Subprime Attention Crisis

Author: Tim Hwang
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
From FSGO x Logic: a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet's precarious foundation In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet—and its free services—will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it. Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

What Tech Calls Thinking

Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Author: Peter J. Wallison
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 159403866X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
The 2008 financial crisis—like the Great Depression—was a world-historical event. What caused it will be debated for years, if not generations. The conventional narrative is that the financial crisis was caused by Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation of the financial system. That narrative produced the Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive financial-system regulation since the New Deal. There is evidence, however, that the Dodd-Frank Act has slowed the recovery from the recession. If insufficient regulation caused the financial crisis, then the Dodd-Frank Act will never be modified or repealed; proponents will argue that doing so will cause another crisis. A competing narrative about what caused the financial crisis has received little attention. This view, which is accepted by almost all Republicans in Congress and most conservatives, contends that the crisis was caused by government housing policies. This book extensively documents this view. For example, it shows that in June 2008, before the crisis, 58 percent of all US mortgages were subprime or other low-quality mortgages. Of these, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When these mortgages defaulted in 2007 and 2008, they drove down housing prices and weakened banks and other mortgage holders, causing the crisis. After this book is published, no one will be able to claim that the financial crisis was caused by insufficient regulation, or defend Dodd-Frank, without coming to terms with the data this book contains.

The Subprime Solution

Author: Robert J. Shiller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156328
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A best-selling economist reveals the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis and puts forward bold measures to resolve it by restructuring the institutional foundations of the financial system in a thoughtful study by the author of Irrational Exuberance. First serial, The Atlantic.

The Subprime Virus

Author: Kathleen C. Engel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199398283
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
In this lively new book, Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy tell the full story behind the subprime crisis. The authors, experts in the law and economics of financial regulation and consumer lending, offer a sharply reasoned, but accessible account of the actions that produced the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Voices from the Valley

Author: Ben Tarnoff
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721262
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
From FSGO x Logic: anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, providing a bird's-eye view of the industry In Voices from the Valley, the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark

Author: Dean Starkman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231536283
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation). In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

Out of Crisis

Author: David A. Westbrook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317254910
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
Former Federal Reserve chair Greenspan recently said that the risk management paradigm is broken; thus our understanding of financial regulation no longer makes sense. More generally, the current financial crisis obliges us to rethink the relationships among "financial markets" and "governments." In Out of Crisis financial analyst David Westbrook illuminates the intellectual, business, and policy errors that have led us into the present morass. Through a vivid legal and political analysis he shows how the ideologies of the right and left have distorted financial thinking and policy. Learning from these errors, the book sketches the emergence of a new understanding of risk management and bureaucratic regulation. Out of Crisis begins the tasks of rethinking the structures that constitute financial markets and exploring how such structures may be strengthened. Taking responsibility for the markets we build to do so much of our society's work, we may yet become mature capitalists.

The End of Finance

Author: Massimo Amato
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745683657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
This new book by two distinguished Italian economists is a highly original contribution to our understanding of the origins and aftermath of the financial crisis. The authors show that the recent financial crisis cannot be understood simply as a malfunctioning in the subprime mortgage market: rather, it is rooted in a much more fundamental transformation, taking place over an extended time period, in the very nature of finance. The ‘end’ or purpose of finance is to be found in the social institutions by which the making and acceptance of promises of payment are made possible - that is, the creation and cancellation of debt contracts within a specified time frame. Amato and Fantacci argue that developments in the modern financial system by which debts are securitized has endangered this fundamental credit/debt structure. The illusion has been created that debts are universally liquid in the sense that they need not be redeemed but can be continually sold on in increasingly extensive global markets. What appears to have reduced the riskiness of default for individual agents has in fact increased the fragility of the system as a whole. The authors trace the origins of this profound transformation backwards in time, not just to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s but to the birth of capitalist finance in the mercantile networks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This long historical perspective and deep analysis of the nature of finance enables the authors to tackle the challenges we face today in a fresh way - not simply by tinkering with existing mechanisms, but rather by asking the more profound question of how institutions might be devised in which finance could fulfil its essential functions.

Boom and Bust

Author: William Quinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108369359
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts and why is this happening more and more frequently? In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles, visiting, among other places, Paris and London in 1720, Latin America in the 1820s, Melbourne in the 1880s, New York in the 1920s, Tokyo in the 1980s, Silicon Valley in the 1990s and Shanghai in the 2000s. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen, and why some have catastrophic economic, social and political consequences whilst others have actually benefited society. They reveal that bubbles start when investors and speculators react to new technology or political initiatives, showing that our ability to predict future bubbles will ultimately come down to being able to predict these sparks.