I want last week’s European bail-out to work. My sincere hope is that collective and decisive action by the eurozone’s large member states will stabilize global markets, at least for a while, so allowing the global economy to catch its breath.
As someone who works in financial services, I follow the markets – in the West, across Asia and the entire world – closer than most. Since the Bear Stearns collapse in March 2008, through the demise of Lehman Brothers and its ghastly aftermath, much of my professional life has been dominated by the angry flashing of those little lights on a Bloomberg screen.
In recent years, the violent gyrations on financial markets have been deeply discomforting, causing angst among market professionals, like me – but that is the least significant aspect. For those little lights represent, of course, the ebbs and flows of cash which, in turn, determines the fate of real businesses. It is at the sharp end of employment and livelihoods, dispossessed homes and broken families that the human impact of financial turbulence is most keenly felt….
…The eurocrats, of course, lack the guts to trim back monetary union to a more manageable size. Too much face would be lost. So “euroquake” fears, once viewed as outlandish, are gaining pace. Despite Thursday’s deal, and all the reassurances of a “durable solution”, the Italian government on Friday paid 6.06pc for 10-year money, up from just 5.86pc a month ago and a euro-era high. Such borrowing costs are disastrous, given that Rome must roll-over €300bn of its €1,900bn debt in 2012 alone. A default by Italy, the eurozone’s third-biggest economy, and the eighth-largest on earth, would make Lehman look like a picnic.
The eurozone must be consolidated. World leaders should similarly force European banks to disclose their losses, we all take the hit and then we move on. Instead, we are served-up, in ever more complex variants, the same “extend and pretend” non-solutions. It gives me no pleasure to write this, but I give this deal two weeks.
PS When I watched the news on friday night I said to myself, “Three Days”. I think two weeks is just a little optimistic, don’t you?
Tuesday UPDATE in America – Hate to say “I told you so”, but Greece is wobbling… and it has been three days, hope everyone has a four month food supply and a few guns for family protection.
Tea Party Organizer and PREPARED, completely sober and realistic American Mother,
I have been a fan of Ron Paul for many years. Â Although I have formally endorsed Michele Bachmann for President this election cycle, Ron Paul is a close second choice to lead our nation back to Free Market Sanity. Â I am so grateful he is in the race. His voice on the worlds stage gives him an opportunity to share the facts about Economics. Â Here is a clip from the interview yesterday on Meet the Press.
“What we’re witnessing today is the failure of a Keynesian economic model,” Paul said. “And today we have to replace it with something — we either replace it with more government, more authoritarianism, more controls, or we look toward the free market.”
To learn more about the difference between Keynesian Economics Vs. the Austrian Model as articulated by Hayek, please watch these informative videos:
Reason cartoon contributor Scott Stantis references the famous Hayek-Keynes debates in his syndicated daily strip Prickly City — with a punchline about how much, alas, most people care.
I’m wondering how much more the American Taxpayer will be willing to put up with…
Did Maxine Waters honestly think that we would just sit down, shut up, and PAY UP, without any sort of protest? Â Has she studied American History? Â Does she not understand that the first Revolutionary War in America was an ECONOMIC war? Â Does she understand that those of us who descend from Patriots have liberty embedded in our hearts and we were not going to sit idly by and watch a group of Marxists steal the American Dream from our Children and Grandchildren?
Did she honestly think that we would just quietly watch on our televisions as A group of Moonbats Looted the treasury and allowed a Parasitic Democratic Congress to change everything in the blink of an eye?
How much more money does she expect the Taxpayers to put into a FAILED welfare state? Â How many more babies ABORTED with Taxpayer Money? Â How many more children growing up with Government for a Father? Â How many more innocents chained as slaves to a permanent indentured servitude in the form of BENEFITS and Student Loans?
Yes, we were going to rise up and we did rise up and a sleeping giant has awoken and is not going to go back to sleep until the Marxists are driven out of power.
Telling us to go to hell is like a dog biting the hand that feeds it.
