Comments on: Where Are We Again? (Pre-G20 Pittsburgh summit)

By: Bernard

Bernard — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:31:25 +0000

To watch the sale of America and the looting of the American taxpayer is horrifying. by the corporations owning Congress.
a short term profit at the long term rip off of all Americans. Then the corporations will just up and go find another country to bleed dry.

socialism for the few at the expense of the rest.
Socialism American Style. Freedom.. nothing left to loose.

By: Clay Matthews

Clay Matthews — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:32:27 +0000

Big fan of Mr. Johnson. One comment on his Bill Moyers appearance…I wish he would not refer to the bankers as “incompetent.” They were very competent at getting massive amounts of money out of the system and into their personal bank accounts without going to jail. Very competent indeed.

By: Ed Lane

Ed Lane — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:23:44 +0000

If real healthcare reform happens, it will be the result (IMHO) of Obama shifting the message to one that concerns the majority of voters (it’s the insurance companies, stupid) rather than the minority (those without adequate healthcare). the same has to occur with financial reform. As long as the majority of americans have a job, they will not vote for something that benefits the minority UNLESS they see something in it for them. this is human nature, like it or not. Those with the ability to express the impact of “two Americas” on the majority will do a great service.

Who is up to the task?

By: BRUCE E. WOYCH

BRUCE E. WOYCH — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:58:10 +0000

The mythic logos of the eternal return appears to permeate these “recovery cycles” as some kind of cognative suspended animation. But these recapitulating sequences are consequential and revisional not corrective and provisional.

The rates of exploitation grow proportionately with the scope of global expansion and technological intensification (on the one hand), and the inverse scale of ecological degragation and environmental depletion/exhaustion with the consequential reduction to service to demographic redistribution. This, in turn, can be neatly solved by simply cutting the pie values into class segments (like tranches) and politicizing the “stabilization” of shareholders to stakeholders at inverse proportions.

The “political economy” therein, is a self sustaining (status quo / laissez Faire) syndication of interests that provide a fortress of institutionalized self preservation for its lucky owner membership as an imperative of primal survival necessity. One might say that it grows nearly to the degree of cannibalistic towards the rest of the demographic world in pursuit of its one track and zero sum renditions of what is acceptable and what is expendable.
The pressure over time, however, is not only between the perennial exclusions but in the competitive fight for inclusion and the coallitions or factions that are formulated.
That is essentially where we are at right now in terms that are “other” to the normative classifications and genre in economic speak. It is not about a “factory economy” assemblage seeking balance, so much as it is a contest of power for the core alignment of global group/scope and domestic scales. Interexpansionary collusion is economizing duplicity in global political inter-relations, while politics is historicizing (sorry..ah..let’s say retooling the ideological justifications for) the new “realism for a domestic intersubjective economy of atonements. The “market” equilibrium theory of balance can’t decide between efficiency and effectiveness or deficiency and affectiveness; but nowhere is a cost/ratio interaction truly the decisive factor…that just simply gets adjusted to suit the primal order of “established” society.

By: Mary Margaret

Mary Margaret — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:26:37 +0000

Yes this posting summarizes my understanding of what is happening. And the politicians are bribed by coporate money. I’m retiring this year,(67) hope my health gives me about twenty more years. I was “comfortable middle class” due to affordiable university education, always employed, had sick time paid. I don’t think there is going to be a middle class in twenty years in the USA. Just the coporate finance and business rich thieves, technocrats and undereducated poor citizens. Hope I can afford a decently staffed skilled nursing facility and still have the basics–food, clothing shelter and water. Oh and security–Maybe by that time the police will be paid by the coporations—the security guards like Blackhawk in New Orleans. Maybe I should just die a bit younger.

By: Plebeianswillrevolt

Plebeianswillrevolt — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:58:04 +0000

Urgent – America, the problem is “democratic egalitarianism”– which references all those issues of economics and democratic sustainability that are worthy of our consideration as we struggle to sustain our democracy in the face of a corporatist agenda (i.e., an agenda that privatizes and deregulates; that grants control over much of what matters to us in our daily lives to multinational corporations with no loyalty to our country or our people or the public good; that makes greed good, redistribution upwards meritorious, and redistribution to care for public needs and those who need a safety net to protect them somehow morally questionable).

