Its quite amazing how Reagan is revered these days , when at the time he seemed so ridiculous. Now many ideological Reaganite capitalists look radical rather than conservative and are simultaneously crying out for what counts as socialism by their measure.
Lets hear the Gipper tell you why government run things like our remaining banks, or the army for that matter, are silly; lament the fact that the US will never enjoy the same cheap healthcare you can get anywhere else in the developed world and remind you that Reagan really was an anachronistic throwback – a vacuuous, accidental sage like Chauncey the gardener in Being There .
Comments Off on Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicinebusiness
There are several economists who are being called Dr. Doom. Roubini is the best, he sounds like a recorded message played after a nuclear attack. James Bond villains are less terrifying – and I’m talking about what he says now.
October 3rd, 2008Comments Off on Holidays in the Danger Zone – Places that dont Exist | # link to | posted by david
The premise of this 5 part documentary series is interesting in itself – breakaway states, but this episode is particularly relevant. It is about the Georgian breakaway states including South Ossetia. These are the Caucuses – where Caucasians, a ridiculous term that is racism by indirection, don’t come from. Unless you are Georgian, or a Georgian from a breakaway state that doesn’t want to be Georgian, that is. Confused? Stay tuned.
(running time: 30 mins.)
Comments Off on Holidays in the Danger Zone – Places that dont Existworld
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.]
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?
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.
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.
September 15th, 2008Comments Off on Blue Monday | # link to | posted by david
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.