Between the two rounds of the French Presidential election (last Sunday and next Sunday), Sami J. Karam speaks to Axel Gyldén, veteran reporter at France’s leading weekly L’Express. Topics include analysis of the first round results, President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity, Marine Le Pen’s probability of winning and what such a victory would mean for France and for Europe.
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What makes an effective politician? Politicians come from all walks of life but the vast majority of them do not have any formal training in political science or in government or in the tasks and tools of being a politician. Renova, an innovative non-partisan non-profit organization in Brazil, seeks to change that and to also improve governance, by training aspiring political candidates. In this podcast, Sami J. Karam speaks to founder and chairman Eduardo Mufarej about Renova’s mission, its training curriculum and its prospects.
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“For some people, risk is scary and dangerous, and means peril and loss. For others, it means risk assets and they have to pile on because they just see the upside. But risk is actually value-neutral. It is important to be aware of the bias that you bring to things. Do you see both sides and do you weigh them? Or are you likely to overweigh the downside or overweigh the upside?” ________ Michele Wucker
We all have an ambivalent attitude towards risk. In 1850, a young Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root “the shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea. I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!”
In her new book You Are What You Risk, author and strategist Michele Wucker codifies this ambivalence to risk. In this podcast with Sami, Michele explains the concepts of “risk fingerprint” and “personal risk portfolio”, among others.
Topics include:
0:00 Introduction of Michele Wucker
2:13 Thesis of ‘You Are What You Risk’
5:20 Attitude towards risk: innate vs. acquired through experience
10:40 Taking a risk vs. following a path; Risk and entrepreneurship
14:10 About each person’s risk fingerprint
19:45 Taking risk as the only woman in the room
24:40 “Risk is value-neutral”
33:00 Matching risk fingerprints in interactions; Measuring risk
“Historically, Lebanon prospered as a result of inflows of people and funds – people who came to take refuge in Lebanon and also funds. If we look at the post World War 2 period when modern Lebanon became independent and also at previous periods that Lebanon went through – and I mean over the past 100 or 200 years – one thing that was common to all these eras is its liberal economic system that was adopted by all who lived on this land. The constant was the liberal economic system.”____ Joe Issa El Khoury
Sami J. Karam speaks with Joe Issa El Khoury, a Beirut-based financier, about the tragic events that have unfolded in Lebanon since 2019. A sharp fall in the currency, a banking freeze, a political crisis, hyperinflation, and widespread street protests made 2019 a difficult year. But these events were then compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic and the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020.
Issa El Khoury explains the sequence of events that led to the present, and offers a possible way forward.
Topics include:
0:00 Introduction of Joe Issa El Khoury
2:25 What is it like right now on the ground in Beirut?
8:33 Why did Lebanon have a golden period in 1945-75; why was it later so prone to crisis?
17:40 The Rafik Hariri era and the return of growth 1990-2005
20:00 What explains the weakness of the Lebanese state: geography and demographics
26:30 Lebanon’s diversity as a source of wealth; Example of Lebanese cuisine
30:40 Crossing the line from a laissez-faire economy to a crony economy
35:05 The real estate boom of 2007-11
36:55 The impact of the Syrian civil war
39:10 Crowding out the private sector
44:10 The proximate factors that led to the meltdown
46:15 The current condition of the banking sector; Role of the Central Bank
51:00 Will depositors suffer a haircut? The Lazard and other plans
54:45 Talk of privatization of state assets
59:45 Political patronage in the public sector
1:01:50 “All roads lead to Washington DC and the acronym IMF”
1:05:20 Political reform and the role of the diaspora
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“The paradox of the Gray Rhinos is that the further they are down the road, the less likely you are to do something about them. But that is the time when it will cost the least and you are most likely to be successful.” ____ Michele Wucker
Sami J. Karam speaks to best-selling author Michele Wucker about her 2016 book The Gray Rhino and how its method and lessons apply to the coronavirus pandemic. Gray Rhino threats are highly probable, highly impactful but often neglected until it is too late or until the cost of dealing with them becomes very high.
Topics include:
0:00 Introduction of Michele Wucker
1:05 When will we be able to travel to Asia or Europe again?
3:10 Explaining the concept and examples of Gray Rhino events
9:00 Various reactions to the spread of the pandemic
15:50 Was the virus predictable?
19:20 Why should we have been readier for the virus when it is so rare?
22:00 Why we ignore what is “over there”. Did it start “over there” or over here?
25:35 How could we have prepared for the pandemic?
