["[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-01 00:00]\n<User>Let me tell you about some new developments:\nBut while Claremont remains the most concentrated hub of Whiteheadian activity, the place where Whitehead's thought currently seems to be growing the most quickly is in China. In order to address the challenges of modernization and industrialization, China has begun to blend traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with Whitehead's \"constructive post-modern\" philosophy in order to create an \"ecological civilization.\" To date, the Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centers for the study of Whitehead's philosophy, and books by process philosophers John Cobb and David Ray Griffin are becoming required reading for Chinese graduate students. Cobb has attributed China's interest in process philosophy partly to Whitehead's stress on the mutual interdependence of humanity and nature, as well as his emphasis on an educational system that includes the teaching of values rather than simply bare facts.\n\nDeleuze's and Latour's opinions, however, are minority ones, as Whitehead has not been recognized as particularly influential within the most dominant philosophical schools. It is impossible to say exactly why Whitehead's influence has not been more widespread, but it may be partly due to his metaphysical ideas seeming somewhat counter-intuitive (such as his assertion that matter is an abstraction), or his inclusion of theistic elements in his philosophy, or the perception of metaphysics itself as pass\u00e9, or simply the sheer difficulty and density of his prose.\n\nOne philosophical school which has historically had a close relationship with process philosophy is American pragmatism. Whitehead himself thought highly of William James and John Dewey, and acknowledged his indebtedness to them in the preface to Process and Reality. Charles Hartshorne (along with Paul Weiss) edited the collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism. Noted neopragmatist Richard Rorty was in turn a student of Hartshorne. Today, Nicholas Rescher is one example of a philosopher who advocates both process philosophy and pragmatism.\n\nIn physics, Whitehead's thought has had some influence. He articulated a view that might perhaps be regarded as dual to Einstein's general relativity, see Whitehead's theory of gravitation. It has been severely criticized. Yutaka Tanaka, who suggests that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, proposes that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Whitehead's view has now been rendered obsolete, with the discovery of gravitational waves. They are phenonena observed locally that largely violate the kind of local flatness of space that Whitehead assumes. Consequently, Whitehead's cosmology must be regarded as a local approximation, and his assumption of a uniform spatio-temporal geometry, Minkowskian in particular, as an often-locally-adequate approximation. An exact replacement of Whitehead's cosmology would need to admit a Riemannian geometry. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of processes has proved attractive to some physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.\n\nThis work has been pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr., whose book Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1971) was the first single-authored book in environmental ethics. Cobb also co-authored a book with economist Herman Daly entitled For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (1989), which applied Whitehead's thought to economics, and received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Cobb followed this with a second book, Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy (1994), which aimed to challenge \"economists' zealous faith in the great god of growth.\"\n\nAnother model is the FEELS model developed by Xie Bangxiu and deployed successfully in China. \"FEELS\" stands for five things in curriculum and education: Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions, and Supportive-teacher. It is used for understanding and evaluating educational curriculum under the assumption that the purpose of education is to \"help a person become whole.\" This work is in part the product of cooperation between Chinese government organizations and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China.\n\nWhitehead has had some influence on philosophy of business administration and organizational theory. This has led in part to a focus on identifying and investigating the effect of temporal events (as opposed to static things) within organizations through an \u201corganization studies\u201d discourse that accommodates a variety of 'weak' and 'strong' process perspectives from a number of philosophers. One of the leading figures having an explicitly Whiteheadian and panexperientialist stance towards management is Mark Dibben, who works in what he calls \"applied process thought\" to articulate a philosophy of management and business administration as part of a wider examination of the social sciences through the lens of process metaphysics. For Dibben, this allows \"a comprehensive exploration of life as perpetually active experiencing, as opposed to occasional \u2013 and thoroughly passive \u2013 happening.\" Dibben has published two books on applied process thought, Applied Process Thought I: Initial Explorations in Theory and Research (2008), and Applied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze (2009), as well as other papers in this vein in the fields of philosophy of management and business ethics.\n\nBeginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works \u2013 particularly Process and Reality \u2013 are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.\n<Assistant>Got it. I will remember them.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-02 00:00]\n<User>Let me share some additional facts I found:\nAlfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, was a minister and schoolmaster of Chatham House Academy, a successful school for boys established by Thomas Whitehead, Alfred North's grandfather. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schoolmasters, but that his grandfather was the more extraordinary man. Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Whitehead, formerly Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Whitehead was apparently not particularly close with his mother, as he never mentioned her in any of his writings, and there is evidence that Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, had a low opinion of her.\n\nIn 1918 Whitehead's academic responsibilities began to seriously expand as he accepted a number of high administrative positions within the University of London system, of which Imperial College London was a member at the time. He was elected Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London in late 1918 (a post he held for four years), a member of the University of London's Senate in 1919, and chairman of the Senate's Academic (leadership) Council in 1920, a post which he held until he departed for America in 1924. Whitehead was able to exert his newfound influence to successfully lobby for a new history of science department, help establish a Bachelor of Science degree (previously only Bachelor of Arts degrees had been offered), and make the school more accessible to less wealthy students.