I find a lot of the commentary on what we will have to do to achieve energy independence and to adjust to a time of scarcity to be misguided.  Telling Americans they have to “sacrifice” and “conserve” sounds good, but is not sustainable over the long term.

On the contrary, finding ways in which to conserve energy or reduce spending that actually are perceived as beneficial to individuals is far more likely to succeed and be sustainable.  Why does the “sacrifice” or “conserve” message not work? (more…)

I welcome the opportunity to present testimony on transportation finance and funding issues.  Although I have served on this Board, and am chairing the Governor’s Reform Commission on the Reform of the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and am the Executive Chairman of Pitney Bowes, I am not speaking today on behalf of the Reform Commission or Pitney Bowes.

Before I provide my views and financing and funding strategies, I want to make several preliminary observations: (more…)

One television show I enjoy watching is Mad Men, which takes viewers back to the world of the early 1960’s advertising agency.  Through the series, we get reminded how far we have come on reducing gender discrimination and sexual harassment and smoking.

We also realize that life was a great deal slower then and that there was an element of unreality and unsustainability in how people lived then.  There was no hint of global competition or even of the brutal competition that would characterize the American business world even two decades later. (more…)

As I delve more into the study of health and health care, I find myself learning more about the influence of government food policy on what we eat, and what is causing our epidemic of diet-related conditions: diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, strokes, and even cancer.

Michael Pollan wrote an exceptionally informative article in the October 12 New York Times Magazine, entitled “Farmers in Chief.” Among other observations, he makes the following points: (more…)

Some of my readers have asked me to comment on the financial crisis.  Much has been written about it, and beyond the political rhetoric, there are some very intelligent analyses of what happened and why.  To me, the three obvious root causes were:

• The disconnected and fragmented sub-prime mortgage creation and investment system, combined with the incentives of all players in the supply chain of these mortgages to grow rapidly and to take on excessive risk;
• The unintended consequences of an excessive dependence on “mark-to-market” accounting, which caused financial assets to be written down in value to an artificial “market price,” even if the holder had no intention of selling them, and even if the market for that asset really did not exist.  This artificially low asset valuation would not have mattered, except that lending agreements and other financial arrangements depended on maintaining a minimum level of asset values.  The deterioration of asset values due to these artificially low valuations created a death spiral for companies, because the agreements usually required them to shore up declining asset values with additional credit that simply was not available.
• The mind-boggling complexity of these financial instruments and transactions, which made it extremely difficult for anyone to understand when participants were truly in trouble, until it was too late.   This is also why the rating agencies, on which investors depend to evaluate the riskiness of these instruments and transactions, failed so miserably. (more…)