#finance

Allemagne : Wolfgang Schäuble, figure du monde politique allemand, est mort à 81 ans
▻https://www.20minutes.fr/monde/allemagne/4068272-20231227-allemagne-wolfgang-schauble-figure-monde-politique-allema

Il avait été le ministre des finances allemand inflexible pendant la crise de la dette

Faut aussi le dire quand il y a de bonnes nouvelles.

$46bn wiped off Tencent’s market cap after China proposes new gaming curbs - Nikkei Asia
▻https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/46bn-wiped-off-Tencent-s-market-cap-after-China-proposes-new-gaming-cur

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fcms-image-bucket-production-ap-northeast-1-a7d2.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%2Fimages%2F6%2F4%2F2%2F2%2F47032246-3-eng-GB%2FCropped-1703218804AP21260270701595.jpg?width=1260&height=630&fit=cover&gravity=faces&source=nar-cms

Shares in China’s biggest gaming companies plunged in Hong Kong on Friday after Beijing issued draft regulations aimed at curbing players’ spending, with $46 billion wiped off Tencent Holdings’ market capitalization.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #finance #business #tencent_holdings #bourse #dépenses #budget #dépenses #mobile

Research in peace, academic freedom †
▻https://academia.hypotheses.org/54469

https://academia.hypotheses.org/files/2023/12/intellectual_freedom.jpg

#Mafias et #banques

Retour sur l’histoire d’une saga méconnue : l’alliance que vont tisser groupes criminels organisés et #institutions_financières, des années 1920 à nos jours à l’échelle de la planète. Cette série documentaire en trois épisodes, sous forme d’enquête, plonge dans les eaux troubles de la mafia. De #Michele_Sindona, le banquier du Vatican, au cartel de #Pablo_Escobar en passant par la City et les Bahamas.

►https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-024485/mafias-et-banques
#mafia #crimalité_organisée #finance
#documentaire #film_documentaire

#logement : extensions et restrictions du marché
▻https://metropolitiques.eu/Logement-extensions-et-restrictions-du-marche.html

Qui produit et finance aujourd’hui le logement, suivant quelles stratégies et avec quels effets ? Ce dossier explore les transformations récentes du marché du logement, entre recherche de nouveaux profits, stratégies d’accumulation et expérimentation d’alternatives. ▼ Voir le sommaire du dossier ▼ Ce dossier se propose de contribuer à l’analyse de stratégies émergentes dans la production et dans l’investissement sur les #marchés du logement, à partir des acteurs qui les portent. Trois grands axes #Dossiers

/ logement, #habitat, marché, #promoteurs, #financement, #immobilier, #spéculation, #foncier, À la (...)

▻https://metropolitiques.eu/IMG/pdf/met-intro_dossier_logement.pdf

Le petit commerçant chinois devenu le blanchisseur du crime organisé et des fortunes françaises

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2023/11/22/le-petit-commercant-chinois-devenu-le-blanchisseur-du-crime-organise-et-des-

Ce type est certainement une pourriture véreuse. Cependant, Le Monde semble bafouer la présomption d’innocence et les propos du journaliste sont d’un racisme hallucinant, à commencer par le titre. Je croyais que c’était Le Journal du Dimanche qui avait désormais pour but de nourrir les rangs de l’xdroite, il est pas tout seul :/

Il ouvre même sa filière Chen Wei à d’autres intermédiaires qui apportent leurs propres clients. L’un d’eux, Thierry L., interrogé par les juges, a admis avoir utilisé ce canal et blanchi, en deux fois, 400 000 euros pour « Christophe Février (…), un ami ». M. Février est un repreneur très controversé d’entreprises en faillite en France et à l’étranger, dont les investissements dans la transition énergétique lui ont valu, début 2022, une mise en examen pour blanchiment de fraude fiscale. Selon l’un de ses avocats, Me David Apelbaum, il conteste, dans ce dernier dossier, les faits qui lui sont reprochés et affirme, par ailleurs, ne pas vouloir s’exprimer sur l’autre affaire.

Jeudi 16 novembre, au cœur du CIFA encombré de véhicules, à Aubervilliers, Le Monde s’est rendu dans la boutique Feeling Style de Chen Wei où des clients faisaient leurs achats pour leurs propres magasins dans Paris. Absent, il a été contacté par l’un de ses vendeurs, mais il n’a pas souhaité faire de commentaires sur les enquêtes en cours, à l’instar de ses deux avocats, Me Diane de Condé et Me Thierry Herzog, également sollicités.

trouvé sur ▻https://justpaste.it/72h9d

« Le manque d’immigration de travail handicape la France »

Les économistes #Madeleine_Péron et #Emmanuelle_Auriol constatent, dans une tribune au « Monde », que le pays se prive d’une immigration nécessaire à sa croissance et soulignent que le débat se concentre sur des aspects identitaires et sécuritaires, omettant que les arrivées d’étrangers en France se situent sous la moyenne européenne.

A l’occasion du projet de loi déposé par le gouvernement, le débat sur l’immigration a resurgi dans l’actualité. Sans surprise, les volets sécuritaire et identitaire y tiennent une place prépondérante, éclipsant certaines réalités économiques qu’il faudrait pourtant prendre en compte pour permettre un véritable débat démocratique. Car l’immigration pour motif économique est portion congrue en France, et notre pays se prive, pour de mauvaises raisons, d’un fort potentiel de croissance à long terme et, à court terme, de substantiels bénéfices économiques et sociaux.

Contrairement à une idée reçue, la France est un pays de faible immigration ! Le flux annuel d’immigrés entrants était de 316 174 personnes en 2022, selon le ministère de l’intérieur, soit environ 0,45 % de la population française. En dehors des regroupements familiaux, les possibilités d’une immigration de travail sont réduites pour les ressortissants extracommunautaires.

De ce fait, l’immigration pour motif économique est négligeable dans notre pays : en 2022, elle représentait seulement 16 % des nouveaux visas délivrés, souvent au prix de batailles administratives à l’issue incertaine pour le candidat à l’immigration et pour son potentiel employeur. Et ce, alors même que, selon l’enquête « Besoins en main-d’œuvre 2023 » de Pôle emploi, 61 % des recrutements sont jugés difficiles, principalement par manque de candidats et de compétences adéquates.

Les #bienfaits d’une immigration de travail sont considérables à court terme, pour répondre à des tensions fortes et persistantes dans certains secteurs cruciaux tant pour notre économie que pour notre vie quotidienne. Les métiers dits « en tension » s’observent ainsi à tous les niveaux de qualification : il nous manque aussi bien des ouvriers spécialisés que des médecins, des cuisiniers, des infirmiers, des banquiers ou encore des informaticiens. Dès lors, la faible immigration de travail en France est un #problème_économique majeur. Faute de personnels, des services d’urgences ferment, des citoyens âgés dépendants sont privés de soins, des entreprises renoncent à créer de l’activité, voire ferment ou se délocalisent.

Pourtant, les études réalisées par le Conseil d’analyse économique montrent que l’immigration de travail a, à court terme, un impact négligeable sur les #finances_publiques, dans la mesure où les immigrés travaillent, cotisent et paient des impôts. A long terme, l’#immigration_de_travail, en particulier qualifiée, stimule la #croissance en favorisant l’#innovation, l’#entrepreneuriat et l’insertion dans l’économie mondiale. Comment imaginer que les politiques de #réindustrialisation et d’adaptation au #changement_climatique pourront se faire dans une économie fermée, notamment à la recherche internationale ? Les idées et les innovations ne circulent pas dans l’éther, elles sont portées par des personnes.

