Kunstler: The Leviathan.
The Leviathan
The economic picture manufactured by the national consensus trance has never been more out of touch with reality in my lifetime. And so the questions as to what anyone might do can hardly be addressed. How can I protect my savings? Who do I vote for? How do I think about where my country is going? Incoherence reigns, especially in the circles ruled by those who guard the status quo, which includes the failing legacy news media.
The Federal Reserve has morphed from being a faceless background institution of the most limited purpose to a claque of necromancers and astrologasters, led by one grand vizier, in full public view pretending to steer a gigantic economic vessel that has, in fact, lost its rudder and is drifting into a maelstrom.
For more than a year, the fate of the nation has hung on whether the Fed might raise their benchmark interest rate one quarter of a percent. They talk about it incessantly, and therefore the mob of financial market observers has to chatter about it incessantly, and the chatter itself has appeared to obviate the need for any actual action on the matter. The Fed gets to influence markets without ever having to do anything. And mostly it has worked to produce the false narrative of an advanced economy that is working splendidly well to the advantage of the common good.
This is all occurring against the background of a larger global network of economic relations that is quite clearly breaking apart. The rising tensions between the US, Russia, China, and the Euro Union grew out of monetary mischief “innovated” by our central bank, especially the shenanigans around debt monetization, which have created dangerous distortions in markets, trade, and perceptions of national interest. Nations are rattling sabers at one another and bluster is in the air. The world is bankrupt after thirty years of borrowing from the future to throw a party in the present, and the authorities can’t acknowledge that.
But they can provide the conditions for disguising it, especially in the statistical hall of mirrors that once-upon-a-time produced meaningful signals for the movement of capital. Instead of reality-based choices and decisions, the task at hand for the people in charge has been the ever more baroque elaboration of a Potemkin economic false-front, behind which lies a landscape of ruin scavenged by desperate racketeers. That this racketeering has moved so seamlessly into the once-sacred precincts of medicine and higher ed ought to inform us how desperate and perilous it has become.
The latest installment of the disinformation game was Friday’s employment release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a “blockbuster,” implying blue skies everywhere from Montauk to Malibu. Except that no one with a remaining shred of critical faculty can be expected to believe it. 80 percent of the new jobs numbers were attributed to the mystical birth-death model, a pseudo-scientific fantasy of hypothetical new business starts and associated hypothetical new hires. Demographically, the most new jobs went to the over-55 age cohort — grocery baggers and Walmart greeters — and the fewest to men 25 to 54 (that bracket substantially lost jobs). The official unemployment rate fell to 5.0 rate, with no meaningful discussion of the huge numbers of discouraged people who have dropped out of the workforce.
But the perception of an economy on full throttle chug sent the stock indexes up. The Dow, the S & P and the NASDAQ are the only signaling mechanisms that the legacy media pays attention to, and the politicos take their cues from them, in a feedback loop of false information that begets more delusional positive psychology in those same markets. I suspect the sentiment that reigns now is about nothing more than getting through the holiday season without a financial accident.
But this Fed now finds itself in a trap of its own making. Having so interminably yapped about the interest rate hike, the central bank will have to put up or shut up in December. Only the year-final BLS employment figures might give them an out, if the numbers don’t look so phosphorescent. I think the truth is, this phony baloney economy can’t withstand even a measly quarter-point benchmark interest rate hike. For one thing, it would blow up the operating models of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the buyers of home mortgages who are keeping the construction industry on life support, as well as the parallel rackets in securitized auto and student loans. Imagine all the derivatives bets that would go south. In reality, the Fed knows that it will have to shovel more ZIRP money into the debt-saturated maw of a dying financial leviathan. It can do that, of course, and probably will in the coming winter of 2016, but when that time comes, it will have absolutely no credibility left. And the leviathan will be a little closer to heaving up dead on the beach.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Friday, November 06, 2015
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
Estelle feat. Kanye West, "American Boy."
I first heard (and heard of) this song Wednesday afternoon on 92.7 FM, waiting in the hot parking lot of Target.
George Michael, "Freedom `90"
I changed my tagline. The former one is still good.
All we have to see/Is that I don't belong to you/And you don't belong to me/Freedom--George Michael, "Freedom '90"
All we have to see/Is that I don't belong to you/And you don't belong to me/Freedom--George Michael, "Freedom '90"
The world's most powerful people:
1. Vladimir Putin
2. Angela Merkel
3. Barack Obama
More: https://t.co/43Oz56qVKU
— Forbes (@Forbes) November 4, 2015Monday, November 02, 2015
Kunstler at Boston College
Kunstler recently spoke at Boston College. It was a standard talk about the Long Emergency. Then he went out to dinner "with four faculty members and one friend-of-faculty. Three of them were English profs. One was an urban planner and one was an ecology prof. All of the English profs were specialists in race, gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that the college was a little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current academic obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. Anyway, on the way to restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about a particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to view things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner table...".
Kunstler: Good Little Maoists.
I think he's digging himself a big hole here.
