COP 21 has been over for about 6 months. Most observers were pretty optimistic back then, and it seemed clear to everyone that action was urgently required to tackle climate change. Some clarity is however still needed now, in order to better understand why economic agents didn’t already take action long ago, without waiting for governments to step up, and thus determine how we can effectively lead our society to improve toward a greener path of development.
The ECB published a paper earlier this week pointing at potential insider trading in the US. Alexandre Kurov, Alessio Sancetta, Georg Strasser and Marketa Halova Wolfe, the co-author of Price drift before U.S. macroeconomic news: private information about public announcement?, believe to have found some evidences of insider trading.
Finance and economics suffer a severe disease. Hubris reigns in these domains, and our minds play against the logic and rationality that are required in these fields. Let's go through a few biases which cripple finance and economics, but also many other disciplines.
John Kenneth Galbraith died in 2006 after a very full life that lasted 97 years. But the theories of this brilliant economist are far from going extinct. His vision of the “Modern Firm” and of the so-called “technostructure”, which he described in his book published in 1967 The New Industrial State, has never been more accurate to describe present times. In particular, as we are going to highlight, Merger and Acquisitions (M&As) support very strongly Galbraith’s thesis.