Confusion générale

La France n’a pas de politique d’immigration, notamment économique. Notre pays subit de plein fouet une #pénurie de main-d’œuvre et se prive des bienfaits à long terme de l’immigration de travail. A l’instar de ce qu’ont fait des pays comme le Canada, l’Australie ou l’Allemagne, il est grand temps de changer nos législations et de mettre en œuvre une véritable politique d’immigration économique. Le Conseil d’analyse économique avait déjà, en novembre 2021, formulé plusieurs recommandations visant à mettre en place une politique migratoire ambitieuse au service de la croissance.

On peut citer la poursuite des efforts destinés à numériser, centraliser et systématiser le traitement des #visas de travail émanant des entreprises avec des critères d’admissibilité clairs et prévisibles, une évaluation du dispositif « #Passeport_talent » afin de renforcer son efficacité et d’intensifier son octroi, et la facilitation de la transition études-emploi en fluidifiant et en étendant l’accès à des titres de séjour pour les étudiants, sans y adjoindre de critères de salaire minimum, ni d’adéquation du travail aux qualifications.

Le débat sur l’immigration est monopolisé par des partis politiques qui ont fait de la lutte contre l’immigration leur fonds de commerce. En faisant des amalgames entre immigration, perte d’identité, délinquance et terrorisme, ils laissent à penser que l’immigration est un #fardeau. Le faible volume d’immigration de travail et l’absence d’un discours politique clair sur le sujet contribuent à la confusion générale. Il est, de ce point de vue, frappant de constater que le nouveau projet de loi sur l’immigration aborde pêle-mêle accueil des réfugiés, expulsion de délinquants, immigrés en situation irrégulière et tension sur le marché du travail.

En abandonnant le débat à des partis politiques dont l’objectif n’est pas, de toute évidence, la croissance, on projette l’image d’une opinion publique uniformément hostile à toute forme d’immigration. Or les Français ne sont pas dupes : ils sont même favorables à l’immigration intracommunautaire et n’ont pas de problème avec l’immigration de travail. Ainsi, dans le baromètre 2022 de la Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, 83 % des personnes interrogées affirment que les immigrés de travail doivent être considérés comme chez eux en France.

On manque de bras et de compétences partout sur le territoire. Cette situation constitue un frein à notre économie et, quand il s’agit de médecins et d’infirmiers, un péril pour la sécurité et la santé des Français. Alors que même la Hongrie de Viktor Orban s’organise pour accueillir des travailleurs étrangers, et que l’Italie de Giorgia Meloni prévoit d’accorder 122 705 visas extracommunautaires en 2023, la classe politique française est paralysée. Il est grand temps que l’Etat reprenne la main sur la #politique_migratoire. Les enjeux, tant de court terme pour les #secteurs_en_tension que de long terme pour la croissance et l’innovation, sont vitaux pour notre pays.

►https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/11/17/le-manque-d-immigration-de-travail-handicape-la-france_6200707_3232.html
#travail #immigration #migrations #France #économie #main_d'oeuvre

ping @karine4 @isskein

What If Money Expired ?

A long-forgotten German economist argued that society and the economy would be better off if money was a perishable good. Was he an anarchist crank or the prophet of a better world?

A few weeks ago, my nine-year-old son Theo invented a fiat currency to facilitate trade in his living room fort. Bourgeoning capitalist that he is, he had opened a fort gift shop and offered for sale an inventory of bookmarks hastily made from folded paper and liberal applications of tape. Inscribed on them were slogans like “Love,” “I Rule” and “Loot, Money, Moolah, Cash.”

Theo’s six-year-old brother Julian was interested in the bookmarks, which Theo was happy to sell him for $1 per unit.

“Hang on,” I shouted from the other room. “You’re not going to sell them for actual money.” (State intervention, I know.)

Reluctantly, Theo agreed. After some thought, he implemented a new scheme whereby his brother could print his own money with a marker and paper. Each bill would become legal tender once Julian had written “I CAN WRITE” three times on a piece of paper. Misspellings rendered the money void.

“It has to have some value,” Theo explained. “Otherwise, you could just print millions of dollars.”

Julian grumbled but soon redeemed his new wealth for a bookmark. Theo deposited the money in his pocket, and thus the fort’s commerce commenced.
What Is Money, Anyway?

The history of money is replete with equally imaginative mandates and whimsical logic, as Jacob Goldstein writes in his engaging book, “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Before money, people relied on bartering — an inconvenient system because it requires a “double coincidence of wants.” If I have wheat and you have meat, for us to make a deal I have to want your meat at the same time you want my wheat. Highly inefficient.

Many cultures developed ritual ways to exchange items of value — in marriage, for example, or to pay penance for killing someone, or in sacrifices. Items used for these exchanges varied from cowry shells to cattle, sperm whale teeth and long-tusked pigs. These commodities helped fulfill two central functions of money:

1. They served as a unit of account (offering a standardized way to measure worth).
2. They acted as a store of value (things you can accumulate now and use later).

Due to the flaws of the barter system, these goods didn’t serve the third function of money, which is:

3. To act as a medium of exchange (a neutral resource that can easily be transferred for goods).

Money that served all three of these functions wasn’t created until around 600 B.C.E. when Lydia, a kingdom in modern-day Turkey, created what many historians consider the first coins: lumps of blended gold and silver stamped with a lion. The idea spread to Greece, where people started exchanging their goods for coins in public spaces called agoras. Money soon created alternatives to traditional labor systems. Now, instead of working on a wealthy landowner’s farm for a year in return for food, lodging and clothes, a person could be paid for short-term work. This gave people the freedom to leave a bad job, but also the insecurity of finding employment when they needed it.

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning.

One summer, the philosopher Thales (who coined the phrase: “Know thyself”) predicted Greece would have a good crop of olives. Before they ripened, he rented all the presses on the islands and then grew rich when, come harvest, everyone went to him to press their olives. Today we might call this good business sense. Aristotle called it “unnatural.”

He wasn’t alone in his distrust of commerce. In mythology, Hermes is both the god of merchants and of thieves. Meanwhile, the Bible tells the story of Jesus overturning the tables of moneychangers and merchants in a Jerusalem temple. In the early days, as is true today, commerce implied exploitation — of natural resources and of other people. (The Incans, on the other hand, built an entire civilization with no money at all, just a complex system of tributes and structured specialization of work.)

Nevertheless, the concept of money spread. In 995, paper money was introduced in Sichuan, China, when a merchant in Chengdu gave people fancy receipts in exchange for their iron coins. Paper bills spared people the physical burden of their wealth, which helped facilitate trade over longer distances.

As it evolved, money became increasingly symbolic. Early paper money acted as an IOU and could always be exchanged for metallic coins of various values. In the late 13th century, however, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invented paper money that was not backed by anything. It was money because the emperor said it was money. People agreed. In the intervening centuries, money has conjured more fantastic leaps of faith with the invention of the stock market, centralized banking and, recently, cryptocurrencies.

Today, there is about $2.34 trillion of physical U.S. currency in circulation, and as much as half of it is held abroad. That accounts for just 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced). Total U.S. bank deposits are around $17 trillion. Meanwhile, total wealth in this country, including nonmonetary assets, is around $149 trillion, more than 63 times the total available cash. The gaps between these numbers are like dark matter in the universe — we don’t have a way to empirically account for it, and yet without it our understanding of the universe, or the economy, would collapse.

