I'd love to see how those numbers of yours stack up; more in awe than
understanding, i suspect :)
On Jun 28, 8:32 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When you look at GDP figures (not that many do) in the US you see real
> wage decline over 30 years yet an increase in consumption (and hence
> GDP). Questions obviously arise here on how - the answer is debt
> spending - but how did the borrowing arise - wouldn't we expect
> lending to fall with less money coming in to pay of debt contracted?
> Part of the answer lies in greed and a property bubble created by
> this. Loans appeared to be secured against property, but the banks
> were fueling speculation to inflate property prices to 'earn'
> bonuses. I see little difference in what they did and Deng ordering
> 'homes' that no one will live in. In a sense we all went into a
> command economy. As with the famous Sino-Soviet experiments this was
> and still is based on 'elite madness' and false accounting.
>
> I mention habros because a poisoning feature of luxury seems
> involved. It's surely all over - just switch on TV. The way we
> normally think about running a household just don't apply, though
> politicians mug us with this kind of false analogy. The promise in
> the last election in the UK was that frontline services would not be
> affected by cuts in waste and all the other lies of this kind - the
> usual 5 cents in the dollar stuff pace Bob Dole. This never works and
> we know it doesn't.
>
> I would guess most people have a notion that GDP is a reflection of
> effort and this is the problem. GDP goes up when we buy plastic
> Chinese crap or TVs we didn't make on money borrowed against what was
> supposed to be the ever rising value of our assets like housing. So
> GDP goes up when we simply bubble property prices - usually good for
> people owning property. What the banks did in this needs long
> investigation and description - but in short they began to make money
> make money - something that clearly can't be 'real'. The accounting
> here involves governments creating electronic money (now QE) and
> lending this at low rates to favoured banks (a surplus of capital
> never built on effort) who appeared to be making money hand over
> fist. This was really the Ponzi scheme and no more than anything
> Madoff was doing. Ponzi schemes pay out not on earnings but with the
> new money their lies on performance bring in. The lies are supported
> by elaborate maths. I teach the maths and they don't work as claimed,
> only reducing risk in margins. The key metaphor is to imagine playing
> Monopoly against a banker with a couple of spare sets of money in her
> back pocket.
>
> The idea in this is to use capital ore and more effectively (fine) but
> it all goes mad when the capital becomes earnings ten years off
> treated as though you've made it now. The maths is complicated but
> the schemes are not - it's almost like placing bets on all horses and
> living it up on the winnings whilst ignoring the losses or inflating
> the currency you use to 'account' for them.
>
> What people can't grab is that economics and accounting is like this
> anyway - though supposedly under strict rules. Businesses need to
> stay alive until the good times when most profit is made. This is
> fine until the madness or crooks get in and the idea ceases to be
> about the viable business and becomes just profit.
>
> I can build the case in figures but the issue is corruption - a
> corruption as endemic as that in Soviet performance management. What
> they are telling us is stark. We can't have the public services (who
> cares who runs them if they do it properly) to educate kids, look
> after old and disabled people and the rest even though we have plenty
> of labour to do this - labour in some senses earned through massive
> productivity rises in agriculture and manufacturing. Looming over us
> is a massive and generally parasitic financial services sector that
> matches these productivity gains in size - all of which could be
> routinised to a fraction.
>
> When we talk about making an industry efficient we have little problem
> with allowing wages to come under international competition and all
> the rest, Yet to match this in, say, policing by importing droves of
> keen Chinese and sacking our expensive finest - and the very idea of
> doing this at the top of banking seems impossible - though all the
> skills are comparable.
>
> I suspect the real issues cannot be addressed because most people
> adjust to a view of just being cogs in the wheel and feel their sanity
> threatened by thoughts of the criminality that has been going on
> around them. They look for homely answers like 'blaming profligate
> Greeks' (a hospital doctor in Greece gets under half what a lecturer
> gets in the UK) and imagining austerity measures will let us save our
> way out of the problems. This is not what history tells us - though,
> of course, most people know no real history.
>
> What is happening now is history. - it may as well be a re-write of
> much imperialist history. I hope war is less on the cards, but I'm
> not at all sure. Our ignorance is the real issue - and I suspect this
> is ignorance about just how unfair the world is and how massively
> irrational our systems are.. It's worse than we are thinking and our
> public dialogue allows us to say.
