Your Humble Blogger tried to write another note about our financial crisis, and once again gave up partway through. This time, I was trying to explain my feeling that much of the “wealth” in this country never really existed, because of financial funny business. That is, if a thing—a Pedro Martinez rookie card, a house, a stock portfolio— is worth whatever some schmuck is willing to pay for it, and people are willing to pay much more than they can afford, and banks (and other lending institutions) are willing to prop up those prices not based on some agreement about the value of the object purchased but based on what some schmuck is willing to pay them for the debt, then the notion of wealth<\/i> and value<\/i> gets untethered from, well, from itself.
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Now, that’s not such a problem, really. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It is, because we’ve essentially hooked our economy basket to a big hot-air balloon and launched ourselves over the cliff. The discovery that there’s nothing in the balloon but air is one thing, but if we can’t keep that air hot, we’re in for a bumpy ride.
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On the other hand, the sudden discovery that the houses that were sold for $500,000 aren’t worth half a million dollars, and were never actually worth half a million dollars in the sense that the person who bought the house didn’t have half a million dollars and couldn’t have borrowed the money to buy it if the banks hadn’t been bugnuts crazy, well, the house is still there, the roof still keeps the rain off your head, the deck is still sunny and the windows are still double-glazed. There’s a sense of wealth<\/i> that doesn’t have much to do with money, and that stuff is mostly still around.
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I found Paul Krugman’s mention of Two Kinds of Problem<\/a> convincing. The problem that I care about the most—people losing their houses, their jobs, and their health insurance, their social security, if you don’t mind my calling it that—is bad, but not the sort of thing we have to address over the weekend. In fact, it’s probably not a good idea to address that sort of thing with any fundamental policy changes four weeks before an election. On the other hand, the financial crisis, which indirectly<\/i> affects all that stuff I actually care about, is the sort of thing that we really do risk chaos if we lose our moment, and that moment may be this weekend. Or last weekend. There’s another problem, which is how the fuck did we let ourselves get into this mess<\/i>, but sadly, answering that doesn’t get us much closer to getting us out of it. I’ll just say that there was a nice little NPR story this morning about Bank-to-Bank loans<\/a>, and all I could think of was that in corporate capitalism, the fact that the whole system is dependent on short-term loans of billions of dollars from one bank to another is considered a feature. Corporate capitalism is some fucked-up shit, ain’t it? Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which Your Humble Blogger talks of that which he knows nothing about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18535,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11529\/revisions\/18535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"