Category: Economics, Business, & Work

How much money is there in the world? This visualization compares the world’s richest people, companies, and stock markets with the world’s money supply.

Source: All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization

Well, the reason I’m here is to remind you that maybe, just maybe, you too have a nagging, gagging sense that the current atmosphere of disrupt-o-mania isn’t the only air a startup can breathe. That perhaps this zeal for disruption is not only crowding out other motives for doing a startup, but also can be downright poisonous for everyone here and the rest of the world.

Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.

The web is the greatest entrepreneurial platform ever invented. Lowest barriers of entry, greatest human reach ever. I love the web. Permission-less, grand reach, diversity of implementation. Don’t believe this imaginary wall of access of money. It isn’t there.

Examine and interrogate your motivations, reject the money if you dare, and startup something useful. A dent in the universe is plenty.

Curb your ambition.

Live happily ever after.

Source: RECONSIDER – Signal v. Noise

As America’s economic supremacy fades, the primacy of the dollar looks unsustainable

Ih hegemons are good for anything, it is for conferring stability on the systems they dominate. … The widening gap between America’s economic and financial power creates problems for other countries, in the dollar zone and beyond. That is because the costs of dollar dominance are starting to outweigh the benefits.

In 2008-09 the Fed reluctantly came to the rescue, acting as a lender of last resort by offering $1 trillion of dollar liquidity to foreign banks and central banks. The sums involved in a future crisis would be far higher. The offshore dollar world is almost twice as large as it was in 2007. By the 2020s it could be as big as America’s banking industry.

If foreigners continue to accumulate reserves, they will dominate the Treasury market by the 2030s. To satisfy growing foreign demand for safe dollar-denominated assets, America’s government could issue more Treasuries—adding to its debts. Or it could leave foreigners to buy up other securities—but that might lead to asset bubbles, just as in the mortgage boom of the 2000s.

There are things America can do to shoulder more responsibility—for instance, by setting up bigger emergency-swaplines with more central banks. More likely is a splintering of the system, as other countries choose to insulate themselves from Fed decisions by embracing capital controls. The dollar has no peers. But the system that it anchors is cracking.

Source: The world economy: Dominant and dangerous | The Economist

Never mind the future, we need more diverse visions of the present

While their approaches and economic models differ, the near future that Apple, Google, and Microsoft perceive is remarkably similar.

True innovation requires the undertaking of significant risk, and the bigger a company becomes the more conservative it inevitably has to be. … Without the dual pressures of both the consumer and the stock market, and without a historic reputation to uphold, small startups are now the best engine for generating truly new and groundbreaking innovations.

The money that has kept flowing into tech over the past decade or two seems to have brought with it an added risk aversion. The wild innovation goes into one silo, the day-to-day moneymaking goes into another. Aren’t tech companies supposed to make money by innovating?

This decoupling of the traditional model for a tech business — where risk-taking and money-making go hand in hand — is leaving us with an uncomfortable degree of uniformity among the products and services offered by the biggest and most powerful companies.

Source: Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all solving the same problems – The Verge

I’ve noticed a common bias that shows up in some founders: they believe that their competitors are stupid or uncreative. They’ll look at other businesses and identify inefficiencies or bad systems, and decide that those conditions exist because of dumb decisions on the part of founders or employees.

This is a bad belief to hold. In truth, competitors in the market are usually founded and run by intelligent people making smart and logical decisions.
…
Where companies do things that diverge from what seems smart from the outside, it’s a much better idea to ask why those companies are doing things from the presumption of intelligence and logic rather than the presumption of stupidity. If you don’t ask these questions, you might find yourself making the same decisions, or ending up in the same place with your own set of rationalizations.

Source: Presumption of stupidity – Aaron’s Blog