\n\nThe two volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whitehead's life remain obscure because he left no Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. Additionally, Whitehead was known for his \"almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy\", and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life. This led to Lowe himself remarking on the first page of Whitehead's biography, \"No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him.\"\n\nIn addition to numerous articles on mathematics, Whitehead wrote three major books on the subject: A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), Principia Mathematica (co-written with Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), and An Introduction to Mathematics (1911). The former two books were aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians, while the latter book was intended for a larger audience, covering the history of mathematics and its philosophical foundations. Principia Mathematica in particular is regarded as one of the most important works in mathematical logic of the 20th century.\n\nAt the time structures such as Lie algebras and hyperbolic quaternions drew attention to the need to expand algebraic structures beyond the associatively multiplicative class. In a review Alexander Macfarlane wrote: \"The main idea of the work is not unification of the several methods, nor generalization of ordinary algebra so as to include them, but rather the comparative study of their several structures.\" In a separate review, G. B. Mathews wrote, \"It possesses a unity of design which is really remarkable, considering the variety of its themes.\"\n\nWhitehead and Russell had thought originally that Principia Mathematica would take a year to complete; it ended up taking them ten years. To add insult to injury, when it came time for publication, the three-volume work was so massive (more than 2,000 pages) and its audience so narrow (professional mathematicians) that it was initially published at a loss of 600 pounds, 300 of which was paid by Cambridge University Press, 200 by the Royal Society of London, and 50 apiece by Whitehead and Russell themselves. Despite the initial loss, today there is likely no major academic library in the world which does not hold a copy of Principia Mathematica.\n\nThis is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well-understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the western canon. Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centers around the delivery of Whitehead's Gifford lectures in 1927\u201328 \u2013 following Arthur Eddington's lectures of the year previous \u2013 which Whitehead would later publish as Process and Reality:\n\nHowever, Mathews' frustration with Whitehead's books did not negatively affect his interest. In fact, there were numerous philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School that perceived the importance of what Whitehead was doing without fully grasping all of the details and implications. In 1927 they invited one of America's only Whitehead experts \u2013 Henry Nelson Wieman \u2013 to Chicago to give a lecture explaining Whitehead's thought. Wieman's lecture was so brilliant that he was promptly hired to the faculty and taught there for twenty years, and for at least thirty years afterward Chicago's Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead's thought.\n<Assistant>I understand. I'll keep this in mind.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-03 00:00]\n<User>Let me provide you with some new details:\nWieman's words proved prophetic. Though Process and Reality has been called \"arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century,\" it has been little-read and little-understood, partly because it demands \u2013 as Isabelle Stengers puts it \u2013 \"that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus.\" Whitehead questioned western philosophy's most dearly held assumptions about how the universe works, but in doing so he managed to anticipate a number of 21st century scientific and philosophical problems and provide novel solutions.\n\nIt must be emphasized, however, that an entity is not merely a sum of its relations, but also a valuation of them and reaction to them. For Whitehead, creativity is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or an electron) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities, and is not fully determined by causal or mechanistic laws. Of course, most entities do not have consciousness. As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow. Moreover, inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable.\n\nSince Whitehead's metaphysics described a universe in which all entities experience, he needed a new way of describing perception that was not limited to living, self-conscious beings. The term he coined was \"prehension\", which comes from the Latin prehensio, meaning \"to seize.\" The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons. It is also intended to make clear Whitehead's rejection of the theory of representative perception, in which the mind only has private ideas about other entities. For Whitehead, the term \"prehension\" indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. In this way, entities are constituted by their perceptions and relations, rather than being independent of them. Further, Whitehead regards perception as occurring in two modes, causal efficacy (or \"physical prehension\") and presentational immediacy (or \"conceptual prehension\").\n\nWhitehead describes causal efficacy as \"the experience dominating the primitive living organisms, which have a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and the fate towards which they go.\" It is, in other words, the sense of causal relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by the senses. Presentational immediacy, on the other hand, is what is usually referred to as \"pure sense perception\", unmediated by any causal or symbolic interpretation, even unconscious interpretation. In other words, it is pure appearance, which may or may not be delusive (e.g. mistaking an image in a mirror for \"the real thing\").\n\nIn higher organisms (like people), these two modes of perception combine into what Whitehead terms \"symbolic reference\", which links appearance with causation in a process that is so automatic that both people and animals have difficulty refraining from it. By way of illustration, Whitehead uses the example of a person's encounter with a chair. An ordinary person looks up, sees a colored shape, and immediately infers that it is a chair. However, an artist, Whitehead supposes, \"might not have jumped to the notion of a chair\", but instead \"might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful color and a beautiful shape.\" This is not the normal human reaction; most people place objects in categories by habit and instinct, without even thinking about it. Moreover, animals do the same thing. Using the same example, Whitehead points out that a dog \"would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such.