Some of you must think I’m being quite cheeky with the title of this post and some of you might call it ‘truth in advertising’.
As the article says, markets around the world have slid for the past six consecutive sessions.
Some have speculated this has something to do with the end of Quantative Easing (which means the Wall Street bankers will now be compelled to use ‘private funds’ to prop up share prices.)
And naturally, in case you haven’t been paying attention, ‘insiders’ across the board have been ‘cashing in’ every share they could get their hands on over the past year. (While private investors quaked on the sidelines, absorbing the shocking implications of this sacking of the global economy.)
Left to your imagination is what, precisely, do you do with all of that cash? (Cash that is being SERIOUSLY discounted to prevent it from blowing up the global economy!)
Geez Louise, you COULD chase commodities with it, as the screaming inflation in energy and food prices will attest.
And to further stretch your ‘bug out’ dollar you could invest it in an ‘alternative domicile’ located in a nation that is governed by an industry friendly regime or you could beef up the security of your domestic hideout…in case you don’t get away in time.
So many bases, so little time!
What do YOU think the sudden slide in stock prices mean ?
European markets fell about 1 percent Wednesday after Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, acknowledged the economy has slowed but offered no hint that the United States central bank was considering any more stimulus to accelerate growth. But Asian markets were mixed.
Wall Street stock index futures also fell, pointing to a sixth day of losses in an enduring downtrend as investors worry about the bleak economic outlook and technical market indicators point to more weakness ahead.
Oliver Pursche, president of Gary Goldberg Financial Services in Suffern, N.Y., said the market was probably hoping for some hint of action from the Fed after its second round of bond-buying expires at the end of the month. He said the market sell-off would continue past the end of the second phase of the Fed’s quantitative easing program, known as QE2, into July.
Considering what passes for the ‘global economy’ is nothing more than an exercise in ‘creative accounting’, what are the implications for the end of, er, ‘propping’ that was quantitative easing?
Will the ‘Black Hole’ created by the financial sector finally be revealed? (Worse, will the idiots keep trying to plug it with money?)
While we are here, let us take a look at what’s going on in the ‘global economy’
Every country has given in to temptation to some degree. Brazil increased tariffs on tools and toys. China opened antidumping investigations against American grain imports and imports of photographic paper from the United States, the European Union and Japan. The United States imposed a special tax on some foreigners who win government procurement contracts.
This course is not surprising given the sluggish recovery. In Europe and the United States, the end of fiscal stimulus has left communities and industries foundering. And with the international solidarity sparked by the global financial crisis eroding, governments want to give domestic firms an advantage.
Since the financial crisis began in 2008, G-20 countries have imposed 550 measures to restrict or potentially distort trade. Such measures disrupt international supply chains, reduce economic activity and dent the sense of common purpose that was needed to survive the economic crisis. Giving in to the protectionist impulse now can only make matters worse.
No irony should be lost that this was an ‘anonymous’ editorial from today’s NY Times. A good percentage of these ‘unattributed’ opinion pieces are, er, ‘contrary’ to current mainstream positions.
I’m not kicking the ‘anonymous’ part in the shins; I use a pen name myself.
Is it an ‘act of courage’ to speak your mind when what you’re advocating is totally wrong?
Which, ironically, brings us back to ‘opinions’…you can be sure our anonymous scribe ‘thinks’ they have ‘god’ on their side, even if the ‘little people’ don’t agree.
What have we got here? We have another opportunity to hop on my favorite hobbyhorse and flog A Simple Plan for a few minutes!
What is often called the ‘basic flaw’ with both capitalism and communism? They both assume resources are set to ‘infinite’. They also ‘assume’ economies are just as ‘flexible’ (despite massive evidence to the contrary.)
How was A Simple Plan developed?
A Simple plan works on the premise that all economies are LOCAL and that the most efficient use of resources requires minimum movement of those resources.
(This is due largely in recognition of the fact that shipping shit halfway across the globe will soon be cost prohibitive, and redundancy is in fact a ‘net social good’.)
Or are you like the author of this piece of tripe and think that the global race to the bottom produces the ‘ultimate good’?
While he has lately been doing doing his damnedest to paint himself green, the guy who wrote a book about the ‘flat earth’ is the likeliest individual to express the misguided opinions put forth by this article.
He has also, of late, been distancing himself from his prior support for globalization (although he has yet to repudiate his early ardor.)
But, as I point out in the beginning, the article is ‘anonymous’ and all we can do is ‘speculate’.
At the end of the day ‘economics’ (real economics and not capitalist bullshit) is simple and straightforward.
So good citizen put all of the cards in the order they belong and economics is like a clockwork, affected only by the cycles of nature.
Probably too much of a simplification for some of you but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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