So the President is going to propose a new economic plan after his vacay at Marthas Vineyard.
He should not waste the mental energy attempting to put it together, Ayn Rand has already done the heavy lifting on that topic by taking Collectivism in America to its logical conclusion with Directive 10-289 in the chapter Miracle Metal of Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn used Fiction to help her readers understand what Marxism “Looked Like” in real life by creating fictional characters who could be played today by any of the secular humanists currently embedded in our National Government.
Barack, Tim, David, and Gene could easily play Mr. Thompson, Wesley, Eugene, Floyd, and Fred in the upcoming second installment of Atlas Shrugged, the Movie. Â But the Prez and his Economic team are busy with vacations and writing even more talking points blaming all of the economic morass on tea party activists like me. And preparing a “really big show” for September takes a great deal of time…
Here is a quick synopsis of the  Economic Plan of the Marxist Looters and Moochers from Rands book: (I really think to be congruent the President and his Economic Advisers should just bite the bullet and publish this plan as the logical next step.)
“Head of State Thompson meets with his economic brain trust: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Jim Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Orren Boyle, Clem Weatherby, and Fred Kinnan, who is head of Amalgamated Labor of America. They are discussing Directive 10-289.
Wesley Mouch is upset that people are not sufficiently motivated to cooperate; he needs more power. Weatherby points out that the economic climate is deteriorating rapidly. Lawson says the people lack the proper social spirit, they don’t understand that production is a duty and that there is no such thing as a personal life. Thompson, the realist, says to make sure the Mainstream Media is on board. Ferris brings out an old George Washington quote about wise and honest men and disparages it as out of date.
Fred Kinnan says this is about jobs; he suggests forcing employers to increase their payrolls by one-third. Jim screams that he wouldn’t have any use for the extra men. Kinnan says it’s not about use, it’s about need, and need trumps profit. Jim is insulted by the word profit, but he thinks there might be room for agreement if the railroad can increase its rates. Orren Boyle says he can’t afford it, and Jim says that public need trumps Boyle’s profits. Boyle says no one can accuse him of ever making a profit! Boyle can absorb a rate increase if the government increases his subsidy, but Weatherby accuses Boyle of running a black hole for government money. Thompson says to go ahead with the directive, and he’ll widen the state of emergency. He leaves the meeting.
Mouch sums up. Deterioration of the economy is so great that the best solution is to freeze everything in place and hold the line. Freedom has been given a chance and has failed; stringent controls are necessary. He reads Directive 10-289.
All workers are bound to their jobs and can neither leave nor be fired under penalty of one year in prison. The Unification Board, reporting to the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, possesses judicial authority. All citizens upon turning 21 must register with the Unification Board which will assign them jobs in the best interests of the nation.
All businesses must remain in operation and cannot close under penalty of nationalization and confiscation of property.
All patents and copyrights are to be gifted to the government by the use of voluntary Gift Certificates. The Unification Board will license those processes to all applicants to eliminate monopolies. All brand names and private trademarks are abolished.
No new inventions shall be produced or invented. The Patent Office is suspended.
All business establishments will produce the same amount every year as they did in the Yardstick Year, to be enforced by the Unification Board.
All citizens must purchase the same amount of goods every year as they did in the Yardstick Year, to be enforced by the Unification Board.
All wages and prices are frozen.
All cases arising from this directive are to be decided by the Unification Board.
There is agreement that this will provide security, although Jim gets a bit hysterical. Lawson says to hell with the little people; man’s mind is the source of all the problems in the world. Ferris says that genius is superstition, there is no such thing as the intellect, and man’s brain is a social product. A genius hoards ideas that rightfully belong to the society from which he stole them. Thought is theft.
Fred Kinnan brings them all down to earth. If the Unification Board isn’t owned by organized labor, the whole deal is off. Boyle says that Kinnan is trying to get a stranglehold on every industry in the country; Kinnan smiles and agrees. If Wesley Mouch agrees to let Mouch and Kinnan control the board, Kinnan can get the union membership to swallow the rest. Jim thinks the country won’t stand for it.
