{"id":1476,"date":"2003-09-30T13:08:27","date_gmt":"2003-09-30T17:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/09\/30\/1476.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:27","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:27","slug":"more-about-globalization-and-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/09\/30\/more-about-globalization-and-o\/","title":{"rendered":"More about Globalization, and other things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger just caught a bit in \"Taming the phoenix? Monetary governance after the crisis\", by Benjamin J. Cohen, in <I><a href=\"http:\/\/us.cambridge.org\/titles\/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521790913\">The Asian Financial Crisis and the Architecture of Global Finance<\/a><\/I>, edited by Gregory W. Noble and John Ravenhill (&copy; Cambridge University Press, 2000) that made me think.\n\n<p>\"To Keynes, nothing was more damaging than the free movement of speculative capital... Keynes carefully distinguished between genuinely productive investment flows and footloose 'floating funds'.\" \n\n<p>Once again, my problem is that I adhere to a school of thinking that is fifty years old (and that's one of the more recent ones). Speculation is inherently destabilizing, disruptive and detrimental to society at large; investment, on the other hand, is not only productive and stabilizing but necessary. The difference is that between being short-sighted and thinking long-term. It's fairly easy to see in individual cases, but hard to define, hard to make rules about. Like obscenity (or science fiction), I may know it when I see it, but that means in order to know it, I have to see it. And, of course, since I'm making a judgment about it, I run the risk of tautologizing myself into a corner; I can judge the category based on the results, which begs the question. Anyway, I think it's pretty clear that the financial structure of the US has moved, in large part, from investment to speculation, and that has encouraged short-term thinking in a variety of ways.\n\n<p>To tie this back in to our present brutal political situation, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/09\/30\/opinion\/30KRUG.html\">Paul Krugman points out<\/a> that whether you want Iraq rebuilt or not (and, Gentle Readers, I do), the money being used to rebuild is not actually going to be invested, but rather spent for maximum short-term gain. That is the best we can expect from this administration, he says, and I have to agree. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't rebuild; Truman rebuilt much of the globe and did it more-or-less right (tho' we could argue about whether even that was a good idea). It does mean that we, as a nation, are morally obliged to vote Our Only President out of office at the next election. In my opinion, of course.\n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Humble Blogger just caught a bit in &#8220;Taming the phoenix? Monetary governance after the crisis&#8221;, by Benjamin J. Cohen, in The Asian Financial Crisis and the Architecture of Global Finance, edited by Gregory W. Noble and John Ravenhill (&copy;&#8230;<\/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":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","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=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16842,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions\/16842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}