (lent either by a bank to an individual from its deposits, or lent by a central bank to its banks or government) - but it doesn't have to be government debt! Central banks might typically get M0 money in to the economy by buying government debt with it, so a complete lack of government debt might mean a lack of suitable securities, but M0 is quite small (about 50bn UKP for the UK).
If government borrows less it just frees more of the capital in the economy for private sector or offshore lending. That's why high budget defecits reduce investment and increase the interest rates for a given level of inflation - because they make money available for lending more scarce.
A system which relies on ordinary limited liability companies honouring promises over fifty years (or even just twenty) is, frankly, idiotic. Joining a new pension scheme every time you change employer isn't too sensible any more, either, because some people end up with dozens of schemes each with different rules and exit charges. It's much more sensible for people to be in charge of their own pensions - choose provider(s) yourself, pay in what you like and if employers want to contribute as part of your remuneration then they can pay it straight in. And government can mandate that companies commission and pay in to a (personal defined-contribution) scheme if you don't say otherwise if they wish.
Try Wikipedia, it has articles on each of the things you list and lots more. Unlike projects' individual sites, it tends to start by telling you what each actually does. Most of them are hardly earth-shattering, it's just that Java developers seem to like assigning a silly acronym or coffee related name to every equivalent to a CPAN module.
'Deliverables on time' is a stupid metric of a programmer's performance because there is no standard size and quality of 'deliverable' and no unbiased way to determine 'on time'. How do you distinguish between the productivity of the programmer/environment/tools and the accuracy of the estimate of what 'on time' is?
If you're measuring a project as a whole it's more sensible because the project manager is responsible for both the estimate and the development work...but even then you might want a way to measure progress, and a way to tell the difference between low development productivity and poor estimation.
Oh, the CEOs are sentient, but the CEOs are not the corporations. CEOs act in their own interests not the shareholders, though the two may have many things in common. If suing furthers the CEOs career and financial interests now but may threaten the corporation's profits longer term, then suing is what they will do. CEOs aren't in complete control, either. If lawyers in the organization see some juicy career opportunities from the corporation using law more then they may do what they can to make that happen - even if it isn't in the shareholders' interests. After all, lawyers don't tend to advise their rich clients not to sue...
If the shop, or the call centre, or the IT helpdesk, or the school, or the train service, or the TV station, or wherever it is you work starts at 9 then you start at 9. Some people can be more flexible, but many can't, and if you solve the coordination problem by government dictat for those who can't then those who can may as well follow.
You've missed something fundamental: there's more than one of them. They don't operate with one mind or behave in the same way. 'They' are not going to suddenly 'become part of society' because most already are; and the most that already are will become normal adults and the criminal children will turn in to criminal adults. Blasting noise at all young adults, children and babies in the area just isn't an acceptable answer to some teenagers being arseholes. Put it this way: if a number of adults of the same age as you started dropping litter, smashing bus shelters and threatening passsers-by (including you), would you accept being driven out of your local public spaces as part of the solution? And that's not even mentioning the effect on local residents, pets and wildlife.
Question: Why?
Seriously, what's the point? How are you going to be better off if you use less energy? What do you gain? What does anyone gain? You gain only the money you save. Everyone else in the world gains a tiny amount from the reduced emission of carbon and of locally dangerous pollutants. Precisely the problem of externalities is that the consumer (and supplier) has no rational self-interested incentive to reduce consumption if the benefits to himself from that consumption are lower than the benefits to everyone else from him not consuming. Overall humanity might experience greater welfare if we consumed less oil, coal and gas; individually we do not. (Though, of course, to define 'overall welfare' we have to make the impossibly difficult decision of how we combine individual welfare in to an overall measure: is my welfare more important than an African's? is mine now more important than mine in twenty years? is ours more important than our grandchildren's? etc).
I'm not sure I like this way of putting, though it's not exactly incorrect, because it can lead people to fallacies such as 'if we tax fuel to help the environment then it only works if we spend the revenue on abatement'. It's not OK because someone has paid, it's OK because the fact that he was willing to pay the social cost (ie, the production cost plus externalities) demonstrates that the benefit to himself exceeds the cost to third parties.
It works just fine if you define overconsumption as 'consuming product at a level which is beyond that which maximizes human wellbeing, and therefore reducing consumption provides an economic benefit'. Of course, most people don't, not least because most people don't think deeply enough about what they're saying to realise they need a definition at all.
It is, though more so in the short term than long term. Remember that, when choosing jobs and housing, people will take in to account the regular journeys they have to make. When the UK train network all went to pot after the Hatfield crash a few years ago some people moved house or job to avoid the need to travel that way. Expensive car transport could do the same (though, to be honest, it isn't all THAT expensive as a proportion of income). And, of course, in the very long term younger people starting their first jobs might be more inclined to develop different habits or put off buying a car for longer (maybe not in the US....it doesn't seem to be optional there). I didn't have one until 26, because I didn't really need or want one and based my choice of home around not having one.
Here are the numbers for a 10% increase in fuel prices (from 'Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with Respect to Price and Income: A Review', http://www.cts.ucl.ac.uk/tsu/papers/transprev243.pdf):
(a) Volume of traffic will fall by roundly 1% within about a year, building up to
a reduction of about 3% in the longer run (about 5 years or so).
(b) Volume of fuel consumed will fall by about 2.5% within a year, building up to
a reduction of over 6% in the longer run.
(c) Efficiency of the use of fuel rises by about 1.5% within a year, and around 4%
in the longer run.
(d) Total number of vehicles owned falls by less than 1% in the short run, and by
2.5% in the longer run.
It may be inelastic, but these falls are not trivial.
I've long had a habit of pressing the save shortcut after every change I make. A sentence just doesn't feel 'finished' until I've pressed the save key...