El Blog de Carlos

Page Tutor has a nice post about all those stimulus packages and those figures that are difficult to imagine. They are putting palet-to-palet the amount of bills needed for having a trillion dollars. Have a look! It is really impressive.

John Bird and John Fortune have a new sketch about the banking crisis and how the bankers think about it. It is quite funny to see and quite depressing to believe that it might not be just a joke… (subtitulos en español, para el que los necesite)

Another great post of Dan Coleman of Open Culture . This time about the 1929 crash bringing a documentary from the PBS. For those interested in the current crisis is highly recommendable to have a look at it:

“With the gyrations of the world markets, 1929 was suddenly very present last week. All too present. What really went down in ‘29? Below we present “The Crash of 1929,” a documentary that aired as part of PBS’ The American Experience Series. Part 1 appears below. You can get the remaining parts here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.”

“Beginning in the 1980s, a “Washington Consensus” that free markets were the solution to poverty dominated development theory, policy, and practice around the world. Today, just as faith in deregulated markets has evaporated in the nightmare on Wall Street, so too is the long reign of market fundamentalism (or neoliberalism) ending in the development arena. And, a debate over the best route to development — a debate that was vibrant in the 1970s and earlier — has returned. Various phenomena account for this. We highlight these below, along with some of the alternative approaches that are springing up around the world. ”

This is the introduction of a FPIF book review: Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match, a book by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh recently published by Paradigm Publishers.

I was recently asking myself about the cooperation paradigm and its challenges from the realism one. With the meltdown of the current model of financial system (and a whole philosophy , actually) , it seems that some people are trying to redifine the development model, which honestly can only be a good thing. Hopefully, the debate will not swing the pendulum to the other extreme but will take stock of what happened in the last decades and find, maybe, a model that finally can really help some countries to get rid of poverty.