Month: March 2016

Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached | The Nation

Source: Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached | The Nation

Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached. They have a point—Harvard stands at the troubling intersection between higher education and high finance, with over 15 percent of its massive $38 billion endowment invested in hedge funds. That intersection is getting crowded. Yale’s comparatively modest $26 billion endowment, for example, made hedge fund managers $480 million in 2014, while only $170 million was spent on things like tuition assistance and fellowships for students.
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The problems with hedge funds managing college endowments are manifold, going well beyond the exorbitant—some would say extortionate—fees they charge for their services.

How Maritime Insurance Built Ancient Rome

Source: How Maritime Insurance Built Ancient Rome

Rome wasn’t built in a day. The city needed its insurance industry to develop first.

Maritime insurance is the oldest form of insurance by centuries. But it looked very different when it was sought by sailors crossing the seas that Odysseus had found so perilous. It was much more speculative.

Instead of paying a fee to insure their cargo, merchants funded their voyages with loans that also served as insurance. The loans had very high interest rates, because under the terms of the loan, if the ship sank or the voyage did not succeed, the merchant did not have to repay the loan. This practice, which dates back to at least 1800 BCE and Ancient Babylon, is known as “bottomry”—a reference to the fact that lenders could claim the ship itself if they were not paid back on time.

Why we should fear a cashless world | Dominic Frisby | Opinion | The Guardian

Source: Why we should fear a cashless world | Dominic Frisby | Opinion | The Guardian

Poor people and small businesses rely on cash. A contactless system will likely entrench poverty and pave the way for terrifying levels of surveillance

We already live in a world that is, as far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, about as unequal as it gets. It may even be as unequal as it’s ever been. My worry is that a cashless society may exacerbate inequality even further.

The crash of 2008 showed that, when push comes to shove, banks have already been exempted from the very effective regulation that is bankruptcy – one by which the rest of us must all operate. Do we want this sector to have yet more power and influence?

In a world without cash, every payment you make will be traceable. … The power this would hand them is enormous and the potential scope for Orwellian levels of surveillance is terrifying.

I’m not saying we should all take our money out of the bank, but that we should all have the option to. Cash gives you that option. Why remove it? It’s our money. Not the banks’.

Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight

Source: Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight

When your reality is reconfiguring itself based on not ‘who you are’, ‘what you want’, and creating new possibilities, but reconfiguring itself based on ‘how can we extract the most value from *this little tendency* that we’ve just seen’. When your Google search is so different from my Google search, and it’s not different because it’s optimizing itself for ‘how are we going to help you be more you’, but ‘how are we going to help you be more statistical category 17.03c’, that’s not good. That’s about changing who you are to better serve the market.