"Anyway, it was not a coincidence that in the mid 1960s a new wave of black separatist avatars arose around the time of the civil rights legislative victories. Malcolm X, Stokely Charmichael [sic], the Black Panthers, to name a few. That was the moment when much of the black population slid into what has become essentially an oppositional culture, determined to remain separate. Language is part of that picture."--Kunstler
The Black Panthers:
"The writings of the Black Panthers are also in impeccable standard English, but in their speeches there are occasional occurrences of Black English for stylistic effect, to mark group solidarity. ..."
Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education, edited by Christina Bratt Paulston.
(The book looks interesting.)
Stokely Carmichael.
"Described by some as a "black ogre of choice"[23] and by others as "cool and very hip,"[24] Stokely Carmichael was a man of varied rhetorical talents. From an early age, his charismatic style made him a favorite among his fellow Civil Rights activists and a national leader in the Civil Rights Movement. When he first talked about Black Power in Mississippi in 1966, he did so with the fiery passion of a Southern demagogue--a type of speaker he loved to hate. With just a few words, he was able to rally the crowd that came out to see him in Greenwood, Mississippi into a chorus of voices shouting, "Black Power! Black Power! Black Power!" His ability to tailor his speeches to different audiences was one of his greatest talents, as Carmichael himself boasted in his autobiography:
"While Carmichael himself claimed never to use obscenities or vulgarities, rhetorical critic Pat Jefferson notes that his speeches were often laden with risqué sexual innuendos and four-letter words.[26] Whatever the case, Carmichael was always careful to adapt his language to his audience. A speech at Boston's Episcopal Theological School was fashioned very differently from one before a group of young, black street kids or Civil Rights activists."
See also Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, esp. pp. 224-228.
Kunstler: Good Little Maoists.
I think he's digging himself a big hole here.
"Anyway, it was not a coincidence that in the mid 1960s a new wave of black separatist avatars arose around the time of the civil rights legislative victories. Malcolm X, Stokely Charmichael [sic], the Black Panthers, to name a few. That was the moment when much of the black population slid into what has become essentially an oppositional culture, determined to remain separate. Language is part of that picture."--Kunstler
The Black Panthers:
"The writings of the Black Panthers are also in impeccable standard English, but in their speeches there are occasional occurrences of Black English for stylistic effect, to mark group solidarity. ..."
Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education, edited by Christina Bratt Paulston.
(The book looks interesting.)
Stokely Carmichael.
"Described by some as a "black ogre of choice"[23] and by others as "cool and very hip,"[24] Stokely Carmichael was a man of varied rhetorical talents. From an early age, his charismatic style made him a favorite among his fellow Civil Rights activists and a national leader in the Civil Rights Movement. When he first talked about Black Power in Mississippi in 1966, he did so with the fiery passion of a Southern demagogue--a type of speaker he loved to hate. With just a few words, he was able to rally the crowd that came out to see him in Greenwood, Mississippi into a chorus of voices shouting, "Black Power! Black Power! Black Power!" His ability to tailor his speeches to different audiences was one of his greatest talents, as Carmichael himself boasted in his autobiography:
I had a standard-English speech reserved for the merely affluent and curious. Many times these people would say or write that they had expected an "antiwhite diatribe" or a "raving militant rap." Only to be so pleasantly surprised to get a reasoned argument that--even if they didn't agree with it--was "thought provoking." . . . Then too I had a harder, more analytic, and ideological argument for more serious political and intellectual forums. . . . Then there was a down-home, nitty-gritty idiom in a style I mostly borrowed from the Harlem street corner nationalists and the Southern black preachers. This I saved for the brothers and sisters on the block. But the political message stayed the same, whatever the audience, language, or occasion. Only the style changed.[25]
"While Carmichael himself claimed never to use obscenities or vulgarities, rhetorical critic Pat Jefferson notes that his speeches were often laden with risqué sexual innuendos and four-letter words.[26] Whatever the case, Carmichael was always careful to adapt his language to his audience. A speech at Boston's Episcopal Theological School was fashioned very differently from one before a group of young, black street kids or Civil Rights activists."
See also Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, esp. pp. 224-228.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Friday, October 30, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
I spoke with @ThomasEWoods about libertarianism and the basic income. What a fun conversation! https://t.co/dbEV49wCjW
— Matt Zwolinski (@Mattzwolinski) October 26, 2015Kunstler: Something Happened.
Kunstler: Something Happened.
Ben Bernanke’s memoir is out and the chatter about it inevitably turns to the sickening moments in September 2008 when “the world economy came very close to collapse.” Easy to say, but how many people know what that means? It’s every bit as opaque as the operations of the Federal Reserve itself.
There were many ugly facets to the problem but they all boiled down to global insolvency — too many promises to pay that could not be met. The promises, of course, were quite hollow. They accumulated over the decades-long process, largely self-organized and emergent, of the so-called global economy arranging itself. All the financial arrangements depended on trust and good faith, especially of the authorities who managed the world’s “reserve currency,” the US dollar.
By the fall of 2008, it was clear that these authorities, in particular the US Federal Reserve, had failed spectacularly in regulating the operations of capital markets. With events such as the collapse of Lehman and the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it also became clear that much of the collateral ostensibly backing up the US banking system was worthless, especially instruments based on mortgages. Hence, the trust and good faith vested in the issuer of the world’s reserve currency was revealed as worthless.
