Easy Money Research Articles

New Technologies in Remittance Sending: Opportunities for mobile remittances in Africa

Mobile remittances have a high development potential as they hold the promise of providing quick, easy and cheap money transfers. In Africa, mobile phone usage has increased sharply and mobile banking providers are extending their services, therefore offering opportunities for mobile remittances. The rise of mobile banking in Africa, however, differs substantially across countries, mainly due to a lack of financial infrastructure. Consequently, the opportunities that mobile banking offers for mobile remittances vary geographically. The services provided do not always meet the needs of remittance senders and the African remittance market is generally under-acknowledged as an important market by providers. Restrictive financial regulations play a key role as well. Mobile remittances have the potential to become an important and revolutionary tool for remittance sending in Africa. Effective policies should therefore address the limitations in the regulatory and financial infrastructure for mobile banking to become the foundation for mobile remittances.

Risk Taking, Principal Agent Problems and Breakdown of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): How to Reestablish Safe-Assets and Capital Funding for Social Security?

The breakdown of the financial markets in fall 2007 and the following debt crisis in the EU has produced an enormous mistrust in financial products and the monetary system. The paper describes the background of the crisis induced by functional failures in risk management and the multifold principal agent problems existing in the financial market structures. The innovated nontransparent financial products have mixed up different risk weights and puzzled, or even fooled formerly loyal customers. Contemporaneously abundant liquidity on the international financial market accompanied by easy money policies of the Fed in the US and the ECB in the euro zone have depressed the real interest rate to zero or even negative values. Desperate investors are seeking for safe-assets, but their demand remains unsatisfied. Low real interest rates and the consequently lacking compound interest effect in the same time jeopardize private as well as public insurance schemes being dependent on capital funding: the demographic crisis becomes gloomy. Therefore, the managers of the financial markets have to reestablish CSR and to divide the markets into safe-asset areas for the usual clients and “casino” areas for those who like to play with high risks. Only with transparency and risk adequate financial products can the lost commitment be regained.

Pentingnya Peran Logo dalam Membangun Brand

Brand is an intangible asset of an entity. It’s a summary of experiences of an entity. Well-developed brand is a very high value asset, even higher than all of the physical assets owned by the entity. Because brand is created on people’s mind, brand can build customer’s loyalty. Brand can be built in many ways. One of the most important way is designing visual indentity, such as logo. Logo is a graphical element in the form of ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign that is collectively form a trademark or commercial brand. Logo is the entrance that reflects a brand. Because of that, a logo must reflect the soul of the entity. Considering how important a logo for a brand, a logo should be designed seriously. Ironically, there’re so many fast, and cheap logo design services that create an instant logo. Why is it happened? It’s because the brand owners have a lack of awareness of the important of a brand and a logo. It’s also because there are a lot of designers who have no respect on their profession. These kind of designers offer cheap services for an easy money with a little work. This situation can be bad for both of the brand owner and the designer. The price of logo design will be cheaper and cheaper, and the brand will not be developed well. That’s why it’s important to raise the awareness of the importance of a branding and a well designed logo which represent the soul of the entity.

Understanding Smoking Behaviour among Secondary School Students in Amman, Jordan: A Qualitative Study

