A selection of the best articles I’ve read on the 10th anniversary of September 15, 2008.
Can we survive the next financial crisis?
Why claims that the 2008 bailout was a “success” should make you angry
Crisis firefighters still uninterested in fire prevention
The broken conversation about financial regulation
10 jaar bankencrisis (in Dutch)
Vandaag begint het nieuwe academiejaar aan de Vlaamse universiteiten.
Wie apotheker wil worden, volgt farmaceutische wetenschappen. Advocaten in spe studeren rechten.
Wie droomt van een carrière bij een financiële instelling kan terecht in de richting financie- en verzekeringswezen aan de hogeschool. Aan de universiteit is er echter geen ‘vakopleiding’ voor bankiers.
Hoe kan je dan toch een topbankier worden? Continue reading “Zo word je een topbankier”
Want to be a lawyer? Go to law school.
Want to be a doctor? Go to med school.
Want to be a banker? Go to… bank school?
You don’t have to study economics to get into banking. Many bankers have degrees in philosophy, geography, mathematics, civil engineering, law, or history.
Bank managers don’t care that their employees have studied Old French poetry or Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. To employers, a university degree indicates perseverance and an ability to learn new things.
However, there are some specific things you can learn to get ahead. The following four skills will boost your career in finance. Continue reading “So you want to be a banker”
My book Bankers are people, too was published on this day one year ago.
A big ‘thank you!’ to all readers and supporters!
The ten year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy is fast approaching. Some quick thoughts on what has changed and what we’ve learned over the past decade, with a focus on Europe.
Facebookpost over de rol van banken in de strijd tegen crimineel geld:
Links:
Voor wie meer wil lezen over dit onderwerp:
Vorig schooljaar gaf ik enkele maanden wiskundeles aan leerlingen uit de derde graad ASO1. Aangezien ik zo’n vijftien jaar geleden op dezelfde school gezeten heb, was het boeiend om te zien wat er in die tijd veranderd is. Continue reading “Veranderingen in de wiskundeles”
The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was a government policy in the People’s Republic of China during the 1960s and 1970s. From Wikipedia: “privileged urban youth [were] sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there.”
A lot of economists and economic historians study aggregated data, e.g. gross domestic product, inflation, trade flows, or productivity.
Such a high level approach is valuable. However, the macro perspective by definition misses the details. A macroeconomist will typically explain productivity growth by referring to increases in (human) capital and total factor productivity. But how exactly do concrete changes lead to higher output? Continue reading “Down to the corporate side!”
Wired has a great article (warning: long but worth your time) on last year’s cyberattack. It started as part of the Russian cyberwar against Ukraine. Almost immediately, companies around the world became collateral damage. Andy Greenberg’s Wired story highlights the impact on shipping giant Maersk.
Just to illustrate the vulnerability of IT systems:
Maersk’s 150 or so domain controllers were programmed to sync their data with one another, so that, in theory, any of them could function as a backup for all the others. But that decentralized backup strategy hadn’t accounted for one scenario: where every domain controller is wiped simultaneously. “If we can’t recover our domain controllers,” a Maersk IT staffer remembers thinking, “we can’t recover anything.”
The total damage caused by the attack has been estimated at $10 billion…
Econoom Carsten Brzeski schrijft in zijn column in De Tijd:
Wie in [het vergrijzend Duitsland] constante pensioenen voor de komende twintig jaar belooft, gooit hoge ogen bij het electoraat, maar is bezig met economische zelfmoord.
Economische zelfmoord, dat klinkt serieus! Laten we verder lezen… Continue reading “Zijn de Duitse pensioenen onbetaalbaar?”