\" In this way symbolic reference is a fusion of pure sense perceptions on the one hand and causal relations on the other, and that it is in fact the causal relationships that dominate the more basic mentality (as the dog illustrates), while it is the sense perceptions which indicate a higher grade mentality (as the artist illustrates).\n\nWhitehead makes the startling observation that \"life is comparatively deficient in survival value.\" If humans can only exist for about a hundred years, and rocks for eight hundred million, then one is forced to ask why complex organisms ever evolved in the first place; as Whitehead humorously notes, \"they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them.\" He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better. In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.\n\nWhitehead's idea of God differs from traditional monotheistic notions. Perhaps his most famous and pointed criticism of the Christian conception of God is that \"the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.\" Here Whitehead is criticizing Christianity for defining God as primarily a divine king who imposes his will on the world, and whose most important attribute is power. As opposed to the most widely accepted forms of Christianity, Whitehead emphasized an idea of God that he called \"the brief Galilean vision of humility\":\n\nIt should be emphasized, however, that for Whitehead God is not necessarily tied to religion. Rather than springing primarily from religious faith, Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system. His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the primordial nature of God. However, Whitehead was also interested in religious experience. This led him to reflect more intensively on what he saw as the second nature of God, the consequent nature. Whitehead's conception of God as a \"dipolar\" entity has called for fresh theological thinking.\n<Assistant>Thanks for the update. I've recorded these facts.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-04 00:00]\n<User>Let me update you with some new information:\nGod's consequent nature, on the other hand, is anything but unchanging \u2013 it is God's reception of the world's activity. As Whitehead puts it, \"[God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.\" In other words, God saves and cherishes all experiences forever, and those experiences go on to change the way God interacts with the world. In this way, God is really changed by what happens in the world and the wider universe, lending the actions of finite creatures an eternal significance.\n\nWhitehead thus sees God and the world as fulfilling one another. He sees entities in the world as fluent and changing things that yearn for a permanence which only God can provide by taking them into God's self, thereafter changing God and affecting the rest of the universe throughout time. On the other hand, he sees God as permanent but as deficient in actuality and change: alone, God is merely eternally unrealized possibilities, and requires the world to actualize them. God gives creatures permanence, while the creatures give God actuality and change. Here it is worthwhile to quote Whitehead at length:\n\nFor Whitehead the core of religion was individual. While he acknowledged that individuals cannot ever be fully separated from their society, he argued that life is an internal fact for its own sake before it is an external fact relating to others. His most famous remark on religion is that \"religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness ... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.\" Whitehead saw religion as a system of general truths that transformed a person's character. He took special care to note that while religion is often a good influence, it is not necessarily good \u2013 an idea which he called a \"dangerous delusion\" (e.g., a religion might encourage the violent extermination of a rival religion's adherents).\n<Assistant>Got it. I will remember them.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-05 00:00]\n<User>I'd like to share some important information:\nHowever, while Whitehead saw religion as beginning in solitariness, he also saw religion as necessarily expanding beyond the individual. In keeping with his process metaphysics in which relations are primary, he wrote that religion necessitates the realization of \"the value of the objective world which is a community derivative from the interrelations of its component individuals.\" In other words, the universe is a community which makes itself whole through the relatedness of each individual entity to all the others \u2013 meaning and value do not exist for the individual alone, but only in the context of the universal community. Whitehead writes further that each entity \"can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty. The spirit at once surrenders itself to this universal claim and appropriates it for itself.\" In this way the individual and universal/social aspects of religion are mutually dependent.\n<Assistant>Sure I will remember them.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-06 00:00]\n<User>Let me provide you with some new details:\nOverall, however, Whitehead's influence is very difficult to characterize. In English-speaking countries, his primary works are little-studied outside of Claremont and a select number of liberal graduate-level theology and philosophy programs. Outside of these circles his influence is relatively small and diffuse, and has tended to come chiefly through the work of his students and admirers rather than Whitehead himself. For instance, Whitehead was a teacher and long-time friend and collaborator of Bertrand Russell, and he also taught and supervised the dissertation of Willard Van Orman Quine, both of whom are important figures in analytic philosophy \u2013 the dominant strain of philosophy in English-speaking countries in the 20th century. Whitehead has also had high-profile admirers in the continental tradition, such as French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who once dryly remarked of Whitehead that \"he stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror.\" French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour even went so far as to call Whitehead \"the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.\"\n<Assistant>Appreciated. I'll retain these important details.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-07 00:00]\n<User>Here are some new facts I learnt just now:\nHistorically Whitehead's work has been most influential in the field of American progressive theology. The most important early proponent of Whitehead's thought in a theological context was Charles Hartshorne, who spent a semester at Harvard as Whitehead's teaching assistant in 1925, and is widely credited with developing Whitehead's process philosophy into a full-blown process theology. Other notable process theologians include John B. Cobb, Jr., David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, C. Robert Mesle, Roland Faber, and Catherine Keller.