Background: Tobacco smoking is the most preventable cause of death in many countries. Globally, it accounts for 4.9 million deaths per annum, 70% of which occur in developing countries. With the growing economic development of countries in the ‘East’ and ‘South’, the international tobacco industry has been shifting its marketing towards these areas. Evidence shows that the majority of the smokers start smoking as early as high school level and the number of young smokers is increasing rapidly, which is a concern. In Jordan, smoking has reached alarming proportions, but as yet limited data is available about young Jordanians’ smoking behaviour. This research is an attempt to bridge the gap. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted on secondary school students of Amman, the capital of Jordan in 2010. The participants of the study were 16-18 year-old students of public and private schools in eastern and western suburbs of Amman, who were recruited using stratified random sampling. Five focus group discussions (FGDs), two for males and three for females with six participants per group were conducted. The FGDs used open-ended questions to focus discussion on four broad areas: smoking behaviour, reasons and place of smoking, accessibility of tobacco products, and quitting smoking. Results: The results show that 40% of students were current smokers, and that 66.7% of these were males. The age at which they started the habit was as early as 11 among males and 16 among females. Family environment was found to be positively associated with participants’ smoking behaviour. Hookah smoking was considered socially acceptable in some families, with the perception that it was less harmful than cigarettes. Females tended to smoke alone within contained/secret places, whereas males were more likely to smoke in a group environment on the street or near where they lived. ‘Stress’ was the main reason for participants to start and/or continue smoking, followed by ‘peer pressure’, ‘belonging’ and ‘being cool’. Other factors such as easy accessibility, availability and money issues also played an important part in their smoking. The health risks and consequences of smoking were underestimated by the students, and they expressed no interest in quitting or taking familial advice against smoking seriously. Fear that their fathers might learn of their habit and the possible consequences thereof, i.e., ‘harsh punishment’, was a prime factor for students not to smoke. Despite legislation, students were able to obtain tobacco products easily. The school environment was an important predictor of students’ smoking as teachers smoked within the school vicinity, even in the lass, and the school curriculum did not tackle the issue of tobacco appropriately. Conclusion: Certain measures taken to control youth smoking have not been effective due to lack of understanding of how young people perceive smoking and hence act. This paper sheds some light on 16-18 years old students’ smoking behaviour, factors that encourage their smoking and areas where attention is needed to prevent youth smoking.

The capitalism of turbulences and the over-limited liability of the too big to fail corporations: A property economics note on the working of moral hazard

In the corporative realm of the organization of firms, endemic to modern capitalist economy, a common allegation is that “limited liability”, State historically allowed for political or fiscal reasons, would (though asymmetrically) incite stockholders and managers to overconfidence in their characteristic profit-driven endeavours. It is asserted that the corporative judicial-legal shield absorbs risks and unleashes moral hazard, eroding the genuine market capitalism (gambling, greed, monopolism, wickedness). In this article, we will re-examine the moral hazard around modern corporation, starting from an “institutionally neutral” analysis of the interpersonal asymmetry of knowledge, and shifting over to the domain of “comparative inter-institutional” judgements, opposing two counterfactual mutually exclusive frameworks: the one respecting naturally defined private property rights and the other one hampering them through State-made regulatory interventions. We will add more precision to an old classical debate upon the “illiberalism of corporations”, arguing that, along with the factors fuelling the modern boom-bust business cycles by means of easy money and credit, guilty as well for instability in the global markets is some sort of “over-limited responsibility” of corporations (for instance, in finance and banking industry), granted with those “too big to fail” privileges, invoking their “systemic importance” in terms of resource allocation or employment dynamic.

The Black Saint and the Best-Selling Writer

The Black Saint and the Best-Selling Writer Joe Miller (bio) When I first saw the “ABSTINENCE = FREEDOM” sticker on Jackie Story’s van, I wrote it down in my notebook, but I didn’t ask her about it. I wrote down “Scooby van,” too, and “light blue” and “rust.” And when I got home that night I opened my laptop and wrote from memory that it cost Jackie $85 to fill the tank, and that she had to fill it often, and that she was having to turn down friends when they asked for rides home from church because she couldn’t afford it anymore, and that that’s not the kind of person she wants to be. [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 35] I wrote this story: Jackie went to San Juan Motors, a used-car lot up the street from her church, to trade the van and sign a contract for a white Ford Escort station wagon. The guy who sold it to her went to her church. He said to her, “I’m going to put a brand-new radio in it just for you because you are so terrific.” On the way home, she picked up one of her sons from church and another from school, and every time anyone opened the car doors the tuner would reset to the left-most position on the dial and the speakers would scream with static. The radio slid right out of the dashboard and onto the floor whenever she accelerated from a full stop. Then, a week later, the wagon broke down in front of the Hobby Lobby and Cracker Barrel on a parkway in the suburban Northland of Kansas City, three and a half miles from her house. Jackie was the main character of a book about a mixed-race, inner-city Pentecostal megachurch that I never wrote. Several times a week I would follow her around, scribbling notes in a narrow notepad, asking her questions, trying to find a story and a shape to her life that would fit me and the rest of the world. She didn’t have time to be without a car. Her two youngest sons, P. J. and Jonathan, were starting public school after years of home schooling. Cameron, her second oldest, was eighteen, jobless and carless, and he still expected her to provide everything he needed and most of what he wanted. She worked as a part-time hospice aide, did some sporadic work as a model and ran an as-yet unprofitable business venture that she described to me as “kind of like a direct-marketing business opportunity, except we sell phone service, and everybody needs that.” Even when her car was working, she felt like she needed an extra hour each day and an extra day each week—a “Smonday,” as her pastor liked to say. Without a car she had to take the bus everywhere, had to hoof it an hour and a half in both directions, on a hilly stretch, just to catch the nearest ride. It had been hot that fall, too, with a couple of days in the high 90s. At times it seemed like more than she could handle. When she felt overwhelmed, she said, she imagined herself a Sherman tank, slow but relentless, and strong—just like the motivational speaker had said a year earlier in a speech at a business conference she had gone to in Anaheim. It was the climax of his pep talk, the highlight of the whole convention, when he marched back and forth across the stage, imitating a tank, and the crowd went wild, knowing they had what it would take to make their prayers come true. I’d been around Jackie long enough to know that her prayers were for easy money and for the time it would buy. Jackie wanted to give every waking minute to her sons, to [End Page 36] her brothers and sisters at her church, to herself and to God. But so long as she was poor, she had to trudge through life, and trudge harder still without a car. I offered to...

