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Spin-O-Nomics In A World Of Unraveling Globalism
Submitted by James H Kunstler via Kusntler.com,
“…we may be headed into a world where capital is abundant, deflationary pressures are substantial and demand could be in short supply for quite some time.”
- Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury
Professor Summers must be reading Ben Bernanke’s new blog. Or maybe he’s writing it for walking-around money. At $250,000 a pop for making a speech, Mr. Bernanke can certainly afford to pay high-toned hacks to polish his spin-o-nomics. Raillery aside, Mr. Summers’ utterance provokes some pretty fundamental questions: what exactly is this world we’re heading into, and what exactly does that capital consist of?
It is, first, a world of unraveling globalism. So many people who should know better — members of the supposed thinking class who have suspended their thinking — swallowed Tom Friedman’s dictum that globalism was here to stay, a permanent new feature of the human condition. File that idea in the dead letter office, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. With the help of competitive central bank racketeering, desperate nations have propelled themselves from financial disorder to geopolitical turmoil and history marches on - lately to the ululations of gleeful beheaders. Friedman’s flat world was predicated on a dominant and sound American polity, and we’ll have neither in that world Mr. Summers says we’re moving into.
In fact the first condition was predicated on the second: that America would continue to dominate the global economy because its polity was sound. We have clearly blown that by rigging together a corrupt troika of banks, market swindlers, and captive eunuch officials who expanded the financial sector of the economy from 5 percent to more than 40 percent, largely by pillaging the middle class and destroying the basis of their income. The USA set the tone for 21st century magical finance, in which “wealth” was “created” by digital accounting fraud. The effects at home are visible on our landscape of suburban hyperwaste and decrepitating older towns and cities.
One might say the main effect of the 50-year-long Friedman globalism orgy was the schooling of other nations in American-style financial fraud. Surely China has now surpassed the USA, considering the structural perversities of their banking and government relations. They really don’t have to account to anybody, including themselves, and the numbers they publish must be even more fantastical than the junk statistics produced by the US BLS. Europe has been a star pupil and only a few months ago announced a Quantitative Easing (fake capital creation) program as ambitious as America’s have been. Japan, of course, is just marking time until it quietly slips away and goes medieval.
Global disintegration has advanced furthest, not surprisingly, in the fragile band of regions most strung out on the primary commodity: oil. The Middle East / North Africa / Central Asia war zone is steadily combusting, and there is no sign of resolution across the whole of it, only the promise that conflict will get worse. Saudi Arabia was the cornerstone of that district, and the senile Saudi leadership finds itself in peril as its military pretends to support splintering Yemen. The other Arabian princes of other non-Saud clans must be watching the spectacle with wonder and nausea. When Arabia blows up, that will truly be the beginning of the end.
The foregoing leads to that other original question: what is that “capital” we’re counting on? I’d propose that it doesn’t exist. It is a figment engraved on the hard drives of the world, a ghost that haunts the people still in charge of that disintegrating global economy. There is still wealth in the world, but a lot less than people such as Larry Summers say there is.
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"Full faith and credit"...
tick tock motherfuckers...
My clock is either very cynical or already broken. That being said it is still BTFD until the whole thing implodes. I think it is getting closer but still a ways off.
Sorry James, but just because "Globalism" was chosen as the propaganda marketing slogan under which to sell the rights dismantling to the masses doesn't make it the key problem.
Yeah...typical JHK, although he does have a fairly large sliver of the big picture compared to most blowhards. I'd love to corner him and force a Jekyll Island conversation!
Wrong. Professionals know you always sell "too early"; and keep your profits. Lotta wailing and gnashing of teeth involved in that Amateur, "I'm sure I'll know just the day to sell out"- plan.
Full faith in Christ; no worries and all is well with my soul...can't think of ANY better news than that. Changes come and go, there is nothing new under the sun...the changes we see have always occurred...the difference is we see it at a faster pace...instant if you will...but nothing new. People that worry about all this are void of God's Son.
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What we are witnessing is found in one book, the all-time best selling book that any author would be envious of; unfortunately it is the least read.
silly myths.. a lot like prozac
whatever gets ya thorugh the night, just keep that childish bs out my legal processes and policies.. kthx
Can't afford a new road; we gots to bribe Ukraine to be part of our Military-Terrorist Alliance.
Start working at home with Google ! Its by-far the best mixed bag of goods I've had. Last Thursday I got a trademark new Bmw since getting a check for $6474 this - 4 weeks past. I began this 8-months ago and immediately was coming with house at least $77 per hour. I work through this connection, go.to tech marker for work detail.... www.globe-report.com
We US'd some folks.
comment of the year ^^
we corzine'd some folks
^^ comment of the year
The markets and CB's treat all the numbers as separate entity's living in a vacuum instead of pieces of a giant puzzle. They want to determine outcomes and winners but all they are doing is breaking the system of value and trade. After the global system of manipulation falls apart it will take a very long time to put it back together.