\n\nProcess theology typically stresses God's relational nature. Rather than seeing God as impassive or emotionless, process theologians view God as \"the fellow sufferer who understands\", and as the being who is supremely affected by temporal events. Hartshorne points out that people would not praise a human ruler who was unaffected by either the joys or sorrows of his followers \u2013 so why would this be a praise-worthy quality in God? Instead, as the being who is most affected by the world, God is the being who can most appropriately respond to the world. However, process theology has been formulated in a wide variety of ways. C. Robert Mesle, for instance, advocates a \"process naturalism\", i.e. a process theology without God.\n\nIn fact, process theology is difficult to define because process theologians are so diverse and transdisciplinary in their views and interests. John B. Cobb, Jr. is a process theologian who has also written books on biology and economics. Roland Faber and Catherine Keller integrate Whitehead with poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and feminist theory. Charles Birch was both a theologian and a geneticist. Franklin I. Gamwell writes on theology and political theory. In Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age, futurologists Alexander Bard and Jan S\u00f6derqvist repeatedly credit Whitehead for the process theology they see rising out of the participatory culture expected to dominate the digital era.\n\nWhitehead also described religion more technically as \"an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone.\" In other words, religion takes deeply felt emotions and contextualizes them within a system of general truths about the world, helping people to identify their wider meaning and significance. For Whitehead, religion served as a kind of bridge between philosophy and the emotions and purposes of a particular society. It is the task of religion to make philosophy applicable to the everyday lives of ordinary people.\n<Assistant>Thanks for sharing. I've committed this to memory.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-08 00:00]\n<User>Let me provide you with some new details:\nMargaret Stout and Carrie M. Staton have also written recently on the mutual influence of Whitehead and Mary Parker Follett, a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. Stout and Staton see both Whitehead and Follett as sharing an ontology that \"understands becoming as a relational process; difference as being related, yet unique; and the purpose of becoming as harmonizing difference.\" This connection is further analyzed by Stout and Jeannine M. Love in Integrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration \n\nMoreover, a conflict of interest between professional investment managers and their institutional clients, combined with a global glut in investment capital, led to bad investments by asset managers in over-priced credit assets. Professional investment managers generally are compensated based on the volume of client assets under management. There is, therefore, an incentive for asset managers to expand their assets under management in order to maximize their compensation. As the glut in global investment capital caused the yields on credit assets to decline, asset managers were faced with the choice of either investing in assets where returns did not reflect true credit risk or returning funds to clients. Many asset managers chose to continue to invest client funds in over-priced (under-yielding) investments, to the detriment of their clients, in order to maintain their assets under management. This choice was supported by a \"plausible deniability\" of the risks associated with subprime-based credit assets because the loss experience with early \"vintages\" of subprime loans was so low.\n\nThe first visible institution to run into trouble in the United States was the Southern California\u2013based IndyMac, a spin-off of Countrywide Financial. Before its failure, IndyMac Bank was the largest savings and loan association in the Los Angeles market and the seventh largest mortgage originator in the United States. The failure of IndyMac Bank on July 11, 2008, was the fourth largest bank failure in United States history up until the crisis precipitated even larger failures, and the second largest failure of a regulated thrift. IndyMac Bank's parent corporation was IndyMac Bancorp until the FDIC seized IndyMac Bank. IndyMac Bancorp filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in July 2008.\n\nIndyMac reported that during April 2008, Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the ratings on a significant number of Mortgage-backed security (MBS) bonds including $160 million of those issued by IndyMac and which the bank retained in its MBS portfolio. IndyMac concluded that these downgrades would have negatively impacted the Company's risk-based capital ratio as of June 30, 2008. Had these lowered ratings been in effect at March 31, 2008, IndyMac concluded that the bank's capital ratio would have been 9.27% total risk-based. IndyMac warned that if its regulators found its capital position to have fallen below \"well capitalized\" (minimum 10% risk-based capital ratio) to \"adequately capitalized\" (8\u201310% risk-based capital ratio) the bank might no longer be able to use brokered deposits as a source of funds.\n\nSenator Charles Schumer (D-NY) would later point out that brokered deposits made up more than 37 percent of IndyMac's total deposits and ask the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) whether it had considered ordering IndyMac to reduce its reliance on these deposits. With $18.9 billion in total deposits reported on March 31, Senator Schumer would have been referring to a little over $7 billion in brokered deposits. While the breakout of maturities of these deposits is not known exactly, a simple averaging would have put the threat of brokered deposits loss to IndyMac at $500 million a month, had the regulator disallowed IndyMac from acquiring new brokered deposits on June 30.\n\nWhen home prices declined in the latter half of 2007 and the secondary mortgage market collapsed, IndyMac was forced to hold $10.7 billion of loans it could not sell in the secondary market. Its reduced liquidity was further exacerbated in late June 2008 when account holders withdrew $1.55 billion or about 7.5% of IndyMac's deposits. This \u201crun\u201d on the thrift followed the public release of a letter from Senator Charles Schumer to the FDIC and OTS. The letter outlined the Senator\u2019s concerns with IndyMac. While the run was a contributing factor in the timing of IndyMac\u2019s demise, the underlying cause of the failure was the unsafe and unsound manner in which the thrift was operated.\n\nOn July 11, 2008, citing liquidity concerns, the FDIC put IndyMac Bank into conservatorship. A bridge bank, IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB, was established to assume control of IndyMac Bank's assets, its secured liabilities, and its insured deposit accounts. The FDIC announced plans to open IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB on July 14, 2008. Until then, depositors would have access their insured deposits through ATMs, their existing checks, and their existing debit cards. Telephone and Internet account access was restored when the bank reopened. The FDIC guarantees the funds of all insured accounts up to US$100,000, and has declared a special advance dividend to the roughly 10,000 depositors with funds in excess of the insured amount, guaranteeing 50% of any amounts in excess of $100,000. Yet, even with the pending sale of Indymac to IMB Management Holdings, an estimated 10,000 uninsured depositors of Indymac are still at a loss of over $270 million.