Institutional Economics, Risk Management, and Breakdown of Corporate Social Responsibility: Towards a New Architecture of Financial Markets

The breakdown of the financial markets in fall 2007 and the following debt crisis in the EU have produced an enormous mistrust in financial products and the monetary system. The paper describes the background of the crisis induced by functional failures in risk management and the multifold principal agent problems existing in the financial market structures. The innovated nontransparent financial products especially by the so-called shadow banks have mixed up differential risk weights and puzzled or even fooled formerly loyal customers. Contemporaneously abundant liquidity on the international financial market accompanied by easy money policies of the Fed in the US and the ECB in the euro zone have depressed the real interest rate to zero or even negative values. Desperate investors are seeking for safe-assets but their demand remains unsatisfied. Low real interest rates and the consequently lacking compound interest effect in the same time jeopardize private as well as public insurance schemes being dependent on capital funding: the demographic crisis becomes gloomy. Therefore, the managers of the financial markets have to reestablish CSR and to separate the markets into safe-asset areas for the usual clients and “casino” areas for those who like to play with high risks. Only with transparency and risk adequate financial products the lost commitment can be regained.

Greek Drama on a Global Stage

Greek Drama on a Global Stage

Aid

Temporary membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has pernicious effects on the political and economic development of nations, particularly in nondemocracies. The leaders of rich democratic states often trade resources for the salient policy favors that UNSC members can deliver. This provides the leaders of temporary UNSC members with access to “easy money” resources. Such resources have deleterious consequences, particularly in nondemocracies, because they provide leaders with the means to pay off their coalition of supporters without reliance on tax revenues. While foreign aid is an important form of easy money bribe, it is but one of many. Empirical tests show loans are a substitute means for bribing UNSC members.

Proper Implementation of Laws and Policies: A Definitive Way for Providing Justice

The economic influence is the pushing and pulling factor for the commission of the crime of trafficking. The majority of the girls, women and children they have been trafficked in the recent days more in number because of the larger growing sex market. The easy money making, open border and criminalized and organized crime on one hand encourages the pimps and the perpetrators for the commission of the crime and to the other hand the search for the means of livelihood from the victim side contributes to larger extent for the crime. The effective implementation of the laws and plans and policies are the pre-requisites for the economic enhancement of the citizen which ultimately helps to controls the crime rate. The capability enhancement could be the ultimate way for the restoration of the economic standard of the victim to the society and administration of the justice.

