Bank capital – what is it and how is it regulated?

Zum Auftakt des alljährlichen Wirtschaftstreffen in Davos im Januar 2020 trägt dieser 20-minütige Beitrag dazu bei, die Entwicklung vom Stakeholder-Kapitalismus hin zum Shareholder-Kapitalismus besser nachvollziehen zu können. Der Blick in die Geschichte, unterstützt mit Beispielen und Interviews, hilft dabei, die aktuelle prekäre wirtschaftliche Lage von Unternehmen wie die der Deutschen Bank und von General Electric zu verstehen. Am Ende des Beitrages wird die amerikanische Initiative (die B-Corporations), als Beispiel für eine sozialere und ökologischere Wirtschaftsweise mit mehr Verantwortung zum Allgemeinwohl vorgestellt.

What is money and how does it work? The short film reveals common misunderstandings of where money comes from, explains how money is created by banks and presents consequences of money as credit. The video is part of the campaign positive money, promoting the democratic control over money creation.

The new online platform ‚DIY Macroeconomic Model Simulation‘ provides an open-source code repository and online script for macroeconomic model simulation. It follows a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach, empowering users to numerically simulate key macroeconomic models on their own using the programming language R.

The last 15 years have seen extensive research into ecosystem service valuation (ESV), spurred by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 (Baveye, Baveye & Gowdy, 2016). Ecosystem services are defined as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, p.V). For example, ecosystems provide the service of sequestering carbon which helps regulate the climate. Valuation means giving ecosystems or their services a monetary price, for example researchers have estimated that the carbon sequestration services of the Mediterranean Sea is between 100 and 1500 million euros per year. The idea of ESV was a response to the overuse of natural resources and degradation of ecosystems, allegedly due to their undervaluation and exclusion from the monetary economy. ESV can be used (1) for policy decision-making, for example allocating funding to a reforestation project (2) for setting payments to people who increase ecosystem services, for example a farmer increasing the organic carbon content of their soil, and (3) for determining fees for people who degrade ecosystem services, for example a company that causes deforestation.