\n\nInitially the companies affected were those directly involved in home construction and mortgage lending such as Northern Rock and Countrywide Financial, as they could no longer obtain financing through the credit markets. Over 100 mortgage lenders went bankrupt during 2007 and 2008. Concerns that investment bank Bear Stearns would collapse in March 2008 resulted in its fire-sale to JP Morgan Chase. The financial institution crisis hit its peak in September and October 2008. Several major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover. These included Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup, and AIG. On Oct. 6, 2008, three weeks after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Lehman's former CEO found himself before Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Fuld said he was a victim of the collapse, blaming a \"crisis of confidence\" in the markets for dooming his firm.\n<Assistant>Thanks for letting me know. I'll keep track of this.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-09 00:00]\n<User>There are some important details I learned:\nIn September 2008, the crisis hit its most critical stage. There was the equivalent of a bank run on the money market funds, which frequently invest in commercial paper issued by corporations to fund their operations and payrolls. Withdrawal from money markets were $144.5 billion during one week, versus $7.1 billion the week prior. This interrupted the ability of corporations to rollover (replace) their short-term debt. The U.S. government responded by extending insurance for money market accounts analogous to bank deposit insurance via a temporary guarantee and with Federal Reserve programs to purchase commercial paper. The TED spread, an indicator of perceived credit risk in the general economy, spiked up in July 2007, remained volatile for a year, then spiked even higher in September 2008, reaching a record 4.65% on October 10, 2008.\n\nEconomist Paul Krugman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explain the credit crisis via the implosion of the shadow banking system, which had grown to nearly equal the importance of the traditional commercial banking sector as described above. Without the ability to obtain investor funds in exchange for most types of mortgage-backed securities or asset-backed commercial paper, investment banks and other entities in the shadow banking system could not provide funds to mortgage firms and other corporations.\n\nThis meant that nearly one-third of the U.S. lending mechanism was frozen and continued to be frozen into June 2009. According to the Brookings Institution, the traditional banking system does not have the capital to close this gap as of June 2009: \"It would take a number of years of strong profits to generate sufficient capital to support that additional lending volume\". The authors also indicate that some forms of securitization are \"likely to vanish forever, having been an artifact of excessively loose credit conditions\". While traditional banks have raised their lending standards, it was the collapse of the shadow banking system that is the primary cause of the reduction in funds available for borrowing.\n\nThere is a direct relationship between declines in wealth and declines in consumption and business investment, which along with government spending, represent the economic engine. Between June 2007 and November 2008, Americans lost an estimated average of more than a quarter of their collective net worth.[citation needed] By early November 2008, a broad U.S. stock index the S&P 500, was down 45% from its 2007 high. Housing prices had dropped 20% from their 2006 peak, with futures markets signaling a 30\u201335% potential drop. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22%, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion. Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth is down $14 trillion.\n\nIn November 2008, economist Dean Baker observed: \"There is a really good reason for tighter credit. Tens of millions of homeowners who had substantial equity in their homes two years ago have little or nothing today. Businesses are facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression. This matters for credit decisions. A homeowner with equity in her home is very unlikely to default on a car loan or credit card debt. They will draw on this equity rather than lose their car and/or have a default placed on their credit record. On the other hand, a homeowner who has no equity is a serious default risk. In the case of businesses, their creditworthiness depends on their future profits. Profit prospects look much worse in November 2008 than they did in November 2007... While many banks are obviously at the brink, consumers and businesses would be facing a much harder time getting credit right now even if the financial system were rock solid. The problem with the economy is the loss of close to $6 trillion in housing wealth and an even larger amount of stock wealth.\n\nSeveral commentators have suggested that if the liquidity crisis continues, an extended recession or worse could occur. The continuing development of the crisis has prompted fears of a global economic collapse although there are now many cautiously optimistic forecasters in addition to some prominent sources who remain negative. The financial crisis is likely to yield the biggest banking shakeout since the savings-and-loan meltdown. Investment bank UBS stated on October 6 that 2008 would see a clear global recession, with recovery unlikely for at least two years. Three days later UBS economists announced that the \"beginning of the end\" of the crisis had begun, with the world starting to make the necessary actions to fix the crisis: capital injection by governments; injection made systemically; interest rate cuts to help borrowers. The United Kingdom had started systemic injection, and the world's central banks were now cutting interest rates. UBS emphasized the United States needed to implement systemic injection. UBS further emphasized that this fixes only the financial crisis, but that in economic terms \"the worst is still to come\". UBS quantified their expected recession durations on October 16: the Eurozone's would last two quarters, the United States' would last three quarters, and the United Kingdom's would last four quarters. The economic crisis in Iceland involved all three of the country's major banks. Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland\u2019s banking collapse is the largest suffered by any country in economic history.\n\nThe Brookings Institution reported in June 2009 that U.S. consumption accounted for more than a third of the growth in global consumption between 2000 and 2007. \"The US economy has been spending too much and borrowing too much for years and the rest of the world depended on the U.S. consumer as a source of global demand.\" With a recession in the U.S. and the increased savings rate of U.S. consumers, declines in growth elsewhere have been dramatic. For the first quarter of 2009, the annualized rate of decline in GDP was 14.4% in Germany, 15.2% in Japan, 7.4% in the UK, 18% in Latvia, 9.8% in the Euro area and 21.5% for Mexico.