Greed, Envy, and the Criminalization of Insider Trading

In October 2011, a U.S. District Court sentenced Raj Rajaratnam to 11 years in federal prison for insider trading. This was the longest sentence for insider trading in U.S. history, but it was significantly less than the 19 to 24-year term requested by the government. Such harsh prison terms (equal in some cases to those meted out for murder or rape) require sound justification in a liberal society. Yet jurists, politicians and scholars have failed to offer a clear articulation of either the economic harm or the moral wrong committed by the insider trader.This article looks to fill this gap by offering a rigorous analysis of insider trading, its criminalization, and its punishment from multiple economic and moral perspectives. This analysis reveals that of the three forms of insider trading currently proscribed under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act, two are economically harmful and morally impermissible, but surprisingly one is not (Non-Promissory Insider Trading, where the insider trades on material non-public information while having made no promise not to trade). Having reached this conclusion, alternative justifications or explanations for criminalizing Non-Promissory Insider Trading are explored.Virtue theory is considered as offering an alternative justification for the criminalization of Non-Promissory Insider Trading. In particular, the vice of greed is considered. It is concluded that while insider trading does often reflect the vice of greed, a moralistic contempt for this character flaw cannot justify the criminalization of otherwise morally innocent conduct because this would violate the firmly held liberal Harm Principle famously articulated J.S. Mill.But even if the criminalization of Non-Promissory Insider Trading cannot be justified, it remains for it to be explained. The socio-psychological theory of cognitive dissonance (as articulated by Dan Kahan and Eric Posner) is entertained as an explanation for how morally innocent conduct such as Non-Promissory Insider Trading might first become criminalized and then later perceived to be immoral by a population. Under the theory, actors generally regarded as moral innocents may initially be targeted for punishment as scapegoats in the wake of a disastrous or harmful social event. Over time, to avoid cognitive dissonance between the belief that conduct is morally permissible and the act of punishing it, society’s shared belief in the moral permissibility of the conduct is simply dropped.This theory of cognitive dissonance fails to explain, however, why Non-Promissory Insider Traders would be targeted as scapegoats to begin with. The moralistic contempt for the vice of greed in insider traders (already discussed) offers one motivation, but the public’s own vice of envy concerning the easy money made by insiders may offer another. Since neither motivation supplies a justification for criminalization in a liberal democracy, and since envy in particular has its own harmful effects on society, the Article concludes on the cautionary note that we should perhaps rethink our laws and reconsider our attitudes concerning Non-Promissory Insider Trading.

De “chichipatos” a narcotraficantes: Dinero y heteroglosia social en Hijos de la nieve (2000) de José Libardo Porras

José Libardo Porras's novel Hijos de la Nieve (2000) is a narco-novel that explores how drug trafficking has transformed the way Colombian society views traditional values such as labor and education by creating a new scale of values in which consumerism and “easy money” direct the lives of a growing number of individuals. The novel employs different narrative strategies that subvert a single view of the phenomenon and point out the different interpellations that drug trafficking generates in different characters.

India Reaps Benefits Of Carbon Program

In recent years, Indian companies have discovered a new way of making money. Chemical and other industrial firms running facilities that generate gases with global-warming potential cut back or eliminated the damaging emissions in exchange for credits they then sold to companies in richer countries. The engineering often wasn’t difficult, and the money was good. Now, the easy money from selling carbon credits is coming to an end. Prices for the credits have dropped precipitously, and trading in credits from the most lucrative projects is set to be shut down. Indian chemical companies haven’t given up on selling carbon credits, but they are resigning themselves to the fact that the credits are no longer a route to riches. The credits are a result of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which divided participating nations into industrialized and developing groups. The pact placed the burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the 38 ...

Jazz Age Barcelona (review)