For most people in the developed world, money is lines of data on a bank’s computer. Money is abstract, absurd. It’s a belief system, a language, a social contract. Money is trust. But the rules aren’t fixed in stone.

“Here’s a thing that always happens with money,” Goldstein wrote. “Whatever money is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form money should take, and everything else seems like irresponsible craziness.”
The Problem, As One German Saw It

More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.

“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”

Gesell was born in 1862 in what is now Belgium, the seventh of nine children. He dropped out of high school because his parents couldn’t afford it, got a job with the postal service and then, at 20, went to Spain to work in a business house. Four years later, he emigrated to Argentina, where he set up a company importing medical equipment and a plant to produce cardboard boxes.

Argentina was booming in the 1880s. Using capital loaned from Europe, the country invested in railroads and other infrastructure aimed at opening its resources to international trade. The dividends on those projects were slow in coming, however, and the country struggled to service its debt. Meanwhile, inflation was devaluing the currency and the real wages of workers were declining. In 1890, Argentina defaulted on nearly £48 million of national debt, most of which was underwritten by a British merchant bank. Argentina’s GDP dropped 11% in a year and the country fell into a deep recession and political upheaval.

In 1898, the Argentine government embarked on a deflationary policy to try to treat its economic ills. As a result, unemployment rose and uncertainty made people hoard their money. The economy ground to a halt. There was plenty of money to go around, Gesell realized. The problem was, it wasn’t going around. He argued that the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”

Those who live by their labor suffer from this imbalance. If I go to the market to sell a bushel of cucumbers when the cost of food is falling, a shopper may not buy them, preferring to buy them next week at a lower price. My cucumbers will not last the week, so I am forced to drop my price. A deflationary spiral may ensue.

The French economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it this way: “Money, you imagine, is the key that opens the gates of the market. That is not true — money is the bolt that bars them.”

The faults of money go further, Gesell wrote. When small businesses take out loans from banks, they must pay the banks interest on those loans, which means they must raise prices or cut wages. Thus, interest is a private gain at a public cost. In practice, those with money grow richer and those without grow poorer. Our economy is full of examples of this, where those with money make more ($100,000 minimum investments in high-yield hedge funds, for example) and those without pay higher costs (like high-interest predatory lending).

“The merchant, the workman, the stockbroker have the same aim, namely to exploit the state of the market, that is, the public at large,” Gesell wrote. “Perhaps the sole difference between usury and commerce is that the professional usurer directs his exploitation more against specific persons.”

Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.

To correct these economic and social ills, Gesell recommended we change the nature of money so it better reflects the goods for which it is exchanged. “We must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange,” he wrote.

To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). (The value of and rate at which to apply the stamps could be fine-tuned if necessary.)

This system would work the opposite way ours does today, where money held over time increases in value as it gathers interest. In Gesell’s system, the stamps would be an individual cost and the revenue they created would be a public gain, reducing the amount of additional taxes a government would need to collect and enabling it to support those unable to work.

Money could be deposited in a bank, whereby it would retain its value because the bank would be responsible for the stamps. To avoid paying for the stamps, the bank would be incentivized to loan the money, passing on the holding expense to others. In Gesell’s vision, banks would loan so freely that their interest rates would eventually fall to zero, and they would collect only a small risk premium and an administration fee.

With the use of this stamp scrip currency, the full productive power of the economy would be unleashed. Capital would be accessible to everyone. A Currency Office, meanwhile, would maintain price stability by monitoring the amount of money in circulation. If prices go up, the office would destroy money. When prices fall, it would print more.

In this economy, money would circulate with all the velocity of a game of hot potato. There would be no more “unearned income” of money lenders getting rich on interest. Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. Gesell imagined this would create a Darwinian natural selection in the economy: “Free competition would favor the efficient and lead to their increased propagation.”

This new “natural economic order” would be accompanied by a reformation of land ownership — Free Land — whereby land was no longer privately owned. Current landowners would be compensated by the government in land bonds over 20 years. Then they would pay rent to the government, which, Gesell imagined, would be used for government expenses and to create annuities for mothers to help women achieve economic independence from men and be free to leave a relationship if they wanted.

Gesell’s ideas salvaged the spirit of private, competitive entrepreneurialism from what he considered the systemic defects of capitalism. Gesell could be described as an anti-Marxian socialist. He was committed to social justice but also agreed with Adam Smith that self-interest was the natural foundation of any economy.

While Marx advocated for the political supremacy of the dispossessed through organization, Gesell argued that we need only remove economic obstacles to realize our true productive capacity. The pie can be grown and more justly shared through systemic changes, he maintained, not redistributed through revolution. “We shall leave to our heirs no perpetually welling source of income,” he wrote, “but is it not provision enough to bequeath economic conditions that will secure them the full proceeds of their labor?”

Although many dismissed Gesell as an anarchistic heretic, his ideas were embraced by major economists of the day. In his book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” John Maynard Keynes devoted five pages to Gesell, calling him a “strange and unduly neglected prophet.” He argued the idea behind a stamp scrip was sound. “I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx,” Keynes wrote.

In 1900, Gesell retired and took up farming in Switzerland, where he published pamphlets, books and a magazine on monetary reform. In 1911 he moved to Eden, a single-tax, vegetarian commune outside Berlin, where he criticized monogamy and advocated free love. In 1919, when pacifist poets and playwrights launched the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, they offered Gesell the position of finance minister. Gesell drew up plans for land reform, basic income and Freigeld. The republic lasted all of a week before being overthrown by the Communist Party and then the German army, who detained Gesell and charged him with treason.

He gave an impassioned defense. “I do not attack capital with force, with strikes and paralization of business and plant, with sabotage,” he told the tribunal. “I attack it with the only weapon which is inherent with the proletariat — work. By recommending to the masses untrammeled, relentless work, I lay low the idol of interest.”

Gesell was acquitted and returned to writing. He died of pneumonia in 1930, in Eden, at the age of 67.
And Then It Actually Happened

That very year, the owner of a dormant coal mine near the Bavarian town of Schwanenkirchen tried in vain to get a loan from a bank to begin mining again. Stymied by the representatives of traditional finance, he went to the Wära Exchange Association, a group that was created to put Gesell’s ideas into practice. The group agreed to give the mine owner 50,000 Wära, a depreciating currency equivalent to 50,000 Reichsmarks.

The mine owner then gathered the unemployed miners and asked if they would go back to work, not for legal tender, but for this new currency. They agreed that any money was better than no money. The mine owner purchased food, clothing and household goods from warehouses that were already using the Wära currency. The miners, now back digging coal, used their wages to buy these goods from the mine owner. Soon, other businesses in town wanted to use the currency to benefit from the sudden influx of cash. Because the currency depreciated at 1% per month, everyone was eager to part with it and it circulated rapidly throughout the economy. Soon, in whole districts, the Wära currency replaced the Reichsmark, which alarmed the bigger banks and the government. Finally, the Reichsbank ended the experiment by banning the currency.

Two years later, in the Austrian town of Wörgl, Gesell’s ideas came to life again. In 1932, Wörgl’s mayor, a socialist locomotive engineer, desperately wanted to get his constituents back to work. A supporter of Gesell’s ideas, he devised a plan where Austrian schillings would be replaced with Work Certificates that depreciated at 1% per month.

