Posts Tagged ‘banking’

Bringing utilities into the XXI century

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

At a time when consumers are asked to tighten their belt across the European Union, it is interesting to review how the XXI technology benefits are spread between industries and consumers.

I lived in Italy, UK, Belgium, and therefore I will limit my case studies to these three countries.

Anyway, thanks to the open internal market, most of the companies are actually multinational companies, whose practices extend beyond individual EU Member States.

But I will stretch my review across three decades, starting from when, in mid-1990s I finally surrendered and got a mobile phone (I waited for the GSM service), and then reviewing also other utilities.

Taxing the digital economy:blueprint for a virtual nation?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

This short article (1000 words) tries to see some potential side-effects of the digital economy

Certainly, I am neither the first nor the last.

But it is a little bit disheartening to see how the discussions proceed as if reality had been frozen when the discussions began.

Probably SecondLife was the first case where a real-world entity had to sustain a virtual world currency to avoid a crisis of confidence.

And who should regulate these neo-financial virtual entities?

A short article.

As usual, with more questions than answers.

Beyond microfinancing

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Beyond Microfinancing

If you pick up any newspaper or magazine covering economic issues, every month you will find articles about microfinancing.

The idea of microfinancing expand globalization benefits available to developing countries, by changing the way funding is accessible.

Figures do not lie. And the picture that is projected, despite the 2006 Nobel peace prize to the Grameen Bank founder, is closer to the old way of managing financial relationships with developing countries, creating what was described already in 1990 in a Museum in Germany as the “spiral of debt”.

The idea? Merging microfinancing and charity to deliver self-sustaining development.

(2000 words)

Cooperative systemic risk management

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The title sounds a mouthful?

Well, you can thank WordPress: the original title was “Non-regulatory approach toward systemic risk management and entropy reduction” :D

Moving down to Earth- what is the purpose of this posting?

Sharing, as usual, experience. But this time, something more: a business model and plan.