Building an animated visualisation of financial transactions in the Eurozone — Motivation The motivation for drawing an animated map of the Eurozone financial system stems from trying to understand what happened during QE. The policy is aimed at stimulating investment and consumption in the Eurozone to bring inflation back to 2%. …

Liberalism has recently been attacked by Trumpists and Brexiteers. And, surprising nearly everyone, those attacks were successful despite proposing policies which can hardly be called beneficial for anyone except the Koch brothers & friends. While Francis Fukuyama’s phrase the end of history was never to be taken literally, the 1990s…

Private Equity funds use this ingenious trick where you buy a company, massively increase the financial resources deployed and back comes some pretty significant revenue growth. While that is nothing new, I was a bit surprised to be reminded of this when looking at the balance sheet of the US…

And why international development efforts are not the determining variable — Ask for the passport. It better be Chinese. Eight in ten Chinese living in extreme poverty in 1990 no longer did so in 2010*. In Sub-Saharan Africa, not only were you probably still poor in 2010, but your children might be so as well (this excludes South Africa). The number…

When it comes to Africa, the US and China share more than a healthy dose of pragmatism — In 2009, the clash of giants finally seemed to happen. No lesser battleground than the Democratic Republic of Congo, largest country in Sub Saharan Africa and home to rebels, guns and vast amounts of natural resources was chosen. On the one side the Chinese, armed with a US$ 9bn infrastructure…

…you are very unlucky indeed. Getting to McDonald’s involves driving about 4,148 kilometres to Morocco, crossing a few rivers on makeshift rafts, navigating closed borders, a desert and, if unlucky, landmines. While the remainder of the world is covered in golden arches, only four African countries have outlets: Morocco, Egypt…

They both cost a little more than 10% of the average monthly income in their respective countries. But admittedly the comparison is a little bit of a cheat: The Liberian chicken comes from the forest in the South were they are particularly cheap at 5 dollar for a large one…

Its the humans behind artificial intelligence, not the machines we should focus on now Elon Musk recently called AI our “biggest existential threat”. Almost every week there are more news about robots winning one game or the other. Finally, it seems they have even mastered Go, which was seen as one of the last remits of human superiority (to the great displeasure of my…