The mayor hired townspeople, paid in Work Certificates, to improve roads, install streetlights and build a concrete bridge. Work Certificates circulated rapidly from merchants to tenants, to landlords, to saving accounts. People paid their taxes early to avoid paying for stamps. In one year, the Work Certificates traded hands 463 times, creating goods and services worth almost 15 million schillings. By contrast, the ordinary schilling was exchanged only 21 times.

The experiment was called the Miracle of Wörgl. Vienna newspapers took notice. The government of France expressed interest. Two hundred mayors in Austria devised similar programs in their communities. Again, however, the financial authorities grew uneasy, arguing that these local stamp scrips undermined the currency-issuing power of the national bank. By the fall of 1933, the Austrian Supreme Court had prohibited their circulation.

Gesellian experiments happened in the U.S. and Canada too, inspired by the Great Depression. In 1932, in Hawarden, Iowa, a limited amount of stamp scrip was put into circulation to pay for public works. The same year, a similar program was deployed in Anaheim, California. In 1933, Oregon attempted to print $80 million in stamp scrip, but the U.S. Treasury stopped it. The government of Premier William “Bible Bill” Aberhart in Alberta, Canada, introduced depreciating “prosperity certificates” (which people quickly renamed “velocity dollars”) in 1936.

That decade in the U.S., 37 cities, eight counties and some business groups attempted to issue almost 100 different types of stamp scrip. All these experiments were local, small in scope and short-lived. In 1933, the economist Irving Fisher, who called himself “a humble student of Silvio Gesell,” tried to persuade President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to adopt a national stamp scrip, and even convinced an Alabama senator to introduce a bill that would have issued up to $1 billion in depreciating currency. It never came to a vote. Roosevelt, who was preparing to take the country off the gold standard, worried that any further economic innovations would be too destabilizing.

Other Gesell evangelists included Frank Lloyd Wright and the poet Ezra Pound, the son of an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. As a child, Pound visited his father at work; in a basement vault, he saw sweating, shirtless men with giant shovels scooping millions of dollars’ worth of silver coins into counting machines “like it was litter.” Later he wrote that it was unnatural when a financier made money out of nothing by harvesting interest on a loan. The poet believed our current economic order disincentivizes actual work and creation while incentivizing market manipulation and shrewd, sometimes dishonest, schemes of profit. To Pound, the concept of money was so pervasive and unexamined that money had become an end in itself, not the vehicle it was intended to be.

In 1935, he wrote an essay, “What is Money For?” in which he promoted Gesell’s expiring money with ardent emphasis. “The AIM of a sane and decent economic system,” Pound wrote, “is to fix things so that decent people can eat, have clothes and houses up to the limit of available goods.”

Pound called Gesell’s idea “vegetable money” and argued it was a necessary equalizing force so that one person doesn’t have money wealth that accumulates in a bank while others have potato wealth that rots in their root cellar. In Pound’s view, the wealth of a nation ought to not be measured in its amount of money but by the flourishing of its creative and productive arts. “When the total nation hasn’t or cannot obtain enough food for its people, that nation is poor,” he wrote. “When enough food exists and people cannot get it by honest labor, the state is rotten.”

To Pound, money that is organic, subject to birth and decay, that flows freely between people and facilitates generosity, is more likely to bind a society together rather than isolate us. An expiring money would enrich the whole, not the select few. Usury — which we can take to mean unfettered capitalism — was responsible for the death of culture in the post-Reformation age.

Pound eventually moved to Italy and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, advocating for a strong state to enforce these ideas. In doing so, he ceded his artistic idealism to autocratic fiat. Pound was strident in his economic convictions but also a realist on human nature. “Set up a perfect and just money system and in three days rascals, the bastards with mercantilist and monopolist mentality, will start thinking up some wheeze to cheat the people,” he wrote.
What It Means Today

Gesell’s idea for depreciating money “runs counter to anything we’ve ever learned about the desirable properties of money,” David Andolfatto, a former senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the chair of the economics department at the University of Miami, told me recently. “Why on Earth would you ever want money to have that property?”

But during the economic downturn that followed the Covid pandemic, Andolfatto recognized the potential value of an expiring money in times of crisis. The relief checks that the government sent out to U.S. households didn’t immediately have their desired effect of stimulating the economy because many people saved the money rather than spend it. This is the paradox of thrift, Andolfatto explained. What’s good for the individual is bad for the whole.

“Well, what if we gave them the money with a time fuse?” Andolfatto remembers wondering. “You’re giving them the money and saying look, if you don’t spend it in a period of time, it’s going to evaporate.”

In a paper he wrote for the Fed in 2020, Andolfatto called this concept “hot money credits.” He pointed out that when the economy goes into a funk, there is a “coordination failure” where people stop spending and others stop earning. Withholding money in times of fear creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by further stifling the economy. So, could Gesell’s idea of expiring money be the cure?

“The desirability depends on the diagnosis,” Andolfatto told me. “It’s like a doctor administering a drug to a healthy person and a sick person. You administer the drug, and it has some side effects. If the person is healthy, you’re not going to make them any better. You might make them even worse. If they’re sick, it might make them better.”

The problem, Andolfatto said, is that issuing pandemic checks with an expiration date would hurt those with little savings. People with money in the bank would use their expiring money just like normal money. People with no savings, on the other hand, might find that expiring money forced them to spend and did little to stabilize their financial situations.

Since he wrote the paper, Andolfatto went on, the U.S. economy recovered remarkably well under policies that didn’t include Gesell’s radical reforms. “I admit to being intrigued by the idea,” Andolfatto said. “You can do it on a local level. I wonder, as a practical matter, if one can do it on a large scale.”

Keynes believed Gesell’s expiring money amounted to “half a theory” — it failed, Keynes argued, to account for people’s preference for liquid assets, of which money is just one example. “Money as a medium of exchange has to also be a store of value,” Willem Buiter, a former global chief economist at Citigroup, told me. In a Gesellian economy, he continued, the affluent would simply store their wealth in another form — gold bars, perhaps, or boats — which could be converted into money when they wanted to transact.

Buiter doesn’t believe Gesellian money can really address serious social inequality, but he did note times when it was advantageous for a central bank to drop interest rates below zero, like when inflation and market interest rates are low and should go lower to maintain full employment and utilization of resources. Positive or negative interest rates could easily be applied to digital money in a cashless economy, for which Buiter and others have advocated. But it’s hard to imagine how a government today could practically implement a Gesellian tax on hard currency. “You’d have to be able to go out and confiscate money if it’s not stamped,” Buiter said. “It would be rather brutal.”

In 1938, the psychologist Abraham Maslow — who later became famous for his “hierarchy of needs,” which ranked human necessities from the physiological (air, water, food) to the transcendent — spent six weeks with the Siksika (Blackfoot) people in southern Alberta. He discovered a community where wealth was not measured in money or in property. “The wealthiest man in their eyes is one who has almost nothing,” he wrote, “because he has given it all away.”

For most of us today, money is assurance. We live in a culture in which the pursuit of security is paramount. Save money, we are told — for a health crisis, for our kids to go to college, for retirement. But is it possible to have any guarantee, through money or anything else, of our safety in life?

