Banking With Hitler
October 16th, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)
Contradicting the notion that the Swiss were alone in banking for the Nazis. There are lots of very poor documentaries about this kind of thing, don’t let that put you off.
A Short Film About Detroit - and a crazy idea for the recession.
October 15th, 2008 9 comments or link to (permalink)
Embedding disabled on this, however here is the link.
Why am I choosing to highlight this film? The US car industry is essentially bankrupt, and Detroit is already the equivalent of a failed state within a contracting economy. The median price of a house in Detroit is, staggeringly, less than $10,000. Surely, with a deep prolonged recession it is beyond hope?
The financial sector has been saved by the government, but too late to prevent significant in the ‘real economy’, there will, as a result, be a need for massive government spending to stave off the effects of unemployment. This either happens naturally through conflict or war, or via the preferable alternative of things like the New Deal.
So what should the New Deal Light, New New Deal, or Deal 2.0, or whatever look like? It will have to employ lots of people and will therefore be some kind of large scale industrial project, but it will also have to have a strategic benefit of the type that has the kind of long term return that only governments can consider. In America’s case this obviously will have to do with energy, and more specifically portable energy, and even more specifically portable energy that solves a fundamental problem with the way America uses energy. American planning inextricably revolves around cars more than any other nation on earth, this is a problem that the government can realistically help solve, and only now will it have the stomach to do so.
As Paul Kedrosky predicts, clean tech. “was just given a two-year window to gestate before the major economies worldwide turn higher and begin driving energy prices straight up.”
So my hypothetical proposal is this: nationalize GM and Ford and create a plan to subsidize switch the majority of all cars on the road to the most fuel efficient form possible, using a pragmatic combination of goal driven R&D and industrial scale production, in a realistic timeframe, using whatever means is necessary, and with the zeal of the Apollo Moon Shot.
Is this a crazy idea?
9 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: business
Milton Friedman - the Bumbling Old Man That Killed the American Dream
October 11th, 2008 11 comments or link to (permalink)
The events of the last 6 months are more significant than 911 and will no doubt result in more suffering. They are partially a result of the ideas of the man whose choir performs the surreal song called ‘The Corporation’, in the first video. A more apt title might be American Requiem. Two other videos are more in depth pieces by Milton Friedman: on limited government and appearing on Icelandic State Television in 1984 (oh the irony).
The United States has recently had to nationalize the majority of mortgage lending and is in the process of nationalizing large sections of the banking industry which is now rated below Namibia. US treasuries are less credit worthy than the McDonalds hamburger chain’s, the stock market has had a worse week than during the crash that brought on the Great Depression, banks have completely stopped lending to other banks and ships are sitting in docks unable to sail without letters of credit. This cancer has spread, and with banks in many other countries being nationalized to avoid collapse, the IMF said today that we risk systemic global financial meltdown. And this is the sober world of finance.
The reason why this happened is not because of subprime mortgages, Collateralized Debt Obligations or Credit Default Swaps any more than the USSR fell apart because of Boris Spassky’s inferior chess strategy or a cunning plan by Ronald Reagan. Russia fell apart because of the increasingly powerful economic engine of the West and adherence to a flawed, extremist ideology.
The emergence of China’s economic leviathan is the root cause destabilizing effect that turns leveraged debt in the form of CDOs and CDSs into nation busters, but second component, the extremist ideology came from an unlikely source, a nice old man with patrician charm.
The nice old man was Milton Friedman, part of the Chicago School of economists who dreamed up monetarism, an extreme form of laisser-faire capitalist economics, not far removed from Social Darwinism. Economics is arguably not a science and I suspect that monetarism, when treated scientifically, reveals a scientific misunderstanding in its core premise, by thinking of the economy as a closed system rather than open one. I’ve outlined this hunch on my blog and I’d love if someone better qualified than me could someday prove it, however a formal proof of its fallacy is not required to identify its problems when adopted as ideology. Monetarism’s problems started when it morphed into a self-contradictory political ideology called Libertarianism which will be defined as the period from Reagan until Monday afternoon.
Political ideology is like diet, moderation and balance are good. You can’t have unregulated capitalism or people will make money out things like slave trading. Similarly you can’t have totalitarian socialism or you end up with everything run like the DMV, with unmotivated people doing things that people don’t want, slowly, and in drab environments.
On an ideological level, there is nothing consistently libertarian about flag waving Reaganite Republicans, or there wouldn’t be an American army or flag. There is also nothing intrinsically socialist about French left-bank intellectuals or there wouldn’t be any cafes or any music, after all, there is nothing more entrepreneurial than starting a band or opening a cafe. Both extremes are self contradictory, and the truth is somewhere in the middle, to paraphrase the architecture critic, Rayner Banham: politics is about creating a well tempered society.
Libertarianism is like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, a form of political ideology where there is no polis, no society, to be political about. As with anything with a logical flaw, its adoption has ended up revealing that flaw. In this case, a Libertarian approach to capitalism, denying the existence of government, and therefore regulation, has ended up with the government owing much of the economy. This is a far, far worse outcome than if there had been well regulated capitalism in the first place.
11 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: FEBL business
Travels With My Beard
October 11th, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)
An English sikh having been mistaken for a muslim by a rastafarian and asked what its like “to be at the bottom of the barrel”, decides to find out what its like to be a muslim in Britain after the London terror bombings. He grows a beard to look a little bit more ‘fundamentalist’, and sets off on his travels.
Running time: 57 mins.
1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: religion world
YouTube Launches Full Length Video Service
October 11th, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)
Star Trek Original Series - the enterprise crew catch a virus that removes their inhibitions.
The original Star Trek is hilariously camp to look at these days - there is a world apart from this and the later versions which appeal to techy geeks rather than nostalgia freaks. This episode is a particular favorite of mine.
While we are on the subject of full length videos, YouTube has done what it always promised, full length videos with inline ads, similar to Hulu. For the ones that I could find, embedding was disabled for individual items yet they still promote a playlist embed which then doesn’t work. This seems to destroy the essence of what made YouTube so great and viral. Dumb, dumb, dumb.