Financial/Fiscal Topics

• Changing Patterns Of Business Financing - The last fifty years have seen dramatic changes in the ways that firms finance themselves. Today's capital market presents a set of financing choices that is broader and more complex than at any time in history. This market has created enormous opportunities for financial managers to create value by making the right financing choices. At the same time, the financial markets can be volatile and conditions may arise when a traditional source of financing dries up. Banks for example, have played a diminished role as providers of capital to medium and large sized businesses. At the same time, a variety of current and breaking developments are likely to bring new financing opportunities in the future. An essential decision which will confront credit managers in the next decade is how to best take advantage of these opportunities while not jeopardizing access to traditional sources of financing.
• Financial Centers, Services and Activities in Space
• Global Trading Utilizing Neural Networks - In the late 1980s, the investment industry underwent a technology-driven revolution, which has brought about the emergence of interrelated global financial markets and the need for a global perspective on trading. Today, the world's financial markets have become interdependent through a technological transcendence of time and space.
• LetsLink: The economic miracle of Woergl and the successful experiment of Schwanenkirchen - Slow money circulation is the cause of the present economic paralysis. Money as a means of exchange is increasingly slipping out of the hands of the working people. It seeps into the channels of interest and ends up in the hands of a few, who don't invest in the goods market but keep it as a means of speculation. As money is the necessary wheel in the production machine, the accumulation of large sums in the hands of a few is a terrible danger for the functioning of the production process. Money accumulation means a merchandise jam and unemployment. An insecure economic situation frightens the holders of money. They don't spend their money anymore or only reluctantly, they distrust every investment, the money circulation slows down, the total turnover in goods and services shrinks, the standard of living of the working people decreases. If the situation doesn't change, the nutrition of the people will be paralysed, peace and wealth will be destroyed. Thus whole peoples and states are threatened with destruction. As we cannot free the world from this danger, we can at least give a sign.
  The "emergency-aid program" of the mayor was unanimously supported by all parties. But now? Could it be possible that a "commoner" who had attended school only until his 12th birthday, and who never studied any kind of economics, know better than all experts, politicians and interlectuals? Had an unknown, who didn't even have a doctor title, found "the source of knowledge", "the magic recipe", said to be impossible to find?
  The people of the neighboring community Kirchbichl laughed at the Wörgl inhabitants who wanted to produce their own money. A small miracle happened, however, that was to astonish the world.
• Grounded Capital: The Geographic Nature Of Venture Financing In The United States - A number of researchers have demonstrated that rather than simply dispersing, the Internet in fact has exhibited an uneven spatial pattern throughout the United States and world. Although the use of the Internet is rapidly decentralizing, the majority of Internet industry firms remain concentrated in key locations in the United States. This pattern of uneven territorial distribution of the Internet industry is demostrated in this paper with the introduction of two new indicators, the location of top web sites and the location of dot-com firms. This paper uses this distribution as the dependent variable in a multivariate regression of a number of regional attributes that are often used to explain the location of new and innovative industries. This analysis shows that one variable in particular, venture capital investing, has played an important role in determining the location of the Internet industry. Although capital is often described as footloose and fungible, the manner in which venture capital investing takes place is strongly tied to location. The ability of venture capital to create successful Internet content firms is dependent upon regional systems of personal contacts and networks through which scarce information is quickly exchanged, flexibility is maintained and resources can be invested expeditiously.
• Hyper-Economy II: Combining price and utility communication in multi-agent systems - Agent-based systems modeling is a new and increasingly popular field of information science. An agent represents not only static features of an object, but its behavior, goals and methods of interaction with other agents and the environment. The agent approach has proven useful for studying many different kinds of complex systems, from natural environments to economic processes. Automated multi-agent systems let us model large numbers of agents interacting with each other and changing environments, to study the dynamics of various environments, to test existing theories of social organization, to represent conflicting corporate and individual interests, and to control the behavior of distributed automated systems.
  New digital environments flout our expectations in dramatic and essential ways, and will force us to reconsider many of our views on multi-agent systems. The internal structure of a computing environment is significantly different from that of the physical space. There is no concept of premium location here, or differential rent. Software systems differ in methods of agent replication and deployment, transaction costs, and many other essential characteristics from both natural and artificial physical environments. To take advantage of the peculiarities of multi-agent computing systems, we need new architectures with new, adaptive regulatory and resource-allocation mechanisms.
