Fiscal pickle: How Iceland, an insignificant nation of fairy-worshipping fish picklers, helped mess up the global money fest.

Paul Krugman writes that Iceland has just had to bail out a domestic bank for nearly a billion dollars, which on a per capita basis is a bigger bailout than the failed $700 billion mother of all bailouts. This piece by Max Keiser, a year ago, uses Iceland as a perfect example of the retarded-debt-craze-asset-bubble that has just bukkaked from a great height over the entire anglo-saxosphere and beyond.

The presenter, Max Keiser may be a nut case, a tabloid version of the higher brow economic Cassandra nut case, Nouriel Roubini. But in the land of the mad, Keiser is king, and we are currently in the land of the mad.

[Dear readers, I am very sorry if you are bored by all this financial stuff, which I assure you, I have absolutely no fucking clue about (just like people who work at investment banks, apparently). Unfortunately, I just can’t get enough of it. All those graphs and stats and doomsday scenarios and schadenfreude together – its like a disaster movie made specifically for slightly autistic, embittered beta-male, web nerds, like myself. Perhaps the economy is tanking because, like me, everyone is watching the economy tank rather than working.]

Merci Brice.

7 comments business

Laurie Anderson on the National Debt

Plus Ca Change… professional New Yorker and androgynous person from the future, Laurie Anderson, talks about the problem of the national debt. Only this was nearly 20 years ago.

You would think that the problem of debt would be bigger now that: Asia is lending us money to pay the interest on the money it lent us to buy their mouse pads and umbrellas; capital markets have curled up into a nasty little tight spit-ball and the securities industry has shat the proverbial bed.

But as a percentage of GDP the numbers are far less scary according to the second graph here. So what’s the deal? Why aren’t the numbers worse, if the story is?

2 comments business

Wall Street Warriors: Capitalism Rules

This first episode made in 2006 is from what could have been an extremely humdrum reality TV show about Wall Street. It may accidentally become a classic period piece, if the producers can embrace the irony as the series moves into its 3rd series, in a dramatically altered universe.

[from Hulu, so US only]

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Mr Untouchable (Trailer)

The original documentary has been taken down, however if you get a chance to see the original it is a ground breaking film about the biggest heroin dealer in Harlem in the 70s. The premise is that drug lord, Nicky Barnes was different in that he delivered a ‘good’ product and was professional.

This has been something that has been on my mind lately, I recently met someone who made his money from Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, he was a personal friend of Colonel Sanders and said that what made him different was that he cared about the product.

When I worked at an Internet incubator as an ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’, we looked obsessively at how we would build a viral product, any viral product. In essence this seemed to be the moral equivalent of selling bad drugs, possibly a more dubious standpoint than Nicky Barnes’ good drugs.

What I am getting at here is not that selling KFC is morally bad, but that it is wrong to think that cynically selling a bad product well marketed, will succeed. McDonalds sell incredibly tasty food – it just happens to be bad for you. But when it comes to capitalism there is a responsibility not just to believe in a good product, but a product that is good for people. i.e. not tobacco or slave harvested cotton or heroin. The line moves. Kentucky Fried Chicken only becomes a moral hazard when it is too cheap and too delicious that people become habitual users.

Throughout Mr Untouchable, including in this trailer, people correct themselves after using terminology such as ‘successful entrepreneur’. That this kind of language is used at all, smacks of a society as a whole, which needs moral regulation, not just banks on Wall street which have reward without risk.

This clip contains this unbelievable line: “he was giving something back to the community that he was abusing and killing”, wherever this line applies, unregulated capitalism has failed.

1 comment clips

Parkour Thermal Images Documentary

A documentary about an artist capturing Parkour with a thermal image camera. The idea is slightly better than the end reulst, unfortunately.

1 comment art

Blue Monday

Watch the top video from 6:00.

I live two hundred yards or so from the New York Stock Exchange, and use the gym next door. Since last October, there have periodically been camera crews outside, recording the slow motion implosion of the financial sector. But this morning, a bright sunny day with a clear blue sky there was no indication at all of the catastrophic events that were occurring to the financial system. Despite the fact that by this evening, the NYSE was practically flood lit.

Bloomberg today ran a slightly melodramatic piece that said that this was one of those days where ‘you remember where you were when…’. Well, I was outside the stock market, when the securities business was becoming extinct, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell it from any other day.

Although the stock market crash of 29 was a far more rapid, severe and dramatic affair, the real drama played out over a decade as the inertia of the effects of capital markets spilled into what even Greenspan calls ‘the real economy’. If you look closely at the footage, over and over again, I suspect that the 1929 crash appeared far less dramatic than people suggest now, even if the effects were severe.

BTW, watching BofA’s hugely impressive CEO, Ken Lewis, it is great shame that this country’s politicians aren’t of the same calibre.

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Quiz: What is the Connection with the Man Getting Punched to the Huffington Post?

The answer after the jump, here.

2 comments clips, politics

Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer

The New York Public Library ran a particularly great selection of lectures last year. Here is the culmination: Gunter Grass followed by both Grass and Norman Mailer.

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Zeitgeist and the Threat of Dangerous, Pandemic Internet Memes.

The comments thread under my rant against the execrable Zeitgeist has taken on a life of its own. Most people are clearly cranks, but a few are curious as to why I think such a seemly amateur and relatively unimportant film is worth talking about at all.

Rather than discussing the details of the film, which for me is like a chemist arguing with a priest as to whether you can turn water into wine by saying a prayer, I am more interested in the general pathology of conspiracy theories on the Internet (Perhaps this would be a good topic for some second-rate liberal arts degree).

The ability to travel to new continents created pandemic disease that wiped out many aboriginal Americans. The web has created a potential for diseases of the mind to spread more rapidly across continents than ever before. It is reasonable to take seriously the threat of idea pandemics caused by false ideas, spread via any new and powerful medium. The Rwandan genocide was triggered by the more traditional and less virulent medium of radio, as Hutus spread rumors that they would be attacked by Tutsi. I suspect that it is theoretically possible that an idea could spread via the Internet and translate into large scale violence, and that we should be on the look out for Internet memes that could mutate into malignant forms, just in case.

Current viral ideas on the Internet are largely benign, if bland or tasteless, from cuddly animals (LOLcats) to people drinking each other’s shit (2 girls one cup). Looking at the statistics from YouTube, conspiracy theory clips are extremely popular and increasingly so. Many of the ideas in these are only a few plot changes away from resembling those that have triggered violence, historically. Zeitgeist is a prime example.

Continue reading:

17 comments FEBL, religion

The Big Bang

Aired on Sept 4th on BBC to celebrate this weeks trial run of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a history of the Big Bang, a story far more wonderful and imaginative than Biblical creation.

(For those of you that have noticed that I keep bashing religion at the moment – I’ve had enough, I’ve cracked. I am normally relatively nonpartisan about politics because I don’t like or trust any politicians from McCain to Obama, but I can normally see people’s points of view from both sides of the fence. However, I really, really am depressed about a certain intellectually incurious, beehive hairdoed, 50s throwback, living adjacent to Siberia without a Passport. Someone probably quite nice as a person and harmless, if her opinions aren’t inflicted on everyone. Someone who thinks that fairy stories should be taught as an alternative to science and that rape victims should be forced to have babies without a welfare state to support them. Palin is living proof that consent can be manufactured, and in 15 minutes, as junk food rather than a healthy product.)

3 comments science