The great triumph of Ben Bernanke was to engineer a fix that rendered trust and good faith irrelevant. That was largely accomplished, in concert with the executive branch of the government, by failing to prosecute banking crime, in particular the issuance of fraudulent securities built out of worthless mortgages. In effect, Mr. Bernanke (and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice), decided that the rule of law was no longer needed for the system to operate. In fact, the rule of law only hampered it.
Mr. Bernanke now says he “regrets” that nobody went to jail. That’s interesting. More to the point perhaps he might explain why the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission did not make any criminal referrals to the US Attorney General in such cases as, for instance, Goldman Sachs (and others) peddling bonds deliberately constructed to fail, on which they had placed bets favoring that very failure.
There were a great many such cases, explicated in full by people and organizations outside the regulating community. For instance, the Pro Publica news organization did enough investigative reporting on the racket of collateralized debt obligations to send many banking executives to jail. But the authorities turned a blind eye to it, and to the reporting of others, mostly on the web, since the legacy news media just didn’t want to press too hard.
In effect, the rule of law was replaced with a patch of official accounting fraud, starting with the April 2009 move by the Financial Accounting Standards Board involving their Rule 157, which had required banks to report the verifiable mark-to-market value of the collateral they held. It was essentially nullified, allowing the banks to value their collateral at whatever they felt like saying.
Accounting fraud remains at the heart of the fix instituted by Ben Bernanke and the ploy has been copied by authorities throughout the global financial system, including the central banks of China, Japan, and the European Community. That it seemed to work for the past seven years in propping up global finance has given too many people the dangerous conviction that reality is optional in economic relations. The recovery of equity markets from the disturbances of August has apparently convinced the market players that stocks are invincible. Complacency reigns at epic levels. Few are ready for what is coming.
Ben Bernanke’s memoir is out and the chatter about it inevitably turns to the sickening moments in September 2008 when “the world economy came very close to collapse.” Easy to say, but how many people know what that means? It’s every bit as opaque as the operations of the Federal Reserve itself.
There were many ugly facets to the problem but they all boiled down to global insolvency — too many promises to pay that could not be met. The promises, of course, were quite hollow. They accumulated over the decades-long process, largely self-organized and emergent, of the so-called global economy arranging itself. All the financial arrangements depended on trust and good faith, especially of the authorities who managed the world’s “reserve currency,” the US dollar.
By the fall of 2008, it was clear that these authorities, in particular the US Federal Reserve, had failed spectacularly in regulating the operations of capital markets. With events such as the collapse of Lehman and the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it also became clear that much of the collateral ostensibly backing up the US banking system was worthless, especially instruments based on mortgages. Hence, the trust and good faith vested in the issuer of the world’s reserve currency was revealed as worthless.
The great triumph of Ben Bernanke was to engineer a fix that rendered trust and good faith irrelevant. That was largely accomplished, in concert with the executive branch of the government, by failing to prosecute banking crime, in particular the issuance of fraudulent securities built out of worthless mortgages. In effect, Mr. Bernanke (and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice), decided that the rule of law was no longer needed for the system to operate. In fact, the rule of law only hampered it.
Mr. Bernanke now says he “regrets” that nobody went to jail. That’s interesting. More to the point perhaps he might explain why the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission did not make any criminal referrals to the US Attorney General in such cases as, for instance, Goldman Sachs (and others) peddling bonds deliberately constructed to fail, on which they had placed bets favoring that very failure.
There were a great many such cases, explicated in full by people and organizations outside the regulating community. For instance, the Pro Publica news organization did enough investigative reporting on the racket of collateralized debt obligations to send many banking executives to jail. But the authorities turned a blind eye to it, and to the reporting of others, mostly on the web, since the legacy news media just didn’t want to press too hard.
In effect, the rule of law was replaced with a patch of official accounting fraud, starting with the April 2009 move by the Financial Accounting Standards Board involving their Rule 157, which had required banks to report the verifiable mark-to-market value of the collateral they held. It was essentially nullified, allowing the banks to value their collateral at whatever they felt like saying.
Accounting fraud remains at the heart of the fix instituted by Ben Bernanke and the ploy has been copied by authorities throughout the global financial system, including the central banks of China, Japan, and the European Community. That it seemed to work for the past seven years in propping up global finance has given too many people the dangerous conviction that reality is optional in economic relations. The recovery of equity markets from the disturbances of August has apparently convinced the market players that stocks are invincible. Complacency reigns at epic levels. Few are ready for what is coming.
Halloween Music, Part 1: Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead."
Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead."
I posted this video back in February 2013.
But not this version:
And speaking of what-a-difference-two-and-two-thirds-years make, remember this?
Well, check this out:
I posted this video back in February 2013.
But not this version:
And speaking of what-a-difference-two-and-two-thirds-years make, remember this?
Well, check this out:
This year, as Rubio runs for president, he has cast the Senate — the very place that cemented him as a national politician — as a place he’s given up on, after less than one term. It’s too slow. Too rule-bound. So Rubio, 44, has decided not to run for his seat again. It’s the White House or bust.
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