It turns out greed is not so good
A reader and Joe Bageant stare over precipiceLet's make a little wager. How long will it take before Social Security is privatized in order to "save Social Security?" Which by sheer coincidence would also pour billions more into Wall Street hands.
Pisses me off. I was counting on Social Security. I just filed for it last month. I'm sure I will get a check all right, paid in fiat currency. Source
Fortune magazine laid it out in 2007
When it comes to markets, we hold these truths to be self-evident: (1) It's never different this time, and (2) Every boom leads to financial excesses that spark its undoing. (That's why they're called business cycles.) "The necessary conditions for a bubble to form are quite simple and number only two," investor Jeremy Grantham noted in a recent newsletter headlined "The First Truly Global Bubble." "First, the fundamental economic conditions must look at least excellent - and near perfect is better. Second, liquidity must be generous in quantity and price: It must be easy and cheap to leverage." That pretty much sums up the world we've been living in, a world where prices skyrocketed for Miami condos, Indian stocks, and office towers in Dubai. Source
And, BTW, ailout isn’t socialism – it’s fascism
As Progressive Review reports:
Brady Wiseman in Bozeman MT writes to note, "Bailing out the banks is not socialism. The government and the Fed are not becoming exactly the creditors of the banks. Because the numbers are so large, they are now partners. It's not a bailout so much as a merger. What do you call the merger of government and corporations? Mussolini called it fascism."
Wiseman is quite right. We let ourselves get caught in the rhetoric of the day in which you can call anything you don't like socialism, but god forbid you use the term fascism. In the past, however, we have addressed this matter:
Sam Smith, 2006 - One needs to look not at Hitler but at the founder of fascism, Mussolini. What Mussolini founded was the estato corporativo - the corporative state or corporatism. Writing in Economic Affairs in the mid 1970s, R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler described corporatism as a system under which government guides privately owned businesses towards order, unity, nationalism and success. They were quite clear as to what this system amounted to: "Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face... An acceptable face of fascism, indeed, a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted forms." Source
SQUIBS
Spengler: E pluribus hokum
OJ trial summary
Catholics allowed on British throne
Orang-utans victims of tainted Chinese baby food
posted by Tom Nadeau at 5:42 PM
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