\n<Assistant>Wonderful. I'll remember these key points.", "[Dialogue between User and Assistant on 2024-01-10 00:00]\n<User>Here are some new facts I learnt just now:\nSome developing countries that had seen strong economic growth saw significant slowdowns. For example, growth forecasts in Cambodia show a fall from more than 10% in 2007 to close to zero in 2009, and Kenya may achieve only 3\u20134% growth in 2009, down from 7% in 2007. According to the research by the Overseas Development Institute, reductions in growth can be attributed to falls in trade, commodity prices, investment and remittances sent from migrant workers (which reached a record $251 billion in 2007, but have fallen in many countries since). This has stark implications and has led to a dramatic rise in the number of households living below the poverty line, be it 300,000 in Bangladesh or 230,000 in Ghana. Especially states with a fragile political system have to fear that investors from Western states withdraw their money because of the crisis. Bruno Wenn of the German DEG recommends to provide a sound economic policymaking and good governance to attract new investors\n\nThe World Bank reported in February 2009 that the Arab World was far less severely affected by the credit crunch. With generally good balance of payments positions coming into the crisis or with alternative sources of financing for their large current account deficits, such as remittances, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) or foreign aid, Arab countries were able to avoid going to the market in the latter part of 2008. This group is in the best position to absorb the economic shocks. They entered the crisis in exceptionally strong positions. This gives them a significant cushion against the global downturn. The greatest impact of the global economic crisis will come in the form of lower oil prices, which remains the single most important determinant of economic performance. Steadily declining oil prices would force them to draw down reserves and cut down on investments. Significantly lower oil prices could cause a reversal of economic performance as has been the case in past oil shocks. Initial impact will be seen on public finances and employment for foreign workers.\n\nThe output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States\u2014decreased at an annual rate of approximately 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, versus activity in the year-ago periods. The U.S. unemployment rate increased to 10.1% by October 2009, the highest rate since 1983 and roughly twice the pre-crisis rate. The average hours per work week declined to 33, the lowest level since the government began collecting the data in 1964. With the decline of gross domestic product came the decline in innovation. With fewer resources to risk in creative destruction, the number of patent applications flat-lined. Compared to the previous 5 years of exponential increases in patent application, this stagnation correlates to the similar drop in GDP during the same time period.\n\nEuropean regulators introduced Basel III regulations for banks. It increased capital ratios, limits on leverage, narrow definition of capital (to exclude subordinated debt), limit counter-party risk, and new liquidity requirements. Critics argue that Basel III doesn\u2019t address the problem of faulty risk-weightings. Major banks suffered losses from AAA-rated created by financial engineering (which creates apparently risk-free assets out of high risk collateral) that required less capital according to Basel II. Lending to AA-rated sovereigns has a risk-weight of zero, thus increasing lending to governments and leading to the next crisis. Johan Norberg argues that regulations (Basel III among others) have indeed led to excessive lending to risky governments (see European sovereign-debt crisis) and the ECB pursues even more lending as the solution.\n\nThe U.S. recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009, according to the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the financial crisis appears to have ended about the same time. In April 2009 TIME magazine declared \"More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over.\" The United States Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission dates the crisis to 2008. President Barack Obama declared on January 27, 2010, \"the markets are now stabilized, and we've recovered most of the money we spent on the banks.\"\n\nAdvanced economies led global economic growth prior to the financial crisis with \"emerging\" and \"developing\" economies lagging behind. The crisis completely overturned this relationship. The International Monetary Fund found that \"advanced\" economies accounted for only 31% of global GDP while emerging and developing economies accounted for 69% of global GDP from 2007 to 2014. In the tables, the names of emergent economies are shown in boldface type, while the names of developed economies are in Roman (regular) type.\n\nKrugman's contention (that the growth of a commercial real estate bubble indicates that U.S. housing policy was not the cause of the crisis) is challenged by additional analysis. After researching the default of commercial loans during the financial crisis, Xudong An and Anthony B. Sanders reported (in December 2010): \"We find limited evidence that substantial deterioration in CMBS [commercial mortgage-backed securities] loan underwriting occurred prior to the crisis.\" Other analysts support the contention that the crisis in commercial real estate and related lending took place after the crisis in residential real estate. Business journalist Kimberly Amadeo reports: \"The first signs of decline in residential real estate occurred in 2006. Three years later, commercial real estate started feeling the effects. Denice A. Gierach, a real estate attorney and CPA, wrote:\n\nIn a Peabody Award winning program, NPR correspondents argued that a \"Giant Pool of Money\" (represented by $70 trillion in worldwide fixed income investments) sought higher yields than those offered by U.S. Treasury bonds early in the decade. This pool of money had roughly doubled in size from 2000 to 2007, yet the supply of relatively safe, income generating investments had not grown as fast. Investment banks on Wall Street answered this demand with products such as the mortgage-backed security and the collateralized debt obligation that were assigned safe ratings by the credit rating agencies.\n\nThe collateralized debt obligation in particular enabled financial institutions to obtain investor funds to finance subprime and other lending, extending or increasing the housing bubble and generating large fees. This essentially places cash payments from multiple mortgages or other debt obligations into a single pool from which specific securities draw in a specific sequence of priority. Those securities first in line received investment-grade ratings from rating agencies. Securities with lower priority had lower credit ratings but theoretically a higher rate of return on the amount invested.