I was no more perceptive than
anyone else; during the bull market years [of the late 1990s] some
people did send me letters claiming that major corporations were
cooking their books, but - to my great regret - I ignored them.
However, when Enron - the most celebrated company of its time, lauded
as the very model of a modern business enterprise - blew up, I
immediately saw the implications: if such a famous and celebrated
company could have been a Ponzi scheme,
it was very unlikely that the rest of U.S. business was squeaky clean.
In fact, it quickly became clear, the bubble years were both the cause
and effect of an epidemic of corporate malfeasance. Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling (p. 26) - Quoted in Wikipedia
"That's
how we got here -- a near total breakdown of responsibility at every
link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who
brought us here or risk a total systemic crash." Thomas Friedman - NYT
The US driven, world economy appears to many to be a pyramid scheme.
There is nothing new about financial pyramids, what is new is the sheer
size of this one. There are things whose very magnitude make them
difficult to process. Things like the size of the bailout, the size of
the US current account debt, or the size of Angelina Jolie's lips
immediately spring to mind. This universal pyramid, the one that is
collapsing around our ears at this moment, is bigger than all of that.
One
of the largest pyramids up till this great American cum-universal one
was the scam perpetrated on the Albanian people not long after the
collapse of Communism. The poor Albanians at least had the excuse of
knowing absolutely nothing about money, investment, capitalism or much
else besides raising goats and the "thought" of Enver Hoxha. (post-pyramid Albanians have learned a lot about trafficking prostitutes and stolen cars. Will we be so lucky?)
At this writing I am sixty four
years old and the immense bubble that has burst and is now deflating
all around us has been inflating itself since I was a tiny child.
This
bubble world is the world that I have always lived in and, unless you
are considerably older than I am or live in an undeveloped country
then, it is your world too.
When I was very young the "commie menace" hysteria began, and one of my earliest TV memories in suburban America, beside Howdy Doody, of course, was of the McCarthy hearings and the Korean war.
Karl
Marx and all who sailed in him were taboo, trefa, haram. Compared to
what Karl Marx was then, today's villain, Osama bin Laden, is Brad Pitt.
A reader of this blog, Nicolas
Nilsen sent me an interesting video where, a couple of years before it
happened, stockbroker-agent-provocateur, Peter Schiff,
in Roubini mode, correctly predicted the disaster we are entering into
now. The video appears to be a montage of Schiff predicting and other
"prestigious" analysts literally laughing in his face.
Let's look a the video:
Wow.
Bang on.... and the best parts are all these jerks laughing at him.
I have always suspected that instead of "change", Barack Obama's real mission
is to keep America's emetic reaction to clumsy, ugly, tongue tied,
George W. Bush and all his works from derailing globalization and all
those who profit from it.
As The One is careful to point out, he is the change, as for the rest, aside from his morphology, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Moises NaímisaVenezuelan born, American resident who is the director of Foreign Policy Magazine and a very perspicacious and well connected observer of America's (both north and south's) political scene indeed.
Among Naím's many activities he writes a column in his native Spanish in the Madrid daily, El País. On Sunday he wrote
a very interesting piece that I have not found published anywhere in
English called "The 23rd of January Brigade" referring to those who
will be disillusioned with Obama before he has been in office more than
three days.