One of the downsides of the internet is that these flunkies, who have been utterly wrong about everything in recent years, still have a forum and an audience.
Bernanke, Summers, et al, just STFU and go away already.
Pre-internet, mass communication was concentrated in capital-intensive, geography-limited concerns. Instead of a Chinese laptop, you needed a printing plant. Instead of the coffee shop wi-fi, you needed a radio station with an FCC license. Any reality check to the official line tended towards things like mimeograph sheets or soap boxes on street corners.
God knows TPTB have always had their cheerleaders and spear carriers (read through a bit of 1950's print journalism, especially Luce Inc and others doing God's Work) it's just the rubbish sounds almost plaintive. New Faux News hotties or chattering class favorites are always going to be around. We just know they're talking out of the wrong end.
One wonders who the hell reads Larry Summers news besides us ;-)
We live in what once a productive small SE Illinois town of 5,600 people. It is now a wasteland of deteriorating buidling, homes built in the 50's and 60's falling into a state of disrepair and ruin, inhabited by tattoed freaks, welfare single mothers with their unemloyed SNAP and Link card boyfrieds living off their Baby Daddy Benefits. The elderly who built the town in the 60's 70's and 80's are either in assisted living or nursing homes on government tab. There is no incentive to work...free medical care and housing for all. Our road systems are a total disaster...Township roads are nearly impassable with potholes......no money for repairs....yet their are building a new grade and high school for the welfare kids on free lunch.....with administator salaries in the mid 6 figures. We aren't going to hell in a handbasket...we've already arrived at our destination.
Time for you to move to the next town and get one of those cushy administrator jobs.
I have a not so cushy high risk job of farming. Not easy to move 1,000 acres to the next town. Administrator jobs are doled out to the politically connected and entrenched corrupt familiy overlords and their rlatives and friends. Crony Capitalism in small town America
If I remember, a farm produces FOOD.
Where I live, I'll have to eat trespassers. You'll have earth moving equipment to bury the trespassers, cause you won't have to eat them.
1000 Acre farmer= Federally subsidized fail-proof cash cow; whinning cause somebody else is sucking on the same tit. I'll feel sorry for the next well-off farmer I see, if I get around to it. Lotta work watching that .gov fuel corn grow.
You have not a single clue about farming and subsidies you fucking dick.
It's small towner envy, maybe with a spice of Austrian economics. Or Randist snobbery. Hope your fields dry soon so you can plant.
Farmer whinging about entitled young tattooed freaks lol. You'd be lucky to get a job flipping imported beef in a macdonalds if the gov ever stopped its mass subsidising of your ever-lobbying (bribing) agribusiness, don't you forget that the next time you want to have an old man rant at the 'entitled youth' you silly faggot.
"Administrator jobs are doled out to the politically connected and entrenched corrupt familiy overlords and their rlatives and friends. Crony Capitalism in small town America" -- and it will remain so until they are removed.
In the absence of a just rule of law, power and control is never willing given up, it must be taken.
same as it ever was...
I see everything's going according to plan in your neck of the woods.
It really is a shame what rich people have done to the country isn't it?
"It really is a shame what rich people have done to the country isn't it?"
The problem is NOT rich people.
People that are rich from what they produce are not the problem.
People that are rich from what they steal are the problem.
The banksters need to repay us.
In some parts of the world they will cut off your hands if you steal. Should not those that steal using their intellect have their heads cut off?
Well put. Reminds me of Billy Joel song .. . Allen Town and Waylon Jennings . Where the Corn Don't Grow.
The New World order of QEnomics.
Just keep printing until others refuse to take your currency.
The USA set the tone for 21st century magical finance...
Hmm, ignore history much, do you?
It's not the level of capital so much as the distribution. The Fed can print up to numbers only seen in Astronomy textbooks, but since it's held and circulated in a small segment of the economy, a handful of speculators doing minor games with bizarre financial instruments, it doesn't build the economy where the rest of us live. The hope that a few crumbs will fall off the table isn't the same as taking the muzzle off the ox.
If all that printed money circulated, how would that create wealth?
If the printed money was capital for productive assets, roads, communications, other infrastructure, the real economic activity would add up. Right now Obama's New Deal is for finance professionals unlike FDR's for shovel jockeys.
Globalism is the oligarch version of international trade the same way that capitalism is their version of the free market.
It's good to be an insider. /s
The same sorts who gave us East India Trading Company . gave us globalism .. economic monopoly ... and collusino between govt. and capital to advance an agenda and empire.