Dope

Limited Inc is thinking of changing the name for the Remora category. And let's be interactive about it, shall we? A little contest, my many many eager readers? Or at least my one or two. We need a label that is as au courant as an Enron exec's Swiss bank account , but as ironic as one of David Foster Wallace's footnotes. Please, use the little comment machinery thingy.

On another note, we should keep you up to date on our impoverishment -- always a big theme here at Limited Inc. Yes, December has passed, and our workload has seemingly gone down the old toilet -- we query, we query, and we receive the rare word back that this year, media is re-engineering, renewing its faith in the automatic 20% per year profit margin by getting rid of its deadwood -- the book sections, the freelancers, etc. That means, no eatin' in February for us! It is, of course, hard to get through a month without eating, but Limited Inc is stocking up on the vodka now, in order to weather the storm. An old trick from the de-kulakization days.

Now, down to serious business. And for that, what better place than the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal? Having an asset they have no intention of distributing for free, the WSJ isn't linkable. But we read Mark Falcoff's op-ed piece, Argentina has a choice: Peronism or Modernity, and we couldn't think of a better example of the iron logic of globalisation in its Post-Keynsian guise.

Key graf for us is near the end:
" ... let no one assume that Argentina can solve its problems by moving backwards. In recent weeks there has been much talk about the "good old days" of classic Peronism, with boom and psen populism delivering effortless wealth to every Argentine family. Presumably, experiments with a new, floating currency,a default on foreign debts, or subsidies for unproductive (and uncompetitive) industries could put people back to work, but not for long. In the past, such policies could only be financed through heavy foreign borrowing. With the country in virtual default on $132 billion dollars in obligations, that expedient is simply not a prospect."

Ah, the wonders of globalisation. Nations, like kine being lead down the corridor to the slaugher chamber, are continually being told they can't "move backwards." Why? Because the butchers aren't going to let them. Butchers usually tranquilize the ungulates to make them more pliable. Falcoff spots the butcher's drug in his last sentence, but because he is wearing ideological blinders, he doesn't ponder its essential wonder. If he were more, let us say, Marxist, he might be curious about the historical provenance of that debt. He might even do a little research, and that research would tell him that the majority of the first 60 billion dollars was accumulated under the military junta, with the strong support, until that unfortunate Falklands business, of the US government. He might even wonder why else they would be lending to Argentina at that time -- was Citycorp so tenderhearted under Walter 'Santa Claus' Wriston that they lent to make sure the Argentine family had a guaranteed, inefficient job? And Falcoff might even, in this Marxist moment, ask about the accumulation of the other 60 billion dollars worth of debt. Guess what? It was taken on under Menem and Cavallo's shock treatment regime, when the enterprises were freed, the peso was matched to the dollar, and according to the WSJ, Argentina was proving that Reaganism on the international level was the only way to go (a self fulfilling prophecy -- you can't go backwards when you've sold off your assets to the most corrupt bidder. You especially can't go home again when you torched it and don't even have enough in your budget to pay the firemen).

And say Falcoff decided to throw caution to the wind and even become Leninist. Then he might ask about the motives international lenders have for loaning 130 billion dollars to a country that now "makes up around 20 per cent of JP Morgan's Emerging Market Bond Index Global," according to the Financial Times. Emerging Market hucksters have said, aw shucks, the ratio between debt and GDP will be just fine if Argentina grows at 4.3%. That it has experience negative growth for the last three years, a pretty spectacular correction of -3.5% in 99, doesn't bother the Emerging Marketeer for good reason -- they are in the unique situation of having their risks cared for by such international organizations as the IMF and the World Bank. If Argentina defaults, and Limited Inc sees reason to think it will, the Emerging Marketeers will finally have to face up to the real world -- if you give excessive credit to an excessive debtor because the interest rate and the options on the interest rate are way cool, and you get your kneecaps blown off -- well, a version of caveat emptor, as the crack dealers say, kicks in.