In his chapter in Fleeing Vesuvius Phil Stevens describes challenges to resilience in New Zealand and provides suggestions to help the country sustain its rural sector and preserve its democracy. There are lessons here for elsewhere too.

In a follow-up to her earlier post on preparing your household for a currency crisis, Theresa Carter suggests a range of practical preparations that communities can make in order to build resilience.

There are really three dimensions to the current crisis: the banking and finance dimension of elite fraud; a crisis of uneven development accentuated by competition that has reached outer limits; and a limits to growth crisis. Action to clear up any one of these problems will not succeed without our working on the others as well.

In his chapter from the New Zealand edition of Fleeing Vesuvius, Laurence Boomert gives an account of a lifetime built on accepting and rejecting Vesuvius and the progressive actions taken to beat the odds. “The foreground will seem like the end of the world but I see, through the smoke and ruins of that which must fall, a wiser, more humble, more determined humanity with 10,000 years of social and technological success stories to draw on, setting a new course for the future.”

The news overnight from Brussels is that the 17 euro countries, led in this particular respect by France, have refused to allow the UK to exclude itself from their emerging plans to regulate financial transactions.

by Deirdre de Burca. Andrew Sheng, who heads up a new global think tank called the Fung Global Institute, made an excellent presentation to the Institute of European Affairs yesterday. He was invited to speak about an Asian perspective on fixing the global crisis by Patrick Honohan, the Governor of the Irish Central Bank. You can download a PDF version of the slides that accompanied Sheng’s presentation from here.

by Theresa Carter. What happens if the money in your pockets is worthless overnight? The future of the Euro is not looking too bright, nor is our relationship with it. Whether it crashes, we leave it or we are asked to leave – it is something worth preparing for.

For Adam Smith, “Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.” Banks and financial traders have other ideas. They are now running a parallel economy in which money makes money out of money. The volume of this trade is ten times the volume of trade in goods and services, and traders extract money that other mortals can’t possibly aspire to. No wonder it causes havoc.

This week we’re beginning to upload excerpts from the 100-page appendix to Fleeing Vesuvius which was published in New Zealand over the summer. It should be of interest to anyone who is preparing for the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy. In his preface, Jonathan Boston of the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington provides an overview of the many environmental challenges we face and suggests that the book, which he considers to be “unusual, critically important and refreshingly provocative”, will provide useful tools to help us meet them.

By Warren Mosler and Philip Pilkington.  The Eurozone has certainly seen better days. The mess is only getting messier. Leaked documents from within the Troika show the austerity programs to be an abject failure and yet European officials continue to consider them the only game in town. So, we contend that the periphery governments should have a credible exit strategy on hand and it is to this that we now turn.

The financial world has out-stripped the real world. Our current economic crisis is too good an opportunity to miss since it allows radical action to be taken.

Feasta member Brian Davey has produced several posters for use at Occupy camps which can be downloaded for free here. They make use of creative graphics in order to explore the nature of the current financial crisis, the energy and banking crises, financial predation, and the connection between the Occupy movements and climate change.

The Irish economy needs stimulus and the most effective way to do this is to implement an immediate jobs program backed by newly issued, low-yield tax-backed Jobs Bonds. This will provide the financing necessary for such a program without adding to Ireland’s already substantial interest burden. [...]