Friday, September 19, 2008

Helter Skelter


What's scariest of all is the panicky herd behavior of investors and Wall Street playaz. The Dow's risen 700 points in the last two days just on the word from Treasury Guy Paulson that he's got a magic bullet.

The details of this plan haven't been revealed. Until we know the details, we don't have any idea who's going to be doing what to, and for, whom.

But just on the announcement that the high priests can work their paper magic and "fix the problem," the money crowd moves hysterically and in a mob, riding the roller coaster back to the top.

They're a bunch of mindless hysterics running first in one direction then the other.

So what happens when they find out there is no magic bullet? That you can't just make billions of dollars of bad paper disappear? That somebody has to pay? That this is not a "liquidity problem;" it's an insolvency problem?

This is the second time this has happened in fewer than 100 years (79 years exactly since the last one), and I'm telling you, this is no way to run an economy and a country. It's literally crazy and insane, when you consider those morons in nice suits, nearly all of them nothing but yes-men and yes-women, crazy I say to allow them to run a major world economy.

Capitalists never think. They're just bundles of reflexes and loose ends, and their economic cycle always follows the same pattern: a slow recovery, then boom, mania, panic, and collapse.

Some things have got to change.

3 comments:

Joe said...

I have seen this move toward reckoning coming at an accelerated pace. The Bush administration let the problem grow and actually enabled its to continued build-up to placate the world during the one war they thought was more important than anything else.

Rod said...

Ain't it spooky how all of this crap seems to surface at the end of an administration. Almost like they're emptying the cookie jar before the new folk move in.
Same thing has happened down here in Oz, or maybe we're just surfing in the backwash of your problems in the US

Joe said...

A lot of it is that the world economy is a pretty hard to understand thing. Much of it is psychological, especially the great part that involves the fluff. The other part involving the basic needs and services has to support all the non-essential stuff. But it can look unwieldy in a hurry.

So when the people realize that they don't need all the stuff that they thought they did, things begin to get tumultuous. We may finally be noticing that we are there.

The end of presidential terms is a time of public reflection. It is when people get jittery from future uncertainty.