We are not heroes, but we can howl to the moon!
Simply because we are the kings, hehehe(:
But other than that, we practice LEONG-ISM too! :D
And we can identify the salient features of everything under the sun!
So we are always one up against our competitors hoho!
THEREFORE, BEGIN THIS boringFASCINATING ECONOMICS JOURNEY WITH US!:D
Posted on: Sunday, July 12, 2009 Posted at: 8:09 AM
Hey people,
I've just found some mugging tips which might be effective for our next ECONS test:
My Exam is One or Two or Three Weeks Away Congratulations on starting to study early! Here's what to do:
Ask your instructor for an exam outline and what to expect on the exam
Overview - review your notes and any assignments you had
Big Ideas - review the course's main ideas
Small Ideas - for each big idea review its sub-topics and supporting details
Practice - use old exams to get a feel for the style of questions you might be asked
Hints:
Be realistic - no one can study for 8 hours a day Make sure you get plenty of food, sleep and relaxation
Try to study in the same place at the same time every day
At the beginning of each study period review the last thing you studied for 10 minutes
Rewrite your notes - it can help you retain information
Read your notes out loud
If you don't complete a particular task, don't worry just carry it over to your next session
Don't simply memorize facts - ask yourself broad open-ended questions about the material that's been covered
Night Before the Exam:
Sleep!
Try to just review - don't try to learn anything new
Picture yourself succeeding - One of the key elements for many world-class performers is visualization
Day of the Exam:
Eat - don't skip the meal before your exam - not eating can result in tiredness and poor concentration.
Arrive just a few minutes before your exam to avoid the usual wide-spread and contagious panic
In the Exam:
Use a cheat sheet - Even if you're not allowed to: Make a cheat sheet of the material you are certain will help; take it to the exam; throw it out before you sit down, then recopy it from memory, somewhere on the exam booklet, as soon as you can.
Read all of the questions (except multiple choice) before beginning, and write notes on the paper for anything important that occurs to you as you read.
If you're having a problem with one question move on and return to the problem question if you have time left at the end.
Posted on: Saturday, July 11, 2009 Posted at: 6:23 AM
MONEY IS NEVER ENOUGH, WHY? this is due to human's ever increasing demand for goods. therefore, no matter how much we have now, we will never be satisfied. so does that means the movie title is a fallacy by itself? but nonetheless, the movie is nice(:
若是你有一百万,what will you do! whatever it is, it would definitely be increasing your purchasing power, hence it can help to boost the economy! and ignoring those rather explicit photos, some of the analogies are quite funny!:D
AND SUPERMARKET! (nice song though haha:D) do not neglect such a commonplace like this, we can find many economics theories in the supermarket! for instance, cigarattes are only sold to consumers aged 18 and above, this is a regulation set by the government. also, some of the food prices are actually controlled by the government's price ceiling to make it affordable to us! SEE, there's actually alot of such stuffs out there!:D so open your eyes and see for yourselves!
Posted on: Posted at: 1:47 AM
oh no! and the oil prices are predicted to rise in 2010 again... inflation is owning~ double kill! inflation is UNSTOPPABLE! somebody stop him!!!
Recovery a way off~
Posted on: Friday, July 10, 2009 Posted at: 1:41 AM
ONLY THE FIRST PART IS RELEVANT TO ECONS! the behind part is rather draggy and long, but still~
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Recovery a way off: Obama
'
'AQUILA (Italy) - A LASTING worldwide economic recovery 'is still a ways off', President Barack Obama declared on Friday, but he also said at the conclusion of a global summit that a disastrous economic collapse apparently has been averted.
Speaking at the end of the Group of Eight summit of major economic powers, Mr Obama said world leaders had taken significant measures to address economic, environmental and global security issues.
He rejected suggestions that the summit fell short of expectations by failing to call for tough new sanctions on Iran for its crackdown on democracy advocates after its disputed presidential election.
'What we wanted is exactly what we got - a statement of unity and strong condemnation,' Mr Obama told a news conference. He said the leaders' declaration was even more significant because it included Russia, 'which doesn't make statements like that lightly'. He said world leaders will reevaluate their posture toward Iran at a meeting of the world's 20 major industrial and developing economies in Pittsburgh in September.
Mr Obama told reporters that leaders 'remain seriously concerned about the appalling events of Iran's presidential election'. He said the world would 'take stock of Iran's progress' and watch its behaviour.
Leaders have made clear that for Iran to take its 'rightful place' in the world, the country must adhere to international standards and behave responsibility, Mr Obama said.
Mr Obama, six months in office, said he supports a streamlining of summits - the G-8, G-20 and Nato - and attending fewer of those meetings. He said the United Nations is in need of reform, but international summits fill a gap left by a UN structure that doesn't leverage its power as effectively as it could.
On a pressing issue back home, Mr Obama acknowledged that his top legislative priority - a health care overhaul - had encountered rocky going in Congress during his overseas trip, with opposition building among both Republicans and economically conservative Democrats.
But he said he still hopes to get the measure passed before Congress begins its August recess. The United States is one of the few western nations without univeral health care, and nearly 50 million Americans do not have health insurance.
