The World Economic Forum Releases Its Top Global Risks For 2017

CNBC: Top five global risks for 2017: WEF

The World Economic Forum's (WEF) flagship annual report surveyed 750 experts to identify the most significant global concerns. Here are the top five:

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Update: Zero Hedge has a good summary .... These Are The Top Global Risks For 2017 According To The World Economic Forum (Zero Hedge).

CSN Editor: The World Economic Forum's report is here.

Look At All The World’s Global Trade In One Interactive Map

Foreign Policy: Watch: All the World’s Global Trade in One Interactive Map

It’s hard to understand the jargon-laden and math-saturated world of international trade. But a new interactive map helps visualize global imports and exports, showing just how massive global trade really is.

Each dot, color-coded by type of trade like agriculture, minerals, plastics, and transportation, represents $1 billion. As the graphic shows, there are a lot of dots — 15,600, in fact, to represent the $15.6 trillion of international trade in 2015 (the latest year from which U.N. data is available) according to the U.N. Comtrade database that tracks the world’s economic statistics.

Take a gander at the interactive version here. Or simply watch the above video:

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CSN Editor: China, Europe, and the U.S. is where all the action is.

World GDP rankings in 2031

Next Big Future: World GDP rankings in 2031

Currently on a nominal exchange rate basis countries are ranked as follows

1. USA $18 trillion
2. China $11.4 trillion
3. Japan $4.1 trillion
4. Germany $3.3 trillion
5. UK $3.0 trillion
6. France $2.4 trillion
7. India $2.1 trillion
8. Italy $1.8 trillion
9. Brazil $1.8 trillion
10. Canada $1.56 trillion
11. South Korea $1.39 trillion

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CSN Editor: The full CEBR report is here .... World Economic League Table 2016 Highlights (CEBR)

The Economics Of Engagement Rings

Norman Chan/Shutterstock

The Strange (and Formerly Sexist) Economics of Engagement Rings -- The Atlantic

Diamonds are forever, but the meaning of the diamond engagement ring has changed dramatically in the last century. Today's symbol of love was once something more like virginity insurance.

Why do men buy diamond rings for our fiancées? There's the emotional story. We enjoy making grand gestures of commitment to the people we love. Behind that, there's the marketing story. DeBeers' historic ad campaign, crafted by the real-life mad men at N.W. Ayers, convinced generations of lovers that diamond bands were synonymous with eternal devotion. But behind that, there is economic story that is just as important and fascinating.

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My Comment: Gone down this road .... and yes .... never again.

Bureaucracy Linked To A Nation's Growth

Two of the conquest inscriptions on Building J (ca. 100 BC). Each inscription shows an upside down head with closed eyes signifying conquest on the bottom, a "hill" glyph signifying generalized place in the middle, and a third element on top that varies among inscriptions signifying specific place name. (Credit: Charles S. Spencer, AMNH, used with permission)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2010) — "Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work," said Albert Einstein, sharing a popular view about bureaucracy grinding progress to a halt.

But it now appears that the organizing functions of bureaucracy were essential to the progressive growth of the world's first states, and may have helped them conquer surrounding areas much earlier than originally thought. New research conducted in the Valley of Oaxaca near Monte Albán, a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in southern Mexico, also implies that the first bureaucratic systems may have a lasting influence on today's modern states.

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Trading Shares In Milliseconds

A monitor at Tradeworx’s offices keeps track of the net trading operations during the day. It generally ticks up. Credit: Steve Moors

From Technology Review:

Today's stock market has become a world of automated transactions executed at lightning speed. This high-frequency trading could make the financial system more efficient, but it could also turn small mistakes into catastrophes.

If Manoj Narang is about to bring down the markets, he's certainly relaxed about it. Narang, who wears a goatee and wire-frame glasses, is casually dressed in a brown shirt and dark gray sweatshirt. Sitting on a swivel chair with one leg tucked under the other, he seems positively composed, especially for a man who has just bought and sold 15 million shares with a total value of $600 million. For Narang, however, such volume represents just the start of a normal day. Though it's about noon on a Friday morning, he has barely begun.

