A Free Beginner's Guide to the Sharing Economy For over two years, Shareable has explored the new sharing economy in its many forms: how individuals, families, communities, entrepreneurs, businesses, designers, coders, and countless more are building resilience through collaboration and sharing. In that time, we've amassed a considerable library of how-to share guides, and researched and documented how these shifts are transforming the economy, technology, and civil society. Still, those new to the sharing lifestyle may wonder where to start. It's one of the first things we learn as kids: How to share.But this practice usually fades as we become adults. The guide, available as a free PDF download, offers four Action Ideas to help communities tap into their shared assets and resources. Organize a Community SwapFocusing on clothing swaps Lend LocallyFocusing on tool libraries Share Time, Labor, and SkillsFocusing on time banks Set up a Co-opFocusing on solar co-ops Download the New Dream Community Action Kit Guide to Sharing (pdf)
Peer Lending Grows as Small Biz Option NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- When John Good, owner of the Bubbles Galore Car Wash in Davison, Mich., went to his local bank last year to get a $16,000 loan to expand into the self-serve dog washing business, he was denied. First Place Bank, a subsidiary of First Place Financial in Warren, Ohio, already held the note for Good's original $500,000 Small Business Administration start-up loan, but the bank required massive documentation and fees -- requirements Good felt were too costly, time consuming and frankly, annoying, given the amount. "The amount of money we were requesting didn't merit the amount of work and back-end costs," Good says. That's when Good heard about peer-to-peer lending. Peer lending is not necessarily new, but there are a growing number of business borrowers turning to them -- in part because, as interest rates remain near record lows, investors are looking for options that will make decent returns.
Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters. The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us. After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. It was a tempting conclusion. Wall Street’s continued irrational exuberance, its lavishing of bonuses on its elite, and its pushback against even the most modest of regulations all suggest that the old Ptolemaic system – with Wall Street and the Washington Consensus still at the center of the universe – had not yet given way to a Copernican revolution that displaces these powerful institutions from their privileged position. Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe.
Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M From Index, Union Square Ventures Some great news for small business owners, and perhaps a sign of more crowdsourced funding coming to the U.S.: the UK-based Funding Circle — a kind of Kickstarter for lending to smaller enterprises — has just announced that it has raised a $16 million round to further build up its business of enabling non-bank lending to small enterprises. The investment included participation from existing investor Index Ventures as well as new investor Union Square Ventures — a sign of how Funding Circle may have its sights set on taking advantage of new crowdfunding laws and expanding to the U.S. This Series B round takes the total raised by Funding Circle to $21 million. Funding Circle has made some impressive strides since launching in the UK 18 months ago: it’s facilitated lending to 670 small businesses in the UK, with funds totaling £28 million ($45 million), representing annual growth of over 400 percent.
German voters must break the Merkel mindset that got them into this | Robin Wells Sometimes, just sometimes, economics and politics are like physics – one can recognize immutable forces. One of those times is now, as Greece is inexorably pushed out of the euro. It took no particular talent to have seen this coming, just the recognition that it has always been a fantasy to believe that the Greeks would democratically choose to destroy their economy for the better part of a decade in order to pay foreign creditors. The fact is that Greece never was a suitable member of the eurozone. That the Greek economy was extremely inefficient, that corruption was rife, that the government budgets were perpetually out of control, and that the official statistics were not to be believed were widely known. But, as in many marriages, Greece's entry into the euro was a triumph of sentimentality and wilful blindness over realism. What accounts for this? By doing this, the German elites set a trap for themselves with their own voters from which they cannot easily escape.
Stats total dollars pledged to Kickstarter projects Successfully funded projects This page is automatically updated at least once a day with the raw data behind Kickstarter. Metrics include funding success rates, amount pledged, and the performance of successfully and unsuccessfully funded projects. Statistics are available for the site overall as well as each of the 15 project categories. Check out our blog for more on Kickstarter’s data. Successfully Funded Projects Most successfully funded projects raise less than $10,000, but a growing number have reached six and even seven figures. Unsuccessfully Funded Projects Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing in more ways than one.
