Bulls, Bears & Bucks #61: Beter dan verwacht!

quote:

"You Fools Don't Understand That We're Doomed"

We're all in denial

We're replacing private debt with public debt.

We're not dealing with the cancer in our banking system.

We're not making the structural changes we need to make.

We're not being aggressive enough about restructuring debt (debt for equity swaps).

Bernanke is a wimpy Greenspan sycophant

Obama's rewarding the fools who got us here (Summers, Bernanke, Geithner)

The banksters are taking over again

quote:

"We Have A Real Problem Coming..."

The banks are still insolvent.

That little tweak to mark-to-market accounting a couple of months ago has allowed us all to plunge into deep denial.

Now that the banks are allowed to lie about what their toxic assets are worth, they'll never sell them (because if they did they would have to write them down).

The smaller banks are undercapitalized and will have to raise another $12-$14 billion.

quote:

"The question of whether or not you think the world as we know it has ended, depends on what you think the world IS as we know it. If you think the world as we know it are a handful of huge financial institutions, the dinosaurs that roam the earth, then you're right; they’re not going to exist without HUGE infusions of government money.

On the other hand, if what you really believe is our economy and our world is [..] 115 million American households that are out there, that need jobs, you start to see it very differently, you think: the dinosaurs are gone, and [there’s still a lot of stuff to be done.]"

quote:

Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2009 13:00 schreef tony_clifton- het volgende:
Ik vind 't wel straf dat niemand hier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged gelezen heeft .

Er gebeurt precies in wat er nu gaande is met de banken tot 't op een gegeven moment een andere weg inslaat.

quote:

In a quasi-futuristic America, the dark forces of centralized government and humanitarian redistribution of wealth are sapping the strength of the nation. A mysterious figure named John Galt is slowly swiping away the greatest industrial minds of the country, and they are building a free-market utopia, hidden in a valley in Colorado. They are withdrawing their minds and creative energy from the world, allowing it to crumble into ruins as a fulfillment of its own looting nature. After the collapse, these great creators will emerge from their hideout to rebuild America on an appropriately rational, productive basis, free from the tyranny of mysticism, need, and force, the rotten pillars of contemporary society. And of course, there's some austere romance in there as well, between a few of the impossibly beautiful protagonists.

quote:

Rand could not have foreseen that the problem of capitalism would not be lack of knowledge or production, but in fact the opposite: too much activity, too much creativity, too much crap, with the human race swimming in rivers of its own industrial effluent. She also did not foresee (perhaps it was impossible at the height of the Cold War) that Big Government was in fact no threat to Big Business at all. Indeed, these two have fused together over the last few decades in America, so that a corporatized federal government grows in lockstep with the economy as a whole.

What was most interesting to me, as a student of intentional communities, was the brief Utopian kernel at the heart of Atlas Shrugged. This is a 100-page section near the middle of the book, entitled "Atlantis," where Dagny Taggert (the beautiful female VP of the country's largest railroad) is first introduced to John Galt's hidden valley, where all of the great industrial minds of the country have come to take up residence, performing low-tech, low-pay jobs for each other in a perfectly free, gold-standard-only community. It is, of course, an idyllic spot, with simple, rustic, hand-built homes, and cottage-industry grade manufacturing tools. But the occupants are free from government interference, and they can live their lives rationally, and only for themselves, with the vaunted Invisible Hand taking care of the rest.

But the real key here is scale. What would make a community like Galt's valley work is its small size. If Galt's crew continued to grow their town into a large, sprawling city, all of the dysfunctions of large-scale would kick in: crime, disease, social stratification, corrupt government, etc. In short, why, after America collapses, should we expect John Galt and his heroic libertarians to prevail the next time? What would make them immune to all of the ills that plague every bloated civilization in history? I admire Rand's idea of the old being swept away by the new, to be replaced by the outgrowths of a Utopian community seed. But it seems that she overestimates her own originality in thinking that her scheme will finally be the one that is immune to the laws of society and history. Perhaps that's why she consistently has John Galt saying, "I am the first man to....." If she's using that trope to indicate her own importance, it seems vastly inflated to me. There's really not much in Atlas Shrugged to warrant such grandiosity. In the long run, she's trying to do the same thing as Plato's Republic: overcome the irrationalities created by unnatural living arrangements (i.e., civilization) by postulating a ruling Philsopher King. Didn't work in ancient Greece, won't work now.