• Hyper-Economy I: Combining price and utility communication in multi-agent systems - Symbolic communication mechanisms played a significant part in the evolutionary process by allowing plants, animals and humans to exchange individual experiences and thus turning collections of relatively isolated organisms into adaptive distributed cognition systems. A crucial role in this process belongs to schemes of aggregating and generalizing individual experiences and utilizing the obtained knowledge for optimization of behavior of individual agents. Most recently, money as aggregate symbolic representation of value allowed efficient distribution of economic information in the society. By providing aggregated information on comparative values of goods and services to participants with bounded interests and rationality, the economic signaling mechanisms give them incentives to adjust their consumption and production efforts in accordance with the collective requirements of all other agents in the system. This allowed the complexity of the value exchange system to increase by orders of magnitude, while improving its adaptability.
  With still greater complexity and scale of the system, it becomes crucially important to assure that the agents focus on the right tasks, form reasonable expectations of the utility of various goods and services, and set up stable and mutually beneficial relationships with each other. These focusing and utility assessment mechanisms have been traditionally provided by individual experiences and unmediated sharing of knowledge, similar to value exchange mechanisms before the appearance of money. Further progress of signaling instruments depends on availability of standardized semantic descriptions of quality and utility of various resources, and needs and abilities of different agents. It also requires efficient methods of data acquisition, aggregation and analysis, and low-cost communication and processing tools.
  We are presenting an example of such a collection of signaling instruments. The suggested model of a "hyper-economic" system combines flows of globally aggregated scalar information on prices with mechanisms for sharing knowledge about situational utilities of groups of resources. The project presents methods for combining value and utility signaling mechanisms, introduces non-scalar representations of common experiences analogous to derivative financial instruments and researches their efficiency in different types of economics environments.
• Cybertax - The Internet, the fastest growing communications medium or consumer electronic technology, doubles its size every six months. Within a few years the number of citizens in Cyberspace will outnumber all but the largest nations. The borderless world of the Internet extends its reach to all corners of the world. Best of all, it is almost free. Hardware costs aside, once on the Internet a user can surf anywhere for the price of a local phone call. But what about all the foregone tax revenue that electronic commerce could facilitate? Although Internet commerce is in its earliest stages, its rapid growth is anticipated. Some estimate that in thirty years time, consumer activity online could represent more than thirty percent of total consumer activity. This leads to the erosion of national tax bases. In this paper we show that as a measure of last resort the bit tax can be implemented. Although the exact implementation of such a tax is not yet clear, the general idea of a tax on information from the point of view of an eroding tax base and the changing society is certainly worth considering. Furthermore, the tax revenues could be directed towards improving access to the Internet, educating individuals to become acquainted with the Internet and providing additional needed bandwidth.
• FDIC: Regional Economic Conditions (RECON) - Regional Economic Conditions (RECON) was originally designed to assist the FDIC in the examination process by providing economic information at the state, MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), and county levels. It is helpful in the analysis of risks facing financial institutions. We believe that easy access to timely, high-quality information about economic conditions and risks could be of benefit to some banks, as well as the general public.
• Electronic Payments and the Future of Electronic Commerce - We discuss market implications of adopting electronic payment systems and digital currencies in electronic commerce. The key to understanding and exploiting electronic commerce is to recognize it as a market mechanism where all components of a market interact and must be analyzed collectively. For example, electronic payment systems bring more than lowered transaction costs, affecting product choices, pricing and competition. We examine economic implications of electronic payment systems and especially micropayments enabled by digital currencies in terms of size advantage, the lemons problem, digital product pricing, product differentiation, the commoditization of consumer information and advertisements, and copyrights. In short, electronic payment systems are one of the critical factors which allow process innovations via electronic commerce. These process innovations may either promote competitive and efficient markets or worsen the trend toward the vertical integration and monopolization in the globalized economy. We discuss these two scenarios relating them to electronic payments and digital currencies.
• Ode - Treaty of Noordwijk aan Zee - A great deal of what is seen as growth in the national income, is in reality the correction of errors and social decline from the past and borrowing raw materials for the future. When we value our current economic activities differently, we create an economy with respect for man and nature.
