The Weekly Spot Rate

I was scanning through Business Insider earlier and came across this post. There are some great examples of creating brand awareness, like Baltica Dry.

http://www.businessinsider.com/24-clever-advertisements-guerilla-marketing

Also the YouTube video below is from Shark Tank, a venture capital reality TV show. This product is just plain funny. Enjoy!

Check them out below and have a great week.

The Weekly Spot Rate

This week's spot rate is all about inflation. Friday I was listening to Bloomberg Radio's On The Economy where they interviewed Jagdish Bhagwati a professor at Columbia University. I greatly enjoyed Professor Bhagwati's description of the current food inflation problem. He says that with the lack in global food production and increased food inflation, in order to bring down food prices we need to increase production and "to provide new agricultural productivity. That means we've got to bite the bullet with all these worries about Frankenstein foods, because Frankenstein is only potential whereas the Grim Reaper is here and now." What Professor Bhagwati means is that we need to embrace the use of genetically modified foods (Frankenstein) to feed the world today, and not let the Grim Reaper (the dearth of food and rising prices) starve out our population; better save people with something that may or may not cause harm than knowingly let people die. I thought this way of viewing the problem was amusing and insightful, hope you do to. 

The Billion Prices Project is a project led by two MIT professors who are trying to capture daily inflation fluctuations. They are using a basket of millions of online products to determine what the inflation rate is in a variety of countries. It is worth noting that the United State's official inflation rate is significantly below that of the Billion Prices Project's. The link is posted below.

Have a great week. 

http://bpp.mit.edu/

The Weekly Spot Rate

Alan Blinder the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve wrote a great article in the WSJ about the Carbon Tax idea. This struck me as a great way to implement a new tax, regardless of what it is. Blinder's plan is to approve the tax legislation and tier the tax up over time, but the part I really like is to start at a 0% tax rate. This is a great way, as Blinder point out, to allow business to see where rates will go in the long term and give them time to adjust. Below is a link to the article. 

Bloomberg Radio had an interview with Peter Schaffrik, head of Euro fixed income strategy for RBC capital markets in London, on February 7th, 2011. In this interview Schaffrik spoke about 2 kinds of inflation: internal and external. He defined internal inflation as economic overheating and external inflation as rising commodity prices. As can be seen, one form is controllable by the state and the other is not. I though that this was a great insight, as all too often we find people focusing on inflation, as they should, but they do not separate inflation into the controllable and non-controllable forms. Something to keep in mind when we think about inflation and deflation for that matter. 

The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure by Alan Blinder

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703893104576108610681576914.html

The Weekly Spot Rate

In the "The Crisis of Credit Visualized" Mr. Jarvis offers a wonderful simplified explanation of how the housing bubble was built up, peaked and fell. 

The original source of the video is http://crisisofcredit.com/

The Weekly Spot Rate

     This is the inauguration of The Weekly Spot Rate, a weekly article, video, cartoon or other form of media that I have found particularly interesting. The media may be from the current week or something from the past of interest. 

     To kick us off I have selected a video of various newscasters trying to pronounce the name of the Icelandic Volcano that erupted this past Spring. Not that I could do any better. Enjoy!