'I'm confident we're going to get it done,' he said. Asked if his timetable was 'do or die', Mr Obama responded: 'I never believe anything is do or die. But I want to get it done by the August recess.' -- AP -----------------------------------------
Posted on: Wednesday, July 1, 2009 Posted at: 3:26 PM
haha look at this:D kind of interesting. but quite longD:
'The Sardine Economy', copied from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jun/26/global-economy-sardines (and the review can be found at http://economics.about.com/b/2009/06/29/candidate-for-2009s-worst-economics-article.htm, which says 'Candidate for 2009's Worst Economics Article')
I am not an economist. Even as an undergraduate, I didn't take one class in economics or political science. Instead, I took courses that had more relevance to real life and were of more practical use: The Idealism of Plato, Medieval Proofs of the Existence of God and The Dialectics of Hegel. I wouldn't know how to go long, much less short, or the difference between a call and a put. I'm not interested in derivatives of securitised, collateralised, complex commercial transactions, and I wouldn't know asset-backed commercial paper from toilet paper.
With a mind uncluttered by all this expertise, I can see what led to the current global economic meltdown and how to fix it.
Economists and politicians, by contrast, like the generals who are always fighting the last war, are turning to the Great Depression of 1929-1939 for guidance. But even myopic generals have the sense to look to past winning tactics for guidance. Today's economists and politicians are adopting the throw-money-at-it strategies that failed to pull the world out of economic depression.
The Great Depression came to an end, not because of strategies formulated by economists, but by the outbreak of the second world war (when the generals started placing orders for obsolete weaponry of the type that had been used in the first world war.) Despite all this stimulus, the Dow Jones Industrial Average still didn't return to its 1929 peak until 1954. But for Hitler, world leaders could have perpetuated the Great Depression to this day!
What caused the current global financial meltdown?
The easiest way to explain it is to retell a joke my sister-in-law, a financial adviser, told a group of women 15 years ago.
There was this guy who bought a truckload of sardines at a penny a tin. He resold them for two cents a tin to somebody else, who resold them for three cents a tin to somebody else, who resold them for four cents a tin to a fourth person. Shortly after, the market for sardines collapsed and the fourth guy couldn't sell them, so he figured he may as well eat them. He opened the first tin and the sardines were rotten, the same with the second and third.
"Great," he thought to himself. "I can give them back and not suffer a loss." So he went to the guy who sold him the sardines for four cents a tin and said: "Those sardines you sold me were rotten. Here they are. Give me back my money." The guy who sold the sardines looked at him with pity and said: "Oh, you don't understand. Those weren't eating sardines, those were trading sardines."
That, in a nutshell, is why we are experiencing a global economic meltdown. Our economy was based not on producing goods and services people would pay for, but on producing financial transactions.
The purpose of financial transactions should be to enable the creation of goods and services. When financial transactions become an end in themselves, and goods and services exist only to enable financial transactions (rather than the other way around), as sure as night follows day you are headed towards an economic catastrophe. When a large part of the gross domestic product of a country consists not of doing something useful but producing financial transactions, that country's economy becomes a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Banks should be there to lend money to people or corporations who need it in order to establish or expand viable businesses or acquire their products. If those are the rules of engagement, the banks will be selective in who they lend to and will try to ensure that the people they lend to will ultimately succeed in their business plans. It will charge interest and other fees for giving a loan or establishing a credit facility and make money in that way.
However, when the purpose of a bank lending money is not to itself make interest and charge fees to its customer but, rather, to sell that indebtedness to some other person or institution who will then repackage it and sell it to someone else, who will then again repackage it and resell it, there is no incentive for the original lender to satisfy itself that the business will be viable. In a system of financial transactions for the sake of financial transactions, in which performing a useful function becomes some accidental footnote, we're not talking about an economy, we're talking about a lottery.
To be sure we don't call it a lottery. We call it derivatives, hedge funds, speculative currency trading, the UBS Bloomberg Constant Maturity Commodity Index, short to long bond yields. But basically it's just gambling.
That is the problem. The solution is not to print a trillion dollars to bail out those who created the mess so that they can rise again in order to revisit the rest of us with some derivative of the calamity 10 years down the road. That is nothing but socialism for the rich. The rich have never cared if they destroyed the rest of us, just as long as they made themselves richer in the process. Now that they are inadvertently destroying themselves in the process, why should everyone else come to their rescue?
In Canada, where I live, the federal and one provincial government committed to General Motors the obscene amount of C$10.5bn, or 40% of all the corporate taxes it is estimated the federal government will collect in 2009. Canadian taxpayers pay income taxes by making out cheques to an entity know as The Receiver General. It would save administration costs if we just made them out directly to The Receiver General Motors.
Nor are ill-conceived "shovel ready" construction projects an answer. A subway or light rail system from nowhere to nowhere might put people to work immediately, but will saddle future generations with the much greater cost of operating something that never made sense to begin with.
The solution? The solution is obvious. We need an economy based not on trading sardines but eating sardines; one that is not a chimerical fantasy driven by the buying and selling of notional mathematical constructs, but a real economy based on productive labour; one led not by people who know asset-backed commercial paper, but by people who know their assets from a hole in the ground.