It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...
Despite the fact that stock markets have been operating for over 400 years, how exactly they work at the level of individual participate and individual role is rarely documented. Here in the 21st Century most of the accounts are how to make money as an investor, two or three steps away from the actual transactions taking place within the exchange. Which is why it was so fascinating to find and...
The Visual Capitalist comes though again with an animated tale of the last 120 years of world reserve currencies. Some screen shots and commentary below: The start of the 20th Century is the end of the British Empire. The USD is a minor currency. The British Pound is by far the world’s most popular reserve currency and the world’s international trade settled in London, not New York...
It’s quite rare when the U.S. media has something nice to say about Africa. This week was an exception, in The New York Times, in an interactive digital article about the population growth and economic growth of the African continent. The median age in Africa here in 2023 is just 19 years old, nearly a decade younger than in India and the rest of South Asia. By 2050, more than 1/3rd of all...
In the fight to eliminate global poverty, a statistic often quoted is the World Bank’s claim that the poverty rate is below 10%. True, but only when measured against a global poverty line of $2.15 per day. $2.15 is about the same as American’s spend per day on their dogs and cats. Progress is still positive if you pick a more realistic poverty line, but at $3.65 there are nearly 2...