When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.
“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.
But I must quote myself from my October 30 2008 post, all the money in the world. Since that post has proven to be totally correct. I'd brag about being a prophet, except millions and millions of poor people just like me saw the same thing. You had to be an economist to believe the bullshit:
"As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks."
3 comments:
LI, if there is a time to get vulgar this might be it! I mean really what is this shit we are supposed to swallow. I say raise a racket, wherever and however one can. A stimulus package shoved up one's ass would make anyone scream, I would think.
Ah, one should calm down and do the numbers. OK, fine, they still make one scream. Fuck the wizard pundits who say 1 plus 1 equals anything but 2. Most people can read the writing on the wall, the walls of what were once their homes and work places and know it is fucking cold out there in the Zona. Shout up people and don't let them tell you you're being wooly-brained Socialists, Maoists, Shining Path or whatever. And fuck cynicism, dream a little, don't you want a joyful free life?
And don't forget a rather obvious, if unpleasant, fact - this plan to save us all doesn't make much sense and cannot work. Except by sending us spiraling into the abyss.
Ah, damn I'm so angry. But I'm sick and tired of being lost in the supermarket and sleeping next to the dog food.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWtylSdKSfA
Amie
Amie, I think you can only see the zona if you are poor - I mean really see it, in all its force and splendor. Some parts of it have an awesome beauty. Some parts are funny. For instance, watching the economists scurry from one failing model to another is a reminder that Swift was a genius - this is Island of Laputa stuff, big time. Watching one part of the U.S. government - the Fed - go from loaning the banks money at two percent to taking trillions of dollars of potential debt off their hands, while another part of the government, the court system, pushes people through the sewer who have to pay back their 19 percent credit card loans - that is awesome in its own way too. Like a horror novie. Reminiscent of Georg Foster's caterpillar factory, with the butterlies drugging the caterpillars.
Yet we all sit here. Some of us sit with our hands clutched to the chair, wating for the knock of the landlord at the door. Others - for instance, a guy I rode past on my bike yesterday - lay their cardboard sheet beds out by the the creeks that now serve, conveniently, as sewers. I'm fucking scared that that man will be me.
But I know in a sense that is a delusion. Generated in the artificial paradise to keep us in line. It isn't my daydream. I want back my daydreams.
The great thing about the zona is that it both is and it isn't. It is as if that sci fi motif, where a man projects his reality from his brain, were half true. Half of the zona is delusion, based on the swallowing of an almost infinite amount of fictitous cash. And half of it is true - that fictitious cash bought drinks in manhattan and houses in the hamptons and congressmen in d.c. and mayors in Provence and all kinds of worldly stuff. And in this hologram, all the movements were made, the economies reconfigured, factories closed, countries torn apart like rotten fruit. Mexico devolves into a dirty war and the emerging markets guys report that Mexico is stable as a rock. Etc.
But, however bad the zona is, the last eight years have been worse. Much worse. The fictitious money bought way too much bloodshed. They butchered our third lives and tired out our first lives. They poisoned fucking, drinking, and breathing. They turned democracy into a con game for suckers, run by imbeciles. We have a long way to go before we can wash the dirt of that out. That's the debt I'm worried about.
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