Kinnan laughs and says that if there aren’t rules any longer, then it’s about who robs whom. Kinnan controls the votes of his membership. He knows he’s delivering his people into slavery and they know it too, but they also know Fred Kinnan will throw them a crumb once in a while. If they’re going to be under a whip, they would prefer that Kinnan wield it. He knows he’s a racketeer and his people know it, but they know he can deliver the goods. Mouch gives in.”
No hard feelings guys, I know that my constant drumbeat the past eight years dissing your wives for their epidurals and prozac and your kids ADD meds and vaccines was somewhat annoying, but Rupert and his cronies at The Partnership for New York City have hell to pay for what they have done to humanity. Â He likely has a few freeper mods paid well for sending certain threads down the memory hole & banning loud mouthed bloggers who get a little too close to the truth and if a freedom loving health care blogging Mom gets thrust out of the conversations of the day because I talk too much about certain taboo subjects…well, WHO WILL NOTICE?
Just remember that when 60 % of young couples are infertile, the C-Section rate tops out at 96%, and 75% of our children are drooling in autistic straitjackets, somebody was trying to blow really hard on that whistle.
This excellent post by Janine is a perfect summary of the true cause of the Economic Collapse. Â I first learned about the Derivatives issue when I watched the Documentary, The Obama Deception. A portion of that movie was focused exclusively on this issue. Â The whole movie is hosted below and the clip about Wall Street is above. Â I don’t agree with all of the claims of this movie, but it does tend to make you think.
“With journalists stumped, could anyone in the Washington power “village” stand in the way of runaway derivatives, and the banks that wanted to keep them unregulated? Ironically, there were few policymakers more capable of understanding derivatives or their real world impact than Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. And both were there when derivatives could have been at least partially reined in before they became, to quote Warren Buffett, “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Instead they did exactly the opposite, blocking key regulation at pivotal moments, as we saw in Summers’ remarks above, with Rubin going on to benefit from this deregulated Wild West when he left Washington and returned to Wall Street as a top executive.
Here again, taking an anthropological view can be instructive. Consider the elite conclaves both came from, and the biases and potential conflicts attached to them. Rubin originally came to Washington after decades at Goldman Sachs, a firm renown for its culture of invincibility. Summers came from a somewhat similar culture – Harvard – with ample faith in both himself and the efficacy of the free market.
Their boss, President Clinton, was intent on being the pro-business “New” Democrat. In the last two months, all three have tried to distance themselves from their roles in letting derivatives go unchecked. (And in true shadow elite fashion, none of them have faced the consequences of their actions. In fact, the only ones to really suffer from the failure of the elite are the non-elite, millions of regular people who’ve lost their jobs, houses or savings.)
And derivatives remain unchecked. Just because the economy cratered doesn’t mean that all these money-printing machines have disappeared. According to calculations by Bernstein Research, Goldman Sachs could lose 41 percent of its profits if the new derivatives regulations pass. Banks generally don’t break down their figures on this part of their business (surprised?), but it seems fair to estimate the percentage of the bank revenue that comes from derivatives is solidly in the double-digits (at some it could be more than 50%) To put this in perspective, imagine a food company that gets half its revenue from selling products that go totally unregulated by the FDA, and whose practices are hidden from both regulators and journalists.
Tett notes sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu as arguing,
“...elites …. invariably try to hang onto power–not so much by controlling the physical means of production, but by also dominating the cognitive map, or social discourse. What really matters …is not what is publicly discussed, but what is not discussed. Social silences, in other words, are crucial.”
Her message: when the people in power insist a little too hard that there’s no story to be found, start digging in. Tett says this should be a wake-up call for journalists and anthropologists, to question the people drawing that cognitive map. One reviewer dismissed this as “preachy” advice. It might be, if she wasn’t dead right.
I want last week’s European bail-out to work. My sincere hope is that collective and decisive action by the eurozone’s large member states will stabilize global markets, at least for a while, so allowing the global economy to catch its breath.