• Real Wealth: The Genuine Progress Indicator Could Provide an Environmental Measure of the Planet's Health (May-Jun 1999) - The GDP is fatally flawed, as it privileges the world of the market at the expense of social and environmental breakdown. "The gross domestic product adds up everything Americans spend and declares that as the total good. As a result, the hundreds of billions of dollars that Americans spend to cope with crime, the lawyers, and social breakdown costs, is all GDP--car crashes, fender benders in front of the Capitol. Mr. President, $200 billion a year in repair bills and hospital bills give this country a real boost," says Dorgan.
• Why Bigger Isn't Better: The Genuine Progress Indicator 1999 - As a measure of economic health, the GDP is badly flawed. First by counting only monetary transactions as economic activity, the GDP omits much of what people value and activities that serve basic needs. For example, it doesn't count free services, such as community volunteer work or caring for children or elderly parents in the home--services that would show up in the GDP if they were paid for. It also ignores the value of leisure time spent in recreation, relaxation, or with family and friends. The GDP omits crucial contributions of the environment, such as pure air and water, moderate climate, and protection from the sun's harmful rays, even though these services, which the earth provides for free, become expensive if they need to be bought instead. It is appropriate that an economic indicator include such measures, because common sense and history tell us that the economy is a tool to address needs and enhance well-being, not an end in itself.
• Digital Capitalism - B-webs are the mechanism for the accumulation of digital capital, the knowledge- and relationship-based currency of the new economy. Digital capital includes 3 elements: human (people), relationship (customers and suppliers), and structural (e-business models). These three elements were all vital to the way we viewed the traditional firm ‹ but they all become transformed by internetworking. Now, you can have human capital without having to own it. You can build relationship capital not through mass-produced, one-way communication, but through a dynamic, two-way communication in which customers become partners in innovation. Structural capital is built not by proprietary business processes and systems, but through the creation of radical new business models.
• Northwest Corporate Accountability Project - What is a Shareholder Resolution? - Using the internet for shareowner proxy voting will not just save money. It will awaken the sleeping giant of corporate governance -- individual investors. It will give shareowners unprecedented influence over the policies of large corporations, by making "corporate monitoring" possible. Rational voter apathy will be counteracted by the internet¹s ability to make information exchange cheap and easy. Likely benefits include higher profits, support for social goals, and more realistic levels of CEO pay. Compared to other countries, America has more stock held by individuals who use the internet, so America will lead this trend.
• Information Technology and the Developments in Banking Sector - Electronics and information technologies are rapidly changing the banking and financial services industry. In the world of banking, the developments in information technology have had an enormous effect in development of more flexible payment methods and more user-friendly banking services. The amount of transactions and information have increased so rapidly during the last decades, so it is impossible to even think about banks without computers. This study describes how the information technology has diffused in the banking sector. Some examples of payment methods and services are introduced, particularly a great interest is addressed to the development and diffusion of the Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).
• Growth Is Good for the Poor--Abstract - Income of the poor rises one-for-one with overall growth. This general relationship between income of the bottom fifth of the population and per capita GDP holds in a sample of 80 countries covering four decades. Although there is a fair amount of variation around this general relationship, a number of popular views about the poverty-growth relationship are not true. The effect of growth on income of the poor is no different in poor countries than in rich ones. Incomes of the poor do not fall more than proportionately during economic crises. The poverty-growth relationship has not changed in recent years. We also show that policy-induced growth is as good for the poor as it is for the overall economy. Openness to foreign trade benefits the poor to the same extent that it benefits the whole economy. Good rule of law and fiscal discipline are other factors that benefit the poor to the same extent as the whole economy. Avoidance of high inflation in fact is "super-pro-poor": that is, high inflation is more harmful to the income of the poor than to GDP overall. In contrast we find no evidence that formal democratic institutions or public spending on health and education have systematic effects on incomes of the poor. These findings leave plenty of room for further work, because they emphasize the fact that we know very little about what systematically causes changes in the distribution of income.
• New Math for a New Economy - What's wrong with the 500-year-old way in which all companies keep their books? Just about everything, says Baruch Lev, who has proposed a new method for determining the value of the intangible assets that are at the heart of the new economy.