>
> The questions we aren't asking are about what would be left if there
> was no more 'international trade' and we got round to making stuff
> locally and allowing more global exchange of expertise through virtual
> exchange. We aren't broke in such a system and have capital.
>
> My guess is that most of what we call 'work' in the current system is
> no such thing - it's neurosis.
>
> On Jun 28, 12:58 pm, Ash <ashkas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > So, bullets=100pts, futures=-100TNpts. ;-)
>
> > On 6/28/2011 12:07 AM, archytas wrote:
>
> > > The truth on bullets is you get to eat if you have them and the food
> > > holders don't!
>
> > > On Jun 28, 3:52 am, rigsy03<rigs...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> I wonder the number of vacant, distressed properties in the West?
>
> > >> Well, China was humiliated by the tactics of the West in our forcing
> > >> her to open to trade via opium and dynasty overthrow plus the theft of
> > >> her national arts and treasures- keeping them "safe" in western
> > >> museums, like the rest of our lootings.
>
> > >> Americans accumulated their own debt with abuse of credit when it was
> > >> easy street. The banks/financial institutions were irresponsible and
> > >> so were our governments. You can't eat bullets.
>
> > >> On Jun 27, 4:49 pm, archytas<nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >>> I don't believe the modern arguments (post 1950) concern communism
> > >>> other than as a futile ideal. We seem to have forgotten about habros
> > >>> - the polluting quality of luxury. The term arises in a Greek play
> > >>> celebrating the victory of the Athenian Democracy over the Persians.
> > >>> The warning to the Greeks was that they must never become sissies
> > >>> wallowing in emotions and luxury like the defeated Persians. Most of
> > >>> us are barely aware of history and have no real clue what the Soviets
> > >>> and Chinese were up to. Even in relation to what's going on in China
> > >>> now, I find few who know they have built ghost cities and are fueling
> > >>> GDP growth with a property bubble.
> > >>> The broad brush of western economics is that the ignorant rabble have
> > >>> no place in real decision-making and that they must both know this (in
> > >>> order not to forget their place) and to deny it in fantasies to
> > >>> encourage virtual self-aggrandizement. Thus we are to live in virtual
> > >>> meritocracy whilst actually just part of a pack that will not
> > >>> challenge the alphas. In a very real way, we do not argue with facts,
> > >>> but the stories of literature which bounds our expectations. Video
> > >>> games are a warning of what we are, even if we don't play them.
> > >>> The debts that are everywhere like a nightmare are not to do with
> > >>> money as a means of simple exchange, taken on to be worked off in some
> > >>> equation of labour value. They have been manipulated as surely as any
> > >>> in past empires. Just as Chinese GDP is floating on 64 million empty
> > >>> buildings no one can afford to live in (terms are often half up front,
> > >>> the balance over 3 years), our currencies float on deals between
> > >>> governments and favoured banks. We have suppressed wages and banks
> > >>> hardly even provide working capital for business, instead engaging in
> > >>> speculation in giant Ponzi schemes hedged in ever increasing prices
> > >>> for assets that no one would eventually be able to buy from a wage,
> > >>> and securitised to the tax payer. Wages were collapsed over 30 years
> > >>> by exporting manufacturing - but GDP kept rising as we borrowed
> > >>> against the asset pile to buy more and more crap and pay welfare to
> > >>> those deprived of jobs.
> > >>> The rich grew vastly richer in this period. If there are 64 million
> > >>> Chinese apartments empty, how many across the world are now holiday
> > >>> homes and the rest. None of this is communist or capitalist economics
> > >>> - it's more fundamental, possibly the economics of the city in which
> > >>> absentee landlords gamble the labour of poor tenants and then replace
> > >>> them with more economic sheep. The money that was always making money
> > >>> in high finance was never making anything other than the debt. You
> > >>> need to understand mark to model and mark to market. The money was
> > >>> never being made - banks were allowed to value their own assets to
> > >>> models kept secret for reasons of commercial security. Now, if they
> > >>> have to really sell any 'assets' they are worth what the market will
> > >>> pay. And given the way banks count loans as assets, they are all
> > >>> probably bankrupt because most of the loans will be real liabilities.
> > >>> None of us borrowed this 'money'. It was pumped in by the Fed, BoE,
> > >>> EU Central and so on and stole your hard-earned from underneath you.
> > >>> This
>
> ...
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
0 comments:
Post a Comment