\n\nBy September 2008, average U.S. housing prices had declined by over 20% from their mid-2006 peak. As prices declined, borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages could not refinance to avoid the higher payments associated with rising interest rates and began to default. During 2007, lenders began foreclosure proceedings on nearly 1.3 million properties, a 79% increase over 2006. This increased to 2.3 million in 2008, an 81% increase vs. 2007. By August 2008, 9.2% of all U.S. mortgages outstanding were either delinquent or in foreclosure. By September 2009, this had risen to 14.4%.\n\nLower interest rates encouraged borrowing. From 2000 to 2003, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target from 6.5% to 1.0%. This was done to soften the effects of the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the September 2001 terrorist attacks, as well as to combat a perceived risk of deflation. As early as 2002 it was apparent that credit was fueling housing instead of business investment as some economists went so far as to advocate that the Fed \"needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble\". Moreover, empirical studies using data from advanced countries show that excessive credit growth contributed greatly to the severity of the crisis.\n\nBernanke explained that between 1996 and 2004, the U.S. current account deficit increased by $650 billion, from 1.5% to 5.8% of GDP. Financing these deficits required the country to borrow large sums from abroad, much of it from countries running trade surpluses. These were mainly the emerging economies in Asia and oil-exporting nations. The balance of payments identity requires that a country (such as the U.S.) running a current account deficit also have a capital account (investment) surplus of the same amount. Hence large and growing amounts of foreign funds (capital) flowed into the U.S. to finance its imports.\n\nThe Fed then raised the Fed funds rate significantly between July 2004 and July 2006. This contributed to an increase in 1-year and 5-year adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rates, making ARM interest rate resets more expensive for homeowners. This may have also contributed to the deflating of the housing bubble, as asset prices generally move inversely to interest rates, and it became riskier to speculate in housing. U.S. housing and financial assets dramatically declined in value after the housing bubble burst.\n<Assistant>Noted. I'll remember these details."]
[{"question": "What does ARM stand for:", "answer": "adjustable-rate mortgage"}, {"question": "How long did it actually take Whitehead and Russell to complete Principia Mathematica?", "answer": "ten years"}, {"question": "According to Overseas Development Institute, what is one reason for the reduction in growth in developing countries?", "answer": "falls in trade"}, {"question": "How much global GDP did emerging and developing economies account for from 2007 to 2014?", "answer": "69%"}, {"question": "What economies led global economic growth prior to the financial crisis?", "answer": "Advanced economies"}, {"question": "In what state did Whitehead believe religion began?", "answer": "solitariness"}, {"question": "In November 2008, how much was the U.S. stock index down from its 2007 high?", "answer": "45%"}, {"question": "What does having sense perceptions conclude about a person?", "answer": "higher grade mentality"}, {"question": "When did Whitehead delivery the Gifford lectures?", "answer": "1927\u201328"}, {"question": "What was increased by Basel III regulations?", "answer": "capital ratios"}, {"question": "How many modes does perception occur in according to Whitehead?", "answer": "two"}, {"question": "If IndyMac's downgraded MBS bond ratings had been in effect at March 31, 2008, what would the bank's capital ratio have been?", "answer": "9.27%"}, {"question": "Under what name were those lectures later published?", "answer": "Process and Reality"}, {"question": "What are higher life forms actively engaged in?", "answer": "modifying their environment"}, {"question": "Who is a philosopher that promotes process philosophy and pragmatism currently?", "answer": "Nicholas Rescher"}, {"question": "What area of the world was less severely affected by the credit crunch according to The World Bank report In February 2009?", "answer": "Arab World"}, {"question": "Which financial institution was the first one visible to run into trouble in the United States?", "answer": "IndyMac"}, {"question": "What percent of IndyMac's deposits were withdrawn by account holders in late June 2008?", "answer": "7.5%"}, {"question": "For the first quarter of 2009, what was the annualized rate of decline in GDP in Germany?", "answer": "14.4%"}, {"question": "Where did Whitehead accept administrative positions?", "answer": "University of London"}, {"question": "What type ratings did securities first in line receive from rating agencies?", "answer": "investment-grade ratings"}, {"question": "Had the FDIC disallowed IndyMac from acquiring new brokered deposits on this date, the threat of brokered deposit losses would have been $500 million a month?", "answer": "June 30"}, {"question": "Lie algebras and hypobolic quanternions drew attention to the need for what?", "answer": "expand algebraic structures"}, {"question": "What philosophy in the west was challenged by Whitehead?", "answer": "how the universe works"}, {"question": "What type of God did Whitehead believe existed?", "answer": "dipolar"}, {"question": "What will have the greatest impact on the global economic crisis?", "answer": "lower oil prices"}, {"question": "Arab countries entered the financial crisis in exceptionally strong positions giving them a cushion against this?", "answer": "global downturn"}, {"question": "What dominates more basic mentality in symbolic reference?", "answer": "causal relationships"}, {"question": "When did the financial crisis hit its most critical stage?", "answer": "September 2008"}, {"question": "The equivalent of a bank run on which funds occurred in September 2008?", "answer": "money market funds"}, {"question": "How many homeowners who had substantial equity in their homes two years ago, have little no equity as of November 2008?", "answer": "Tens of millions"}, {"question": "What degree program did Whitehead contribute to establishing at University of London?", "answer": "Bachelor of Science"}, {"question": "Was was the federal funds rate target lowered to by the Federal Reserve in 2003?", "answer": "1.0%"}, {"question": "How many goals of living is there?", "answer": "three"}, {"question": "How many mortgage lenders went bankrupt during 2007 and 2008?", "answer": "Over 100"}, {"question": "According to The Brookings Institution report in June 2009, how much growth did U.S. consumption account for between 2000 and 2007?", "answer": "more than a third"}, {"question": "What was Whitehead's father's profession?", "answer": "minister and schoolmaster of Chatham House Academy"}, {"question": "Who thought Process and Reality was little-read because the reader has to separate them from normal thought?", "answer": "Isabelle Stengers"}, {"question": "What is the growth forecast for Cambodia in 2009?", "answer": "close to zero"}, {"question": "What was Charles Birch's profession besides theologian?", "answer": "geneticist"}, {"question": "What entities does the term prehension apply