PS And, incidentally, you may remember that on September 16th I quoted John Gray on the likely outcome of the crisis - 'It will end with a different world. And not for the first time....' We were both mocked for being apocalyptic. Three weeks later it is apparent that we were, not to put too fine a point on it, right.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
The Glorious People's Democray of Yookay
With the Atlantic Alliance between the PRA and the Glorious People's Democracy of Yookay about to be renamed as Warsaw Pact 2, it is good time to reflect on the mighty, bloodless revolution that brought capitalism to its knees. Well, in fact, I'll leave it to Nassim. Basically, it seems, we handed capitalism over to imbeciles, people who thought they could shuffle dud mortgages into triple A paper and nobody would ever find out. Now it turns out that British affluence and the supremacy of the City of London were dependent on a pile of realtors' property details. It was like asking Foxtons to educate our children. Funny old world eh?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Greetings from the last capitalist outpost here in the Iberian Peninsula.
ReplyDeleteWill we get compensation for the nationalisation of our banks?
Do you have a nuclear programme?
Good luck with the Olympics.
"'It will end with a different world. And not for the first time....'"
ReplyDeleteAnd that's a ground breaking opinion?
Its so wide a guess it takes in every variable in the known universe.
And still no condemnation of the pols who encouraged them, enabled them, and applauded as the tax revenues flowed in, giving them electoral advantages?
Salvation is solving the energy problem, If we do that then the world really will change.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/10/05/scisun104.xml
Not groundbreaking, Passer, a statement of the staggeringly bleeding obvious. My point was the difficulty some people had in recognising this.The Olympics! Very funny.
ReplyDeleteSeems we're all going tabloid. "Apocalyptic" is Dresden or Nagasaki, not a banking crisis. So let's get a grip. Folks in the USA and Western Europe are still fabulously rich by the standards of even a couple of generations ago. The people likely to be worst affected by this are those in the poor countries of the world who will be hit hard by cutbacks in grants and loans, charitable donations et al, and by nasty new proxy wars. And all so we can scrape by on just one Caribbean holiday a year and a slightly smaller brand-new car, etc.
ReplyDeleteBesides, if these bankers are "imbeciles" how come we're lending them 50 billion of taxpayers' money, or 700 billion in the case of the USA? Meet the new bankers. Same as the old bankers.
anyone seen a paradigm shift yet? Ill keep my onions peeled!
ReplyDeleteThe death of capitalism? I hardly think so. John Gray has a lot of interesting things to say, and I liked 'Black Mass', but in his strenuous efforts to avoid utopianism he has become perpetually distopian. A little bit of balance, or even pragmatism, would help.
ReplyDeleteAs for allowing the blame for this debacle to be so easily ascribed to 'The City' and 'Wall Street'; come on! Millions were in on this: every person who claimed their earnings were a little higher than they truly were and their monthly outgoings were lower; who tried to make a speculative buck on the market. No, the 'blame' for this spreads far and wide, and I would prefer the market to device a solution and allocate resources than some second-guessing politico or bureaucrat.
Last night capitalism reached the very bottom of the abyss, C4 news featured, as a person who's opinion on the FiCri was sought, Geoffrey Robinson. Akin to asking Himmler for his opinion on how best to rehabilitate the Auschwitz survivors.
ReplyDeleteThis Innovative, honest, hardworking businessman's CV bears some scrutiny, preferably by the nearest Fraud Squad. His stash comes courtesy of, originally, his Helvetian pay mistress then years spent, hyena like, scavenging among the rotting corpses of dead companies. Particular attention should be given by the investigating officers as to what happened to the Land that the Matrix Churchill factory stood upon. We will not even mention stuffing a brown envelope into the top of Peter (call me gay and I'll have you arrested) Mandelson's panties.
As we know, C4 news comes with its own agenda which has very little to do with accurate, impartial reporting, once again the media pisses in our soup.
PS, if you're out their Steinar, thanks for the tip, 5 years ago, about the hookey Icelandic banks, you were spot on mate.
Never mind John Gray, I think Charles Mackay wrote about our current predicament about a century and a half ago in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'. As I recall, in his chapter on the South Sea Bubble in the 18th century he mentions an investment scheme entitled: 'A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.' People poured money into it, apparently, which pretty much sums up the stupidity and cupidity of the human race. Plus ca change.
ReplyDelete