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The Next Two US Recessions

From The Futurist:

Here at The Futurist, we maintain a track record of predicting bubbles, busts, and recessions long before they happen. For example, the housing bubble was identified in April 2006, back when a person could be socially excommunicated for claiming that houses may not rise in value forever. After that, I have identified when the current recession started, months before most economists, and have even predicted when the present recession will end, and at what level job losses would end at. This track record will now lead me to set my sights on the next two troubles on the horizon, which will be the causes of the next two potential recessions.

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Does Economics Violate The Laws Of Physics?

ECONOMIC GROWTH: Does constant economic growth contradict the laws of physics?
© iStockphoto.com

From Scientific American:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today's dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

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Economists Measure GDP Growth From Outer Space

Increased nighttime lighting indicates economic growth in Poland and Eastern Europe between 1992 (left, above) and 2002. Poland is in the top left quarter of each image. (Credit: NOAA and USAF Weather Agency)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 6, 2009) — Outer space offers a new perspective for measuring economic growth, according to new research by three Brown University economists. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil suggest a new framework for estimating a country or region’s gross domestic product (GDP) by using satellite images of the area’s nighttime lights.

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How Science Can Create Millions of New Jobs

From Business Week:

Reigniting basic research can repair the broken U.S. business model and put Americans back to work .

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then an additional 10 million to keep up with population growth and to spark demand over the next decade. In the 1990s the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs, or 2.2 million a year. But from 2000 to the end of 2007, the rate plunged to 900,000 a year. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key fuel—basic research.

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Physicists Successfully Predict Stock Exchange Plunge

Predicting the drop (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

WITH 20/20 hindsight, financial crashes seem inevitable, yet we never see them coming. Now a team of physicists and financiers have bucked the trend by successfully predicting a steep fall in the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Their model, which employs concepts from the physics of complex atomic systems, was developed by Didier Sornette of the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, Switzerland, and Wei-Xing Zhou of the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. The idea is that if a plot of the logarithm of the market's value over time deviates upwards from a straight line, it's a clear warning that people are investing simply because the market is rising rather than paying heed to the intrinsic worth of companies. By projecting the trend, the team can predict when growth will become unsustainable and the market will crash.

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Night-Time Photos Shed Light On Growing Economies

Bright lights, big GDP (Image: NOAA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

NIGHT-TIME images taken from kilometres above the Earth could help us better understand the economies of some of the planet's least developed countries. So say the US economists behind a method for measuring changes GDP using the intensity of street lights and other night-time lighting.

A better way of estimating GDP is badly needed, especially for poorer nations. Data collected by national governments is weak when it comes to informal sectors of the economy, such as street markets. In some countries, such as Liberia, economic information systems are so poor that meaningful data is sometimes non-existent.

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The Physicists Killed Wall Street

From Discover Magazine:

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes about how physicists are the harbingers of doom, and are responsible for the end times. Or, more specifically, it’s because of physicists that the financial markets are in tatters all around us.

The basic idea is that greedy physicists have gone to Wall Street, cooked up all sorts of arcane derivative products, and subsequently unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the financial markets. This sentiment is best epitomized by a statement from none other than Warren Buffett (perhaps the world’s most successful investor, and certainly the world’s richest): “beware of geeks bearing formulas”

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Chris Anderson: Web Creating Free Economy

From Times Online:

Digital technology is offering consumers better deals and reshaping economic theory, says the author of The Long Tail

The "free economy", where businesses give away their products to make money, is spreading fast thanks to the recession and the increasing reach of digital technology, according to the author Chris Anderson.

Mr Anderson, whose acclaimed book The Long Tail is about how the digital revolution allows businesses to profit from selling small quantities of relatively unpopular items, said that consumers with less in their pockets were looking for bargains, making the free business strategy even more attractive.

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Here's What Killed Your 401K

From Wired News:

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

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A Future Timeline for Economics

The Futurist:

The accelerating rate of change in many fields of technology all manifest themselves in terms of human development, some of which can be accurately tracked within economic data. Contrary to what the media may peddle and despite periodic setbacks, average human prosperity is rising at a rate faster than any other time in human history. I have described this in great detail in prior articles, and I continue to be amazed at how little attention is devoted to the important subject of accelerating economic growth, even by other futurists.

The time has thus come for making specific predictions about the details of future economic advancement. I hereby present a speculative future timeline of economic events and milestones, which is a sibling article to Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, v2.0.

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