In prior columns, here and here I have written about the transformative power of the cell phone.  Currently there are more than 2.1 billion cell phone accounts in the world and more than 220 million in the US.  More people have cell phones than have computers or use the Internet.  Globally, there are some 15 to 20 million news cell phone accounts opened up every month.

The cell phone has obviously changed the way we communicate.  We are all available all the time no matter where we are.  Text messaging is a new form of communication that did not exist before the cell phone.  We have all experienced altered communication and behavior patterns as a result of this great technology.  What is now becoming clear is that the cell phone is dramatically changing how we view and use the land line phone.
Mediamark Research just released a study that reported that 14% of U.S. adults now live in households with one or more cell phones but no landline phone.  That is an impressive statistic.  What makes it a milestone is that it was also reported that 12.3% of adults live in a household with a landline phone, but no cell phone.  For the first time in the U.S., there are now more cell phone only households than landline only households.  That is significant as the cell phone has moved from being something that was used outside the house to being the only phone.  Conversely, land …

In this sixth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Howard Bloom.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists – Interviews’.

For you readers who have enjoyed the past interviews with scientists I would like to quote some wonderful men from England who coined the phrase “Now for something completely different.”   Howard Bloom is a renaissance man, or as some folks from his past might say ‘a different breed of cat’. Howard had been called “the Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st Century” by Britain’s Channel4 TV and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine.  

A recent visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a former Core Faculty Member at The Graduate Institute in two fields—Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership–Bloom is the author of three books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (”mesmerizing”—The Washington Post) (http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Principle-Scientific-Expedition-History/dp/0871136643/ref=sr_1_1/002-7346841-0434402?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187141120&sr=1-1), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century (”reassuring and sobering”—The New Yorker) …

It feels like we are moving through a watershed moment in both the U.S. and global financial markets. When the mortgage securities market collapses as though it was the tulip bulb market centuries ago in Holland it is truly time to take pause and look at what has been allowed to occur.  Mortgages, secured by real estate, have long been considered as a secure type of investment, unlike say junk bonds.  Now the marketplace is saying that they cannot value them so no one is either buying them or allowing them to be used as loan collateral.  Wow!

In the new global electronic trading marketplace, mentioned in the last post, there has been a vast amount of new investment vehicles created in the past 20 years.  These new investment products, ever more sophisticated and varied, gave investors new ways to hedge portfolios, take on or alleviate risk and accelerated the electronic flow of capital around the world.  They also were created, in part, by investment banks to create new sources of fee revenue.  This was the beginning of the problem as it led to investment instruments to become disconnected from the underlying asset.  Once a mortgage was granted to a home buyer, that same mortgage was pooled into a mortgage backed security and sold to a buyer, often in a matter of weeks or months.  There was no longer any connection between the home owner who was paying down the mortgage and the holder of the mortgage.  No relationship existed.  …

There are two future thinking filters through which I view the recent upheavals in the financial markets.  The first is that we are moving to a new and developing global society and that this can first be seen economically.  The second is that debt is something that must be looked with new perspective.  Today we look at the first filter.

Humanity has conclusively moved into the global stage of its evolution. There is no turning back.  There are more than six billion of us and that fact alone is enough to reorganize human endeavor to a global orientation. Human history shows us that economics usually leads the way with politics and culture following close behind.  Columbus ‘discovered’ America because he was looking for a trade route to India (at least now we refer to our indigenous people as Native Americans, no longer Indians) for the economic gain of Europe.  American politics and culture ultimately followed this initial economically driven endeavor.

BNP Paribas, the largest publicly traded bank in France suspended investors’ ability to withdraw money from funds that had invested in American mortgage securities.  When one of the largest financial institutions in Europe shuts down trading because of rising foreclosures in California it is clear that the financial marketplace is global.   Of course we have known this for years, particularly since the advent of electronic fund transfers.  Money flows electronically around the world without any regard to borders or time zones.  Now that money has lost much of its’ physical characteristics, it …