By: tjscottjr

tjscottjr — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:15:39 +0000

Austrian Economists have been accurately predicting boom/bust cycles since the 1920′s and for the same reasoning noted in “The Next Financial Crisis” in TNR refered to in the above piece. And while I agree with the policy prescriptions noted in the article I wish the radical idea of “sound money” had been at least mentioned, even if the prevailing wisdom pooh-pooh’s the idea of a commodity based monetory system as an anachonism. Maybe so, but when the next crisis comes along, it could be so devastating that perhaps people will taken a second look and listen to the only economists who have been correctly predicting these boom/bust cycles….the Austrians.

By: Fred E

Fred E — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:05:58 +0000

It IS run by “out and out criminals.” One hundred and fifty or so of the wealthiest people in the world run this country and every other country. They are members of the Bilderbergs, Trilateral Commission, and The Council on Foreign Relations(fancy words for a thug gang.) Obama is one of their puppets and so was Bush.

Watch this video and pass on the info. It’s a long video and slow to get to some real info, but well worth the time. It opened my eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:12:49 +0000

Simon,
Greenspan must have channeled my comments from class yesterday:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=ajTHW2dMQ3fM

Inflation is what we should be most concerned about because it is an insidious tax and allows our politicians to spend money without owning up to the political ramifications of paying for their spending (indeed, borrowing from foreign governments is not free or sustainable over the long-term and neither is printing money to finance deficits).

By the time that inflation starts to show up in the #’s it will be too late for an appropriate policy response because the economic response to interest rate changes has a lag.

By: Silke

Silke — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:11:30 +0000

a piece on what Sarkozy/France is up to for the G20 summit

http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/charles_bremner/2009/09/sarkozy-threatens-another-walk-out-and-factors-in-happiness-.html

and here what the FT reported yesterday as a kind of (premature?) answer to it
http://link.ft.com/r/IOCBMM/5H3FN/GE90C/86ZGD/MK3VI/N9/h
SocGen bankers quit to launch hedge fund

By: Joe C

Joe C — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:49:24 +0000

Can someone check the slides as it appears that some text may have been cut off at the bottom in translating to PDF (see for example, slide #2)

By: Bayard

Bayard — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:32:32 +0000

Yes, Simon, as always very educational. Sad story, though. Aren’t you just a bit sorry that you are such an expert that you have to endure the continual paint of watching the world’s socioeconomic systems overwhelming much of what we spent the time since the last Great Depression recovering. As an educated observer of this evolutionary spiral, I have deep fears for the future, so deep that I am glad to be old, because if I were young I would be so depressed about the future as to be nearly suicidal.

I still think maybe, as usual, humanity will recover from its selective intellectual blindness just in time to save itself. As shame though, to have to rely on our survival instincts just to survive.

By: Silke

Silke — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:28:29 +0000

I would have betted quite a bit on you or somebody else pointing that out – there has been enough grumbling about that during his reign – but how were Eisenhower’s outings reported at the time? also as something reprehensible?

By: Yakkis

Yakkis — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:50:38 +0000

I remember a time when the last president spent more time on vacation than actually working. I was happy about that because it seemed like he could do less damage on vacation.

By: Silke

Silke — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:29:14 +0000

I’ve read somewhere that Eisenhower spent a lot of time by today’s standards a huge amount of time, playing golf
- I assume that you would never tolerate that in a president today so you get the kind of president who can function without it or who has to replace it by emergency s…x
- you want to see him/her sweat and labour and cut short on sleep just like you do – the media seem to be always full of praise for gruelling schedules which actually tend to play havoc with human sanity

- the Greeks used to have philosophers called peripatetics – I don’t remember what their specialty was but I tried their favourite walk way and a golf course probably wasn’t a bad replacement for it.

But people leisurely strolling while thinking and talking about important major AND minor things or the other way around in full public view, would they be tolerated today? and I do not mean the short for the camera walks with the thoughtful faces – I mean hours and hours of them with nothing happening for the media to feed on