Reviewed by: Jazz Age Barcelona M. Pilar Asensio-Manrique Davidson, Robert A. Jazz Age Barcelona. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Pp. 214. ISBN 978-1-4426-1043-9. Jazz Age Barcelona introduces vital aspects of the Catalan capital during a period marked by the after effects of the First World War until the beginning of the Spanish Second Republic. Written with a captivating style, the reader becomes the inquisitive visitor of spaces that, though no longer in existence, significantly impacted the social fabric of the city. Davidson demonstrates the importance and aesthetic influence of jazz as an international phenomenon in Barcelona—the most cosmopolitan city of the Iberian Peninsula. In this vivacious cultural hub, diverse aggregates of displaced Europeans affected by the war intermingled with the locals and sought freedom, flamboyance, and solace; speculators also made easy money. Drawing on detailed analyses of newspaper articles, critical essays, novels, and photographs, the author claims that jazz played an important role in defining urban spaces: jazz music was revered by a variety of social classes—especially the bourgeoisie—and jazz cultural critique served as a way to provide intellectual and political commentary specific to the Catalan milieu. Davidson divides his analysis into six compelling chapters, which transport us through the "spatial practice" of the Jazz Age. Central to his work are scenes from nightclubs, cocktail hours in hotels, the revue of the music halls, cabarets, brothels, and drug use, which help to illustrate the interplay between writing and images of a forgotten era. Surprisingly, such revelry occurred during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship under which the modernization of the country, the oppression of regional cultures, and state censorship were implemented. The first chapter, "Barcelona Boom Town," describes the city in its international context, comparable to Paris or Berlin. While the major European centers fought the war, Barcelona took advantage of its neutrality and experienced a rapid growth and expansion in the "Roaring Twenties" period that culminated with the International Exhibition in 1929. The second chapter focuses on a bold, eclectic paper, El Escándalo, which pierces "where others cannot or dare not tread," and also on a novel, Sangre en Atarazanas, by Francesc Madrid, one of El Escándalo's editors. Sangre is a collection of chronicles that depict the unrestrained nightlife in the red-light district. Both publications scandalously report on the most sordid streets and immoral places at a time of great censorship and repression—a time when everyone was at risk for what they did or said. "The Spatial Aesthetics of Jazz Rhythm," the third chapter, connects the frenzied, syncopated beat of the American-born music to the rapid transformation of urban locales and activities as seen by the Catalan art critic and cultural commentator, Sebastià Gasch. New urban spheres of musical and visual artistic expression synchronously enmeshed to become part of the cosmopolitan metropolis. Novel innovation included the following: the advent of the cinema industry; symmetrical choreography from the revues; ad-lib jazz music; the physical transformation of the city—magnificent skyscrapers, telephones, subway, and street advertising; and the pervasiveness [End Page 758] of cubism and surrealism. The fourth chapter, "Vantage Point: Barcelona's Mirador," is devoted to the study of a literary and artistic weekly paper informed both by Barcelona's international projection after the Exhibition of 1929 and its nationalistic impulse with the end of the dictatorship. Interestingly, Mirador is not defined only as a "European" cultural journal, but also as a paper with a political agenda of a Catalan nationhood that would not receive the expected support during the Spanish Second Republic. "An Age in Pictures: Imatges (1930)" constitutes the fifth chapter, and includes many original photographs. Imatges was a graphic journal that delved into a culturally innovative age, when the visual perception of the city had been enhanced by the international exposition, technological advances, and the intensity of daily life. The final chapter, "The Colour of a Cocktail: J. M. de Sagarra's Aperitiu and Vida Privada," studies the culmination of the Age. This chapter analyzes a series of articles around the aperitif hour as the embodiment of modernity, and a recognized Catalan novel by the same author. The city is recreated in...

All That Glitters

“The easy money has been made, but the big money has not been made yet,” says one gold expert.

The Possible Misdiagnosis of a Crisis

Most explanations of the 2007–08 financial crisis—including excessive leverage, subprime mortgages, exotic derivatives, reckless risk taking, and easy money that spawned a housing bubble—are inconsistent with elementary principles of finance. The author explains the inconsistencies and suggests an alternative diagnosis that is fully compatible with rationality.

New Capitols of Capital

New Capitols of Capital

Implications of bank ownership for the credit channel of monetary policy transmission: Evidence from India

Using bank-level data from India, we examine the impact of ownership on the reaction of banks to monetary policy, and also test whether the reaction of different types of banks to monetary policy changes is different in easy and tight policy regimes. Our results suggest that there are considerable differences in the reactions of different types of banks to monetary policy initiatives of the central bank, and that the bank lending channel of monetary policy is likely to be much more effective in a tight money period than in an easy money period. We also find differences in impact of monetary policy changes on less risky short-term and more risky medium-term lending. We discuss the policy implications of the findings.

Easy money?: Health cost savings resulting from the switch from a branded drug to a low-cost generic drug in the same class

Easy money?: Health cost savings resulting from the switch from a branded drug to a low-cost generic drug in the same class

Way to Play: Analyzing Gambling Ads for Their Appeal to Underage Youth

This study is the first in Canada to look at gambling ads from a variety of media sources from different provincial lotteries, with 127 television, radio, print, and public-display ads obtained from the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, Loto-Québec, and the Western Lottery Corporation. Ads were coded for recurring themes, symbols, and discourses using a qualitative software program and analyzed, with their appeal to youth forming the framework for analysis. Major findings include the discussion of nine key themes: easy money, dream, social status, glamour, regular folks, sports, excitement, humour, and youth culture. These themes are discussed in terms of their specific appeal to youth audiences, and their significance is related to existing literature.