31:00 The current catch-22: deaths by virus vs. deaths of despair
44:10 Stages of a Gray Rhino event applied to the pandemic
50:10 What other Gray Rhino events do you worry about? A triad of Gray Rhinos
55:45 How alarmists help avert deep crises
59:40 Conclusion
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“You go to some of these places [Midwestern cities], the question they ask when they meet you is ‘where did you go to high school’?… The fact that where you went to high school is a social marker places you in a community. You go to Washington DC and nobody cares where you went to high school… In New York, they ask ‘where are you from?’ because it is assumed that you are not from here. Some of these places in the Midwest… need more outsiders to come in because outsiders are the natural constituency of the new.” _____Aaron Renn
Aaron Renn, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, speaks to Sami J. Karam about US cities. What makes the large coastal cities so successful? What are the prospects for mid-sized and smaller cities in the Rust Belt? What is the current state of play for mass transit? What role does immigration play in the development of cities?
Among the cities discussed, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Charlotte, Minneapolis-St Paul, Nashville, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Madison, Iowa City, Rochester (MN), Singapore, Paris.
Topics include:
0:00 Introduction of Aaron Renn
1:15 What makes the large coastal cities so successful at creating wealth?
8:30 Can a large city become dominant in a new sector? (e.g., New York in tech)
13:00 How would you categorize non-coastal cities in terms of their prospects?
16:30 Why some cities are struggling while others are restructuring successfully
20:55 Will some smaller cities turn into ghost towns within twenty years?
26:35 What is going on with Detroit’s recovery?
30:40 The role of new immigrants in the development of a city
36:50 Immigration policy in Canada and Australia compared to the US and UK
43:50 What is the future for mass transit?
48:00 The lack of city to city benchmarking in infrastructure costing and execution
53:40 Is there anything going on in high-speed rail, other than in California?
59:40 The decline of trust in institutions and the problem of cronyism.
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Sami J. Karam speaks to Nadim Curi, CEO of the anti-crime app CityCop.
Powered by its successful rollout in Latin America started in 2014 and further boosted by funding from startup accelerator techstars, CityCop has staked a claim to turn its “social platform for community watch” into the global leader in crime reporting and public safety.
Curi explains:
What Waze has done for traffic globally, we have done the same for public safety.
What we are doing at CityCop is to make all of this information [about crime incidents] that today is private or is lost, to make it public. The criminals have always taken advantage of this lack of information. They have always the same modus operandi, in the same areas, at the same hours, against the same unaware people. CityCop is making all of this information public for the people to be much better informed of what is happening.
Starting in Austin, CityCop plans to expand to San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other cities. Curi’s ultimate ambition is to turn CityCop into a global “Waze against crime”.
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(Ravi discussed this post at the BreakingBank$ podcast. His segment starts at 20:10.)
Modi’s demonetization was the other November 8th global earthquake.
A thorough historical record will show that not one but two man-made events shook the world on 8 November 2016. One was of course the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency against the predictions of nearly all polls and pundits. The other was the Indian government’s shock and awe decision to withdraw from circulation all ₹500 ($7.3) and ₹1,000 ($14.6) rupee bank notes, equivalent to 85% of the country’s paper money. Although the first event dominated the headlines, the second will have a greater impact on over a billion people in India and elsewhere.
500 rupee banknote, an endangered species since 8 November 2016.
This process known as demonetization is the latest in a series of initiatives by the Modi government to modernize Indian society and to increase financial inclusion and digitalization. Along the same lines in the past two years, other government efforts have included the ambitious and unprecedented Aadhaar national identification system started in 2012, the Aadhaar-based remittance system offered by the National Payments Corporation of India in 2013, and the Jan Dhan Yojana drive to bring financial services to lower-income segments of society. Some private players such as Paytm, Citrus Pay, Mobikwik and Freecharge have also moved in lockstep with public initiatives. Read more →
“The government no longer has the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives across a wide variety of major industries.”______ Jesse Eisinger
Jesse Eisinger is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He has studied, investigated and written extensively on the 2008 financial crisis, its causes and consequences. In 2011, he and a colleague won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In addition, he has won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary.
Eisinger is the author of a forthcoming book on white collar prosecutions, to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. He speaks to populyst’s Sami J. Karam about the reasons why there have been few such prosecutions in recent years. Among these reasons, Eisinger identifies ‘elite affinity’, a revolving door between government and business, and a resource shift that took place at the FBI after 9/11. The conversation closes with Eisinger’s discussion of current anti-trust issues and some comments on the 2016 US presidential race.
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Aaron M. Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, invited founder Sami J. Karam to discuss populyst and the populyst index. Topics include the economies of America and China, Europe’s demographic stagnation and Africa’s population explosion.
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