In her new book “The Age of Insecurity,” the activist Astra Taylor writes: “Today, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure — money, property, possessions, police, the military — have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating the harm done to the economy, the climate and people’s lives, including our own.”

The negative consequences of the unimpeded accumulation of wealth are plain for all to see. Human rights abuses, corruption and the devastation of the planet have all been justified in its pursuit. It’s possible to imagine many reincarnations of money that serve different values. Putting a price on carbon emissions is one way to offset the environmental damage incurred by economic growth. A universal basic income and free higher education would help redistribute and equalize financial and social capital.

There are more radical questions being asked: What if the money you accumulated in life died with you? What if actuaries determined the amount of money people need to live a comfortable life, and earnings were capped there? What would a world look like in which the ardor of one’s work — not just luck and geography and privilege — determined a person’s wealth?

In “The Man Who Quit Money,” Mark Sundeen writes about a man in Utah who deposited his life savings in a phone booth, opting out of the institution altogether. It’s an age-old tradition among the pious and iconoclasts the world over — becoming a recluse in order to attune oneself with rhythms beyond social conventions. Many of the most charismatic people are animated by passions that don’t earn them money but add a richness to their lives that money can’t buy. When we find those things that sustain us — art, hobbies, service — the worth of those activities transcends money to fulfill us on a deeper, spiritual level.

Money may be a language, a way to translate value in terms we all understand, but money is not the sum of what we have to say. The more money one has, the less meaning work has to that person. At the same time, life’s most meaningful work, like raising children or cooking a meal for others, often goes unpaid. And yet this is the substance of life, the stuff that determines who we are and how we will be remembered.

Gesell believed that capitalism had beaten communism, but he recognized the flaws of our current economic order. “The choice lies between progress or ruin,” he wrote. “We must push on through the slough of capitalism to the firm ground beyond.”

Is his idea of an expiring currency any more absurd than the status quo we inherited? Perhaps his greatest contribution is to remind us that the rules of money can be reinvented, as indeed they always have. Money is a construct of our collective imagination, subject to our complacency, yes, but also to our inquiry, values and highest ambitions. Gesell argued for an engaged, probing curiosity of our economic institutions so that we may reimagine them to better serve the societies we want to create. “The economic order under which men thrive,” he wrote, “is the most natural economic order.” To that end, ours may still be a work in progress.

▻https://www.noemamag.com/what-if-money-expired

via @freakonometrics

#argent #finance #histoire #troc #échange #valeur #système_monétaire #Silvio_Gesell #expiration #circulation #confiance #déflation #Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon #intérêts #économie #Freigeld

Unity is probably going to do layoffs - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23954709/unity-layoffs-q3-earnings-runtime-program

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In the report, the company says it is assessing its product portfolio “to focus on those products that are most valuable to our customers” and is “evaluating the right cost structure that aligns with the more focused portfolio.” It plans to make changes during the fourth quarter, and they will “likely include discontinuing certain product offerings, reducing our workforce, and reducing our office footprint.” The company expects to complete its changes before the end of Q1 2024.

Cette annonce fait suite au départ du PDG plus tôt cette année :

Unity Announces Leadership Transition | Business Wire
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1020414

Départ suite au changement de stratégie commerciale :

Unity introducing new fee attached to game installs
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1017447

qui avait été modifiée suite à la grogne des clients :

An open letter to our community | Unity Blog
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1018076

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #unity #finance #business #ressources_humaines #licenciements

Déforestation au Brésil : quatre banques françaises visées par une plainte pour blanchiment
▻https://disclose.ngo/fr/article/deforestation-au-bresil-quatre-banques-francaises-visees-par-une-plainte-p

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BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, le groupe BPCE et Axa sont accusés d’avoir tiré profit de la déforestation illégale en Amazonie, en finançant l’industrie brésilienne du bœuf. L’ONG Sherpa, qui s’appuie notamment sur les révélations de Disclose, vient de déposer plainte au Parquet national financier pour blanchiment et recel de délits environnementaux. Lire l’article

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5 graphiques pour prendre la mesure de l’évitement fiscal | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/5-graphiques-prendre-mesure-de-levitement-fiscal/00108479

Le « Global Tax Evasion Report 2024 », publié ce 23 octobre, offre des statistiques détaillées sur la lutte contre les paradis fiscaux et l’évitement fiscal. Nous en avons sélectionné 5 graphiques pour mieux saisir le phénomène.

Sony’s Bungie Game Unit Cut Jobs as ‘Destiny 2’ Popularity Waned - Bloomberg-
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-31/sony-s-bungie-game-unit-cut-jobs-as-destiny-2-popularity-waned

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iNOkzPtZ36oQ/v5/1200x800.jpg

Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2.

Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting.

#jeux_vidéo #jeu_vidéo #business #finance #bungie #sony #playstation #ressources_humaines #licenciements #naughty_dog #media_molecule #jim_ryan #pete_parsons

Écocides et paradis fiscaux : révélations sur les dérives du soutien européen à l’industrie minière
▻https://disclose.ngo/fr/article/ecocides-et-paradis-fiscaux-revelations-sur-les-derives-du-soutien-europee

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Pour développer l’industrie des batteries électriques ou des éoliennes, l’Union européenne finance des entreprises minières au travers du programme Horizon. Une partie de ces fonds soutient des sociétés impliquées dans des catastrophes environnementales, voire, pour l’une d’entre elles, domiciliée dans un paradis fiscal. Lire l’article

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Nintendo of America President: “Everyone Has the Right To Form a Union”
▻https://www.inverse.com/gaming/doug-bowser-super-mario-bros-wonder-switch-2-nintendo-union

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Video game consoles come and go, but the Nintendo Switch is forever. At least, that’s how it sometimes seems. Six years after its launch, the beloved handheld hybrid is still going strong and on track to sell 15 million devices in 2023. But for Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser, the reason behind the Switch’s lasting power is simple: It’s the games.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #business #nintendo #microsoft #rachat #acquisition #finance #rumeurs #nintendo_switch #console_switch #finance #ressources_humaines #crunch #syndicalisme #entrevue #interview #doug_bowser

#France_Universités : Projet de loi de finances 2024 : les universités vont-elles être obligées de sacrifier certaines de leurs missions ?

France Universités a pris connaissance du projet de loi de finances pour 2024 et déplore le manque de moyens consacrés à l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche. La situation budgétaire critique des établissements universitaires impacte directement leurs missions et leur fonctionnement.

C’est pourquoi France Universités demande la compensation par l’État de l’intégralité des mesures sociales et salariales à destination des agents de l’État, la compensation du surcoût de l’énergie par la prolongation du fonds d’intervention, lancé en 2022, en 2024 (et au-delà), et l’application effective de la clause de revoyure de la Loi de programmation de la recherche.

Après leur non-compensation en 2022, la compensation seulement partielle des mesures annoncées par le ministre de la Transformation et de la Fonction publiques, Stanislas Guerini, en 2023 et 2024 est une très mauvaise nouvelle pour les universités. Une nouvelle fois, des mesures salariales, applicables à l’ensemble de la fonction publique, ne seront que partiellement consolidées en loi de finances. Pour les universités, cela signifie qu’elles devront financer 120 millions d’euros, soit par prélèvement sur leurs fonds de roulement, soit par réduction de leur campagne d’emplois. Cela équivaut à 1 500 emplois de maîtres de conférences en moins, non ouverts au recrutement. Cette situation, totalement injustifiable, obérera leurs missions de formation, de recherche et d’innovation, ainsi que leur capacité à investir et à mettre en œuvre les projets de décarbonation souhaités par le président de la République.