to?", "answer": "conscious or unconscious"}, {"question": "Who also struggled to follow Whitehead's writings?", "answer": "professional philosophers"}, {"question": "Whitehead observes that life is deficient in what?", "answer": "survival value"}, {"question": "On October 16, 2008, how long did UBS predict the United States' recession would last?", "answer": "three quarters"}, {"question": "What was the value of IndyMac's MBS bonds retained in its MBS portfolio that were downgraded in April 2008?", "answer": "$160 million"}, {"question": "How did profit prospects for businesses look in November 2008 compared to November 2007?", "answer": "much worse"}, {"question": "What is the single most important determinant of economic performance?", "answer": "oil prices"}, {"question": "When was Henry Nelson Wieman invited to the Chicago Divinity school?", "answer": "1927"}, {"question": "How much net worth did Americans lose between June 2007 and November 2008?", "answer": "more than a quarter"}, {"question": "Where did the U.S. obtain capital to finance its imports?", "answer": "foreign funds"}, {"question": "Who was Southern California-based IndyMac a spin-off of?", "answer": "Countrywide Financial"}, {"question": "What led to bad investments by asset managers in over-priced credit assets?", "answer": "a conflict of interest"}, {"question": "How much was invested worldwide in fixed income investments?", "answer": "$70 trillion"}, {"question": "What type pool do collateralized debt obligations place their payments from mortgages into?", "answer": "single pool"}, {"question": "When was the peak of U.S. housing prices?", "answer": "mid-2006"}, {"question": "What relationship between advanced and emerging/developing was completely overturned by the financial crisis of 2007?", "answer": "global economic growth"}, {"question": "What did Whitehead view as the second nature of God?", "answer": "the consequent nature"}, {"question": "How much had average U.S. housing prices declined by September 2008?", "answer": "over 20%"}, {"question": "What happened after Henry Nelson Wieman gave a lecture about Whitehead?", "answer": "hired"}, {"question": "How long did Whitehead and Russell expect to spend creating Principia Mathematica?", "answer": "a year"}, {"question": "How many books on mathematics did Whitehead write?", "answer": "three"}, {"question": "How much global GDP did \"advanced\" economies account for from 2007 to 2014?", "answer": "31%"}, {"question": "Who believed that the growth of the commercial real estate bubble indicated that U.S. housing policy was not the cause of the crisis?", "answer": "Krugman"}, {"question": "What was the outcome of anticipating the scientific and philosophical problems Whitehead proposed?", "answer": "novel solutions"}, {"question": "Who was frustrated in Whitehead's books but still interested?", "answer": "Mathews"}, {"question": "How much were remittances sent from migrant workers in 2007?", "answer": "$251 billion"}, {"question": "What was one of the actions taken by government to fix the financial crisis?", "answer": "capital injection"}, {"question": "What is the incentive for asset managers to expand their assets under management?", "answer": "to maximize their compensation"}, {"question": "What French sociologist and anthropologist stated that Whitehead was \"the greatest philosopher of the 20th century\"?", "answer": "Bruno Latour"}, {"question": "What does the creditworthiness of businesses depend on?", "answer": "future profits"}, {"question": "What did reviewer GB Mathews say algebraic structures possessed?", "answer": "unity of design"}, {"question": "What is the term for the experience dominating primitive organisms that have a sense for fate?", "answer": "causal efficacy"}, {"question": "What did Whitehead publish numerous articles about?", "answer": "mathematics"}, {"question": "What is an example of a product Wall Street invented to answer the demand for income generating investments?", "answer": "mortgage-backed security"}, {"question": "The shadow banking system could not provide funds to mortgage firms and other corporations without the ability to obtain which funds?", "answer": "investor funds"}, {"question": "Which publication is considered the most impressive metaphysical text?", "answer": "Process and Reality"}, {"question": "How much of the U.S. lending mechanism was frozen until June 2009?", "answer": "nearly one-third"}, {"question": "What philosophy is closely related to process philosophy?", "answer": "American pragmatism"}, {"question": "What type account is needed by the U.S. to balance an account deficit?", "answer": "capital account"}, {"question": "According to economist Dean Baker, a homeowner who has no equity if this type default risk?", "answer": "serious"}, {"question": "Who is the Senator that released a letter to the FDIC and OTS that prompted a \"run\" on IndyMac?", "answer": "Charles Schumer"}, {"question": "Reviewer Alexander Macfarlane believed that the main idea of the work is a comparative study of what?", "answer": "several structures"}, {"question": "What did European regulators introduce to increase the oversight of banks?", "answer": "Basel III regulations"}, {"question": "The decline of gross domestic product also caused a decline in innovation, evidenced by the flat-lining of what?", "answer": "patent applications"}, {"question": "When did Moody's and Standard & Poor downgrade a significant number of IndyMac's MBS bonds?", "answer": "April 2008"}, {"question": "An entity is a sum of relations, a valuation of them and what else?", "answer": "reaction to them."}, {"question": "The U.E. employment rate was 10.2% in October 2009, which was the highest rate since what year?", "answer": "1983"}, {"question": "What prominent business professor has been heavily influenced by Whitehead?", "answer": "Mark Dibben"}, {"question": "In November 2008, how much had housing prices drop from their 2006 peak?", "answer": "20%"}, {"question": "How many volumes was Principia Mathematica?", "answer": "three"}, {"question": "What subjects has John B. Cobb, Jr. written books on other than process theology?", "answer": "biology and economics"}, {"question": "Which concept does Whitehead state is more dominant in a lower mentality?", "answer": "causal relationships"}, {"question": "In which educational system was Whitehead employed in the late 1910s?", "answer": "University of London system"}, {"question": "What institution reported that the traditional banking systems does not have the capital to close the gap in the lending mechanism?", "answer": "Brookings Institution"}, {"question": "Who argued that regulations led to excessive lending to risky governments?", "answer": "Johan Norberg"}, {"question": "How long did it actually take to complete Principia Mathematica?", "answer": "ten years"}, {"question": "In what field of study has Whitehead's work been most influential in the United States?", "answer": "American progressive theology"}, {"question": "What investment bank stated on October 6 that 2008 would see a global recession lasting for at least two years?", "answer": "UBS"}, {"question": "What does symbolic reference link appearance with?", "answer": "causation"}, {"question": "When did the Fed begin raising Fed funds rate significantly?", "answer": "July 2004"}]