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At the time they occurred, the savings and loan insolvencies were considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Contrary to what was then believed, and in sharp contrast with 2007–2009, they in fact had little macroeconomic significance. Savings and Loan (S&L) remediation cost between 2 percent and 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whereas the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the conservatorships of Fannie and Freddie actually made money for the US Treasury. But the direct cost of government remediation is largely irrelevant in judging macro significance. What matters is the cumulative output loss associated with and plausibly caused by failing financial institutions. I estimate output losses for 1981–1984, 1991–1998, and 2007–2026 (the latter utilizing forecasts and projections along with actual data through 2015) and, for a final comparison, 1929–1941. The losses associated with 2007–2009 have been truly disastrous – in the same order of magnitude as the Great Depression. The S&L failures were, in contrast, inconsequential. Macroeconomists and policy makers should reserve the word crisis for financial disturbances that threaten substantial damage to the real economy, and continue efforts to identify in advance financial institutions which are systemically important (SIFI), and those which are not.

The feminist critique of rape has been a vast and impressive exercise of interpretative activity: it has gripped existing concepts, practices and discourses and subjected them to reinterpretation and transformation. It has been trenchant, assiduous and generative. It has created new legal definitions of rape and modified the evidentiary requirements that define its borders; it has developed new procedural mechanisms and codes of speech during trials; it has multiplied ethico-political interpretations of sexual violence and excavated previously unauthorised forms of social knowledge. Most specifically, it has created new evaluations of rape in the service of a particular form of life; that is, one which cultivates the capacity of women to maximise their own powers of speech and desire.

Although the trigger for the European economic and financial crisis was the subprime and subsequently banking crisis in the USA, the true roots of theEuropean malaise are to be found in the structural weaknesses of the European growth and Euro area development model based on debt financing of public and private expenditure and investment. These drivers were amplified by the lack of effective economic policy mechanisms from both the monetary and fiscal sides of macro-economic management. The global financial crisis of 2007–2009 did not cause the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems. Instead, it crystallised markets and public attention on the underlying core cause of the overall Euro crisis – the insolvency of the public financing system of the European Union (EU) member states.

We advance theory of how founder identity affects business model (BM) design during new venture creation and contribute to the cognitive perspective on BMs. We look at BM design as a longitudinal process involving a variety of cognitive work that is co-shaped by the founder identity work. Based on an in-depth nine-year process study of a single venture managed by three founders, we observed that a novelty-centered BM design resulted from cognitive work co-shaped by founder identity construction and verification processes. Yet, more remarkably, we noted that founder identity verification decreased over time and observed a process that we labeled “identity-business model decoupling.” It meant that the founders did not alter their founder identity but, over time, attentively grew self-aware and mindfully disengaged negative identity effects to design an effective BM. Our results provide a dynamic view on founder identity imprinting on ventures’ BMs and contribute to the identity, BM, and entrepreneurship literatures.

We use normal accident theory to analyze the financial sector, especially that part of the financial sector that processed home mortgages, and the mortgage meltdown. We maintain that the financial sector was highly complex and tightly coupled in the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown. And we argue that the meltdown exhibited characteristics of a system or normal accident; the result of a component failure (unusually high mortgage defaults) that, in the context of unique conditions (which included low interest rates and government policy encouraging home loans to less credit-worthy households), resulted in complex and tightly coupled interactions that financial elites and government officials were ill-equipped to control. We also consider the role that agency and wrongdoing played in the design of the financial system and the unfolding of the mortgage meltdown. We conclude that a fundamental restructuring of the financial system, so as to reduce complexity and coupling, is required to avert future similar financial debacles. But we also conclude that such a restructuring faces significant obstacles, given the interests of powerful actors and the difficulties of labeling those responsible for the meltdown as wrongdoers.