Ce choix budgétaire s’effectue dans un contexte où, depuis plusieurs années, des mesures RH décidées au niveau de l’État ne sont pas financées, notamment le Glissement-Vieillesse-Technicité (GVT) qui vient grever les budgets des universités à hauteur de 45 millions d’euros, rien que pour 2023, et dont la valeur cumulée en plus de 10 ans équivaut à plusieurs milliers d’emplois d’enseignants ou d’enseignants-chercheurs. Nous tenons à rappeler que bien que les personnels des universités soient des fonctionnaires de l’État, c’est aux universités qu’il est demandé de prendre en charge les revalorisations et progressions de carrière prévues pour eux.

La situation est d’autant plus préoccupante qu’elle s’inscrit dans un contexte d’inflation et de crise énergétique. De fait, les universités, qui représentent 20 % du patrimoine immobilier de l’État, sont frappées de plein fouet par l’augmentation des tarifs des fluides, actuelle et à venir. En 2022, l’accroissement de la facture énergétique a été proche de 100 millions d’euros, soit +45 % sur un an. En 2023, le surcoût par rapport à 2022 est estimé entre 300 et 350 millions d’euros. Or, l’État ne prévoit pas non plus de le compenser. Cette perspective est d’autant moins acceptable que les universités, opératrices de l’État, sont en première ligne dans la démarche de « l’État exemplaire » en matière de sobriété, et prennent leurs responsabilités pour atteindre les 10 % de baisse de consommation d’ici 2024.

De plus, au-delà de l’enjeu des bonnes conditions d’accueil des étudiants et des personnels dans les locaux universitaires, se pose aussi la question de la compétitivité de la recherche française dans des secteurs disciplinaires requérants des équipements scientifiques énergivores.

Encore une fois, les universités font les frais de la politique budgétaire du gouvernement qui considère l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche comme une variable d’ajustement et non comme un investissement en faveur de la jeunesse. France Universités appelle donc le Gouvernement et la Représentation nationale au réexamen des crédits de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche lors des débats à l’Assemblée nationale puis au Sénat. Plutôt que d’exiger des universités un « effort de responsabilité » qu’elles assument déjà largement, l’État doit prendre la pleine mesure du rôle joué par les universités et établissements de l’ESR dans le développement économique de notre pays et leur déléguer, enfin, les moyens d’accomplir leurs missions. Il en va de l’avenir de notre jeunesse, mais aussi du futur d’une recherche publique française menacée de décrochage.

▻https://franceuniversites.fr/actualite/projet-de-loi-finances-2024-les-universites-vont-elles-etre-oblige
#ESR #enseignement_supérieur #université #facs #France #budget #finances #loi_finances

Read Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s memo welcoming Activision Blizzard to Microsoft - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915634/microsoft-xbox-internal-memo-chief-spencer-activision-blizzard-completion

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Microsoft just finalized its giant $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard earlier today. Xbox chief Phil Spencer has now welcomed Activision Blizzard King employees to Xbox in an internal memo to all of Microsoft’s full-time employees today.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #business #finance #acquisition #microsoft #activision_blizzard #phil_spencer #bobby_kotick

Completion of Microsoft/Activision Merger Will Transform the Video Game and Technology Labor Market | Communications Workers of America
▻https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/completion-microsoftactivision-merger-will-transform-video-game-and-techn

Today’s announcement that Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard represents a milestone in the effort to improve working conditions in the video game industry. Under the terms of a ground-breaking, legally-binding labor neutrality agreement, Microsoft will remain neutral when Activision Blizzard employees express interest in joining a union, providing a clear path to collective bargaining for almost 10,000 workers.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #business #finance #acquisition #microsoft #activision_blizzard #syndicalisme

Activision Blizzard Games on Ubisoft+: What You Need to Know
▻https://news.ubisoft.com/en-gb/article/wy4gKUmOdRRoO5Uvlr8CA/activision-blizzard-games-on-ubisoft-what-you-need-to-know

In August, Ubisoft announced an agreement with Microsoft granting the publisher the perpetual cloud streaming rights for Call of Duty and all other current Activision Blizzard games and those released over the next 15 years once Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is complete. Chris Early, Ubisoft’s SVP, Strategic Partnerships & Business Development, was a crucial figure in the negotiations. He sat down with Ubisoft News to discuss what Ubisoft+ subscribers can expect now that the acquisition is finalized.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #business #finance #acquisition #microsoft #activision_blizzard #ubisoft #cloud_gaming #gaas #jeu_vidéo_call_of_duty

Microsoft concession a gamechanger that will promote competition - GOV.UK
▻https://www.gov.uk/government/news/microsoft-concession-a-gamechanger-that-will-promote-competition

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The new deal for Microsoft to buy Activision without cloud gaming rights has been cleared after the CMA concluded it would preserve competitive prices and better services.

L’autorité de la concurrence britannique valide le rachat d’Activision-Blizzard par Microsoft, après que ce dernier ait annoncé céder les droits d’exploitation cloud à Ubisoft :

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1014177

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #cma #business #finance #rachat #microsoft #activision_blizzard

To reduce inequalities in research evaluation, give researchers a universal basic income for research impact

As the review of REF2021 begins, Mark Reed proposes that rather than allocating impact funding to a small number of high performing institutions, funding should be allocated more broadly to individual researchers. He argues that not only would this limit the over-concentration of resources in particular institutions, but would also benefit the wider culture of research impact by limiting zero-sum competition between institutions for impact and enabling researchers to pursue, or choose not to pursue, more intrinsically motivated forms of research impact.

–-

The link between research assessment and funding allocations has created perceived and real conflicts of interest for researchers seeking to generate impact, and is at the root of many of the negative unintended consequences of the impact agenda in the UK. A majority (57%) of UK academics hold negative attitudes towards REF, feel pressured to meet REF targets (54%), and think that their creativity is being stifled due to research being driven by an impact agenda (75%). But, few have opinions about what should replace REF.

Other countries are following in the UK’s footsteps as they develop their own systems for evaluating the impact of publicly funded research, but none have so far linked scores to funding in quite the same way. They have also not experienced the same level of unintended consequences. One way of resolving this tension would be to weaken the link between impact scores in REF and funding allocations, and thereby reduce extrinsic incentives for impact. Currently funding is “quality rated” so the “best” institutions get most funding, but does this “rich get richer” system simply perpetuate inequality and make it harder for post-1992 institutions to build and retain talent? Do research intensive institutions produce more high-quality research because they have better researchers and facilities? Or, do they out-compete newer Universities in large part because of a system that they have the power and vested interest to maintain? The answer is both.

If the system concentrates resources in a small number of institutions, it will be easier to produce high quality research in those places and they will attract the most ambitious researchers from new universities, who will seek out the advantage that comes with moving to a Russell Group institution. Speaking from experience, when I moved from a post-1992 to a Russell Group institution, I noticed a big jump in my funding success and the number of invitations and opportunities, which had previously passed me by. I was no different, but I was perceived differently. I didn’t want to leave my post-1992 colleagues, but it felt like the only way I could reach the critical mass I was looking for in my research team (now I’ve achieved that, I’ve moved back out of the Russell Group to a specialist college). If resources were spread more equitably, it might be easier to do research in post-1992 institutions, which in turn would be able to invest in their best researchers with less fear that they will be snapped up by their local Russell Group institution as soon as they start bringing in significant research income.