• Qualisteam - Road-map To Banking And Finance On The Net - Multilingual banking and finance portal. Links to thousands of bank websites (with indication of internet banking services), forum, large banking bookstore. Links to stock exchanges and financial markets.
• The Geonomy Society - Geonomics is in part the Great Green Tax Shift maxed out. Economically, taxing pollution and depletion does reduce pollutants and extracts - and thus the tax base; plus such taxes are regressive, requiring a safety net.
• Tax Waste, Not Work - Tax Waste, Not Work proposes a new approach to fiscal and environmental policy in a way that could attract broad political support. Redefining Progress, a US policy research group, gives a comprehensive guide to how we can shift the tax burden away from productive activities that should be encouraged, such as work and savings, and onto activities that should be discouraged, such as pollution, waste, and energy inefficiency.
• Backcasting - A scenario based upon an approach which is the opposite of forecasting: LOOKING BACK from this year, 2010, it is a good time to review some of the events leading to our founding in 2002. It is now clear that the stock market collapse of 1998 was the final straw for many. While the mutual fund mania was bound to end at some point, many middle class investors who had been downsized, rightsized or otherwise bought off were content to leave their permanent jobs and invest their cash settlements in pension schemes. With the stock market collapse came the realization that something had clearly gone wrong.
• Arthur Cordell, "New Taxes for a New Economy" - Information technology has contributed to a New Economy, which has increased productivity without commensurate growth in jobs. The challenge is to find new ways to distribute income resulting from this productivity. It is proposed that a "bit tax" be applied to interactive digital communication, which can provide the new fiscal framework for distribution of income when jobless growth becomes the rule.
• The Cashless Society - Part I - Virtual shopping, the digital economy, e-cash, e-commerce - these are just a sample in the range of economically-laden terms that have cropped up in recent years to accompany the plethora of new vocabulary spawned by the development and commercialization of the Internet. While most people either know or can guess at what these terms mean, fewer realize the motivations and implications that lie behind the expressions which are being thrown at us - and even by us.
• Electronic Micropayments - As information providers move from the physical world of atoms to the virtual world of bits, the cost of doing business and the business opportunity itself change. Information goods have the unique characteristic that both the delivery of the goods and the transfer of money can be accomplished on the same network, thereby bypassing traditional, physical distribution channels. In the absence of these barriers to entry, users want the ability to buy the exact information they need at marginal cost, without concern for long-term commitment to a provider or disclosure of personal information. Micropayments answer this challenge by profitably utilizing the Internet to make secure, private transactions for sub-cent purchases.
• Intermediation, Contracts and Micropayments in Electronic Commerce - Will the electronic marketplace be frictionless and economically efficient or suffer from mundane problems found in physical markets? Some imagine electronic commerce as a perfect market platform supported by computer technologies and process innovations; however, despite its advantages over physical markets, electronic markets may not be blindingly efficient because of the nature of a market. We discuss one reason why this will be the case, and summarize innovative processes to prevent market failure.
• Parallel, Local & Community Currencies in Asia, Africa & Latin America
• Electronic Money, or E-Money, and Digital Cash
• Pareto Optimal Sizes Of Innovation Spillovers - Offers reasons indicating that the spillovers (externalities) from innovation activity are surprisingly large but individuals who have invested directly or indirectly in the economy's innovation processes obtain less than ten percent of the total economic benefits.
• Time as currency - This paper introduces the successful concept of time dollars and how it has been used in the USA to attract new people into volunteering.
• The Greatest Wealth Transfer Event of the Twentieth Century Begins
• America -- The Land of Misery and Plutocracy
• The Cashless Society - Part I
• Towards A North American Common Currency
• Will Cyberspace Change Monetary Policy?
• The Citizens Dividend
• Transaction Net: How Currency Systems Work (a Money Map)
• History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day
• Resolving The Uneven Distribution Of Wealth Among Provinces
• Bytes of Cash: Banking, Computing, and Personal Finance
• International Business Information, Global Business Information, Investing, Stock Markets, Etc.
• The Internet and the Future of Money
• Wired Collections: Future of Money
• The Impact of Cybercommunications on Traditional Financial Services
• Hyper-Economy: Combining Price and Utility Communication in Multi-agent Systems
• Banks & Treasury Globalization
• Privatization of Money - Summary
• World Bank Report 1997
• Patterns of Bank Location in Northwest Indiana

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