The Fastest-Dying Jobs of This Generation (and What Replaced Them) - Jordan Weissmann - Business In the late twentieth century, America underwent its big switch -- the transformation from a broadly middle class, manufacturing-based economy, to a financially polarized, services-based economy. Union rolls plummeted as Wall Streets profits surged, and the demand for factory workers were supplanted by the need for healthcare professionals, teachers, and computer engineers. This is a narrative that, by now, is probably familiar to you. But it's also abstract. The two graphs below, adapted from a new working paper by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood and the Census Bureau's Emin Dinlersoz on the rise and fall of U.S. labor unions, tell the tale more concretely. In roughly 20 years, entire categories of factory work nearly disappeared. Of the fastest-growing occupations, the winner, by a long shot, was numerical control machine operators -- the men and women who program and run factory machinery. But why would skilled workers shun unions?
Earn Steady Returns - Lending Club Prime Consumer Notes provide steady returns. As of August 14, 2012 every investor with 800 Notes 1 or more purchased directly from Lending Club has experienced a positive return regardless of the timing of investment or the allocation across Note grades. Investors can purchase 800 Prime Consumer Notes for as little as $20,000. A Financial Innovation. Lending Club is a consumer loan origination and investment platform. What are Prime Consumer Notes? Prime Consumer Notes are fixed-income investments that generate monthly cash flow in the form of payments of principal and interest. Quality Borrowers. We approve fewer than 10% of the loan applications, based on stringent credit criteria designed to focus on the most creditworthy borrowers. As of August 14, 2012, the average Lending Club borrower shows the following characteristics: 715 FICO score 14.25% debt-to-income ratio (excluding mortgage) 15 years of credit history $69,274 personal income (top 10% of US population) 2 Average Loan Size: $11,750
Dancing With Derivatives Jamie Dimon calls it “a doozy.” And it was. A $2 billion credit derivatives trading bungle that could mushroom to a $4 billion loss. The shining industry agitator against some of the tougher regulations on banks has suddenly become the shining example of why still tougher regulations may be needed. After the economy nearly atomized in a cloud of cupidity, Dimon became known as America’s least-hated banker. If Jamie the Great and his “good bank” can make such a gigantic blunder, sending déjà vu shivers down America’s back, what hope is there for lesser bankers? As Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, “we now have ironclad proof — as if we really needed it — that everyone is capable of disastrous stupidity.” Dimon doesn’t buy the argument that bosses of big, complex companies can never make mistakes. Britain has been rocked by a “shareholder spring,” a revolution of ordinarily placid investors vetoing bloated executive pay deals and bonuses. The Rev.
Pitches Search | BankToTheFuture.com Community based Membership, eLearning and Training Organisation, with Network of 300 Specialists and 90 people investing in our success. Pitch Funded This pitch was funded on our beta platform. We now have regulatory permissions to offer Equity CrowdFunding & no longer offer rewards CrowdFunding.
Peer-to-Peer Equity: Crowdcube With the introduction of p2p lending some lenders wrote that the concept enabled everyone to feel as banker. Now, newly launched Crowdcube.com enables any UK resident to feel as venture capitalist for a financial commitment as low as 10 GBP. Investors can browse pitches which usually include business plans and financial projections and sometimes even video pitches. In return for the investment, investors get shares of the company. For example entrepreneur Daniel Vinson wants to raise 50,000 GBP. He is offering 49% equity in return, meaning investors roughly get 1% shares in return for 1,000 GBP investment. There are 6 entrepreneurs pitching for funding at the moment. Crowdcube, founded by Darren Westlake and Luke Lang, launched 2 weeks ago. Investors are charged a processing fee by Crowdcube for each transaction equal to the sum of 0.20 GBP plus 4% of the value of the transaction. Investors can add credit to their Crowdcube account balance via credit card, paypal or bank transfer.
Projects - Bloom - Be part of the crowdfunding revolution Projects Innovative, passionate, groundbreaking, you can explore our projects here Enterprise by Christine Robertson We would like to raise funds towards hosting and marketing our new website www.swaptogs.co.uk. Sport by Courtney Macguire I am a Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games potential athlete, looking to raise funds to compete in Ar... Loughborough, by Claire Rennie We want to construct a summerhouse on the back of a van so that we can take our new range of natu... Fraserburgh, United Kingdom by Caroline and Alex Nite Raising funds to save the specialist cheesemonger Guid Cheese Shop in St Andrews. Tayport, United Kingdom Publishing by Owen O'Leary Like a friend in a foreign city. Glasgow, United Kingdom by Barry James How to raise funding for entrepreneurs, businesses and other ventures Sheffield, United Kingdom
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human. So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. Framing Modernity and Globalization