So, here’s an idea (not a new one, but a good one): make funding proportional to the number of research active academics and give them all a universal basic income for their research and impact. I’m not talking about scrapping competitive research funding, but if at least 50% of funding from REF were to go into individual staff accounts, we’d all have equal opportunities to do seed-corn projects, impact, networking and capacity building to prepare us for our next funding bid, and we might have a fairer chance of success. I’ve often been surprised by the creativity and outputs that ECRs get from very small amounts of funding and I think we’d be blown away by the research and impact that could be made possible by universal basic income for researchers. It would also curtail the “projectification” of research, where researchers “are currently hopping from project grant to project grant” instead of conducting “groundbreaking, continuous lines of research”, as the Dutch Academy put it, in its own proposal to the Dutch Government to introduce universal basic income for researchers in The Netherlands (still pending a decision by the Ministry of Education). It would also go some way to paying for the estimated 37% of research in UK Universities that is currently self-funded by researchers and their institutions, often to support REF submissions. If REF funding is meant to build UK research capacity and leadership, why limit it to those who already lead and have most capacity, when we could level up across the sector? The best resourced institutions and teams already have enough advantage to maintain their trajectory without such a change leading to a levelling off for them.

I’m not suggesting there should be no strings attached. Researchers would have to demonstrate they are research active (as they already do in REF), and I think institutions should still have to produce impact case studies underpinned by rigorous research. But those case studies should be graded only for the purposes of choosing which ones to publish publicly, with funding linked to the submission of enough case studies above this quality threshold. I wouldn’t set such a threshold particularly high in terms of the significance and reach of impact; the goal would be to publish a database of impacts that doesn’t include case studies based on questionable research, or that consist of long lists of activities with no evidence of impact (there are many of the latter in the REF2014 database). If an institution doesn’t submit enough case studies above the threshold, then they wouldn’t get their full funding allocation.

By decoupling impact scores from funding, we could also relax rules around where the underpinning research was conducted, or even who it was conducted by, as long as an institution has invested in the generation of impact during the assessment period. Many of the most robust impacts are based on diverse bodies of work and evidence synthesis. This kind of impact work would stand to gain much from a system that encouraged collaboration, rather than competition, between institutions..

I’d make the minimum number per head of staff lower than it is now (though not as low as it is in Australia), but allow institutions to submit as many cases as they wanted, so we celebrate a much wider range of impacts. One of the reasons we’re increasingly narrowing and instrumentalising what we submit to REF is that we are being driven to prioritise case studies we think will make the top grade. If the threshold was lowered for funding (say to 2* or above), institutions would be less risk averse and celebrate many more impacts, empowering those who wish to disengage from impact and enabling others to pursue impact on their own terms based on what inspires and motivates them intrinsically. We would begin to see more of the “unsung impacts” we saw submitted to the recent Fast Track Impact competition of this title, including transformational changes that had limited reach, and we’d discover all the rich impacts arising from public engagement in more applied disciplines that tend to currently only submit easier to measure, more instrumental impacts on things like policy or the economy.

Research assessments like REF present the highly polished tip of an iceberg. I think the public deserve to see the true depth and breadth of that iceberg. And when they do, I think that they too will support the idea of trusting individual researchers with funding, and the creativity that comes from this.

▻https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/06/21/to-reduce-inequalities-in-research-evaluation-give-researchers-a-univer

#université #recherche #revenu_de_base #revenu_universel #projets_de_recherche #inégalités #impact #compétition #néo-management #néo-libéralisme #université_néolibérale #financement #financement_par_projet

L’administration #Biden annonce discrètement qu’elle va financer une section du mur à la frontière avec le #Mexique

« Construire un mur massif sur toute la frontière sud n’est pas une solution politique sérieuse », avait proclamé Joe Biden lors de son accession à la présidence des Etats-Unis. Son administration a pourtant discrètement annoncé jeudi 5 octobre qu’elle comptait ajouter une nouvelle section au mur frontalier avec le Mexique pour tenter de limiter les arrivées de migrants, reprenant à son compte une mesure phare et controversée de l’ancien président Donald Trump.

Cette décision a valu à Joe Biden d’être accusé de #volte-face, lui qui avait promis le jour de son entrée en fonction, en janvier 2021, que le contribuable ne payerait plus pour la construction d’un mur. Le démocrate de 80 ans, candidat à sa réélection, a assuré qu’il ne « pouvait pas interrompre » le #financement engagé par son prédécesseur, faute d’avoir pu convaincre le Congrès d’employer ces fonds pour d’autres mesures. Le même jour, la Maison Blanche a fait part de la reprise de vols directs d’expulsion vers le Venezuela pour les immigrés en situation irrégulière, interrompus depuis des années.

Le ministre de la sécurité intérieure, Alejandro Mayorkas, a expliqué qu’une nouvelle portion de mur serait érigée dans la vallée du #Rio_Grande, à la frontière avec le Mexique. « Il existe actuellement un besoin aigu et immédiat de construire des barrières physiques et des routes à proximité de la frontière des Etats-Unis afin d’empêcher les entrées illégales », a-t-il déclaré dans un avis officiel publié par le registre fédéral des Etats-Unis. Plus de 245 000 tentatives d’entrées illégales ont été enregistrées sur une dizaine de mois jusqu’au début d’août, selon l’administration.

Le ministre a ensuite assuré sur le réseau social X (ex-Twitter) que des passages de l’avis officiel avaient été « sortis de leur contexte » et a affirmé : « Il n’y a pas de nouvelle politique concernant le mur à la frontière. Nous avons toujours dit clairement qu’un mur n’était pas une solution. »

Au Mexique, le président Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, qui rencontre jeudi le chef de la diplomatie américaine, Antony Blinken, a jugé qu’il s’agissait d’un « pas en arrière ». « Cette autorisation pour la construction du mur est un pas en arrière parce qu’elle ne résout pas le problème, nous devons nous attaquer aux causes » de l’immigration illégale, a réagi le président mexicain.

Des fonds approuvés sous la présidence de Donald Trump

« L’argent était prévu pour le mur frontalier. J’ai essayé de convaincre [les républicains au Congrès] d’allouer les fonds à autre chose, de les rediriger. Ils n’ont pas voulu », s’est défendu Joe Biden. « En attendant, il n’est pas possible légalement d’utiliser cet argent pour autre chose que ce pour quoi il a été prévu », a poursuivi le démocrate pour justifier une décision vivement critiquée par certains élus de son parti, en particulier dans l’aile gauche.

M. Mayorkas a expliqué de son côté que les fonds pour « les barrières physiques supplémentaires » viendraient d’une dotation approuvée par le Congrès dans ce but précis en 2019, quand M. Trump était au pouvoir. L’immigration illégale est un problème politique croissant pour M. Biden, que les républicains accusent de laxisme.

Donald Trump, son rival et favori de la droite pour la prochaine élection présidentielle, n’a pas manqué de réagir. L’annonce de l’administration Biden montre que « j’avais raison quand j’ai construit 900 km (…) d’un mur frontalier tout beau, tout neuf », a-t-il écrit sur sa plate-forme Truth Social. « Joe Biden s’excusera-t-il auprès de moi et de l’Amérique pour avoir mis si longtemps à bouger et avoir permis que notre pays soit inondé de 15 millions d’immigrants illégaux, venant de lieux inconnus ? », a-t-il ajouté.

Les républicains ont fait de l’immigration l’un de leurs angles d’attaque favoris contre la Maison Blanche. L’aile droite du parti s’oppose par exemple au déblocage de fonds supplémentaires pour l’Ukraine, estimant que cet argent devrait plutôt servir à lutter contre la crise migratoire.

Le sénateur conservateur Lindsey Graham a demandé de lier les deux sujets, alors que le Congrès américain doit voter sur un nouveau budget, et donc sur une éventuelle rallonge pour l’Ukraine, avant le 17 novembre, sous peine de paralysie de l’Etat fédéral.

Reprise des expulsions vers le Venezuela

La Maison Blanche s’est défendue d’utiliser la construction du mur pour marchander le soutien des parlementaires républicains à un nouvel effort financier en faveur des Ukrainiens : « Je ne ferais pas le lien entre les deux », a assuré Karine Jean-Pierre.

Concernant le Venezuela, l’administration Biden va reprendre dans les prochains jours les expulsions directes par avion, suspendues depuis des années en raison de la situation sécuritaire très dégradée dans ce pays.

Le département d’Etat a précisé que les autorités de Caracas avaient accepté de recevoir leurs ressortissants ainsi renvoyés. Le gouvernement vénézuélien a confirmé, dans un communiqué, que les deux pays avaient « conclu un accord permettant de rapatrier de manière organisée, sûre et légale des citoyens vénézuéliens depuis les Etats-Unis ».

Les Vénézuéliens sont l’une des nationalités les plus représentées parmi les migrants qui arrivent régulièrement à la frontière sud des Etats-Unis. Cette reprise des expulsions directes vise des personnes entrées sur le territoire américain après le 31 juillet 2023. Pour ceux qui se trouvaient sur le sol américain avant cette date, Washington avait récemment annoncé l’octroi de 500 000 permis temporaires de séjour.

Selon l’ONU, plus de sept millions de personnes ont fui le Venezuela depuis l’effondrement de son économie. Le régime du président Nicolas Maduro est visé par des sanctions de Washington, qui n’a pas reconnu sa réélection en 2018.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/10/05/l-administration-biden-annonce-discretement-qu-elle-va-financer-une-section-
#Joe_Biden #frontières #USA #Etats-Unis #murs #barrières_frontalières #renvois #expulsions #Venezuela

Le financement quadratique des biens publics

▻https://scienceetonnante.substack.com/p/le-financement-quadratique-des-biens

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F967ecd32-d320-4106-9199-a6d78e92bc3d_1456x816.png

Une formule mathématique bizarre pour mieux financer ces choses qui profitent à tous, mais que personne ne veut payer.

[...]

Avec le financement quadratique, si des agents souhaitent financer un certain bien public, ils peuvent faire une contribution de leur choix. L’organisme central collecte ces contributions volontaires et finance alors le bien public avec le montant suivant : on prend la racine carrée de chaque contribution, on les ajoute, et on met le tout au carré.

[...]

En particulier, on voit que si N personnes sont intéressées et mettent toutes la même contribution X, le niveau de financement total sera

F = N²X

et augmente donc avec le carré du nombre de personnes impliquées !

Si on revient à l’exemple du financement d’un parc municipal ou d’un logiciel, 100 personnes qui contribuent chacune 10€ engendreront un abondement 10 fois plus important que 10 personnes qui contribuent chacune 100€.

[...]

Alors il est vrai que ce mécanisme a l’air plutôt sympathique, mais pourquoi cette formule quadratique bizarre ? Eh bien parce que c’est la meilleure possible ! Au moins…en théorie !

[...]

L’article est intéressant (il y a aussi la démonstration mathématique), et une petite conclusion sur les difficultés d’implémentations.

#science_étonnante #mathématiques #financement_quadratique #bien_public

« Les #gestionnaires_d'actifs ont pris possession d’#infrastructures fondamentales de notre vie quotidienne » | Alternatives Economiques
►https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/gestionnaires-dactifs-ont-pris-possession-dinfrastructures-fondament/00108262

https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/sites/default/files/public/styles/for_social_networks/public/field/image/gestion-actifs_3.jpg?itok=RFV8kyHX#.jpg

Géographe à l’université Uppsala en Suède, Brett Christophers a étudié ces poids lourds de la #finance dans son dernier livre Our Lives in Their Portfolios. Why Asset Managers Own the World (Verso, 2023, non traduit). Il a constaté notamment leur intérêt croissant pour l’acquisition de logements, de routes, d’antennes-relais, de parcs éoliens ou de réseaux d’eau, en somme pour toutes ces infrastructures dont dépendent les populations, au point que nous vivons, selon le chercheur, dans « une #société de gestionnaires d’actifs ».

[…]

Cette société, est-elle une utopie ou une #dystopie ?

B. C :
En effet, on peut se demander : qu’est-ce que ça peut faire que les propriétaires de ces #infrastructures soient des #gestionnaires_d’actifs ? Ces dernières affirment que c’est mieux pour tout le monde quand les infrastructures sont entre leurs mains plutôt qu’entre celles d’autres propriétaires, notamment les #pouvoirs_publics : les usagers bénéficieraient de meilleurs services, les clients de meilleurs rendements et l’#Etat pourrait se focaliser sur ses missions. En réalité, aucun de ces arguments ne tient. Le livre consiste justement à les déconstruire.

Concernant les usagers, des reportages ont documenté les dérives des gestionnaires d’actifs. Mais on pourrait se dire que ces histoires sont anecdotiques ou qu’ils ne font pas pire que les autres. Après tout, ce n’est pas parce que ces #infrastructures sont publiques qu’elles sont forcément bien gérées. Je viens du #Royaume-Uni et on ne peut pas dire que quand le gouvernement détient ces infrastructures ce soit un modèle à suivre…

Mais, en réalité, plusieurs études ont montré que ce n’est pas anecdotique. Par exemple, les taux d’expulsion sont plus élevés pour les logements possédés par des gestionnaires d’actifs que pour ceux appartenant à d’autres propriétaires. De même, les maisons de retraite sont plus chères, alors que le nombre d’heures par patient des infirmières y est plus bas, ce qui explique probablement pourquoi la mortalité y est plus élevée.

#rentabilité #profits

Action des étudiant·es de Polytechnique lors du Forum des entreprises
▻https://academia.hypotheses.org/52521

Nous documentons ici une action organisée le 3 octobre 2023 par le collectif “DESOBEX” lors du forum des entreprises de l’École polytechnique et publions les discours prononcés à cette occasion. Communiqué du collectif DESOBEX Mardi 3 octobre 2023, l’École polytechnique … Continuer la lecture →

#Actualités_/_News #Billets #Crise_climatique #École_polytechnique #financement_de_la_recherche #indépendance_universitaire

Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal gets preliminary approval from UK regulator - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23885176/microsofts-activision-blizzard-uk-cma-preliminary-approval

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TckDaeLCCmwuXDsjZAmU41I9lqg=/0x0:3000x2000/1200x628/filters:focal(1500x1000:1501x1001)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24755330/WJoel_STK156_1.jpg

The competition watchdog said the revised deal offered by Microsoft appears to address competition concerns. A final ruling is expected before October 18th.

#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #business #finance #rachat #acquisition #cma #royaume-uni #microsoft #activision_blizzard