A World Flying Blind – Andy Xie – Caixin Online
The outlook for the global economy is gloomy and leaders lacking vision are to blame. Eventually, this will come back to haunt all of us
At the annual World Economic Forum in Davos we again saw familiar faces from the West, but some different characters from emerging economies. Some of the last year's bunch went to jail amidst the revolutions engulfing the Middle East. They were discussing how to fix capitalism. Apparently, the same people who blew up the world and got their governments to bail them out are now again making millions and talking about how to fix things. Not many people see the irony in this. The tragedy of the global financial crisis is that it didn't sweep away the old order.
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The world is a dangerous place because it is being led by the wrong people like the Davos crowd. Monetary and fiscal measures merely prolong the stagnation and stoke inflation down the road. This muddling-through equilibrium will blow up in our faces when inflation causes social turmoil.
David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words – Aaron Bady – The New Inquiry
[I]f “debt” doesn’t seem simple and quantifiable and reducible to numbers, some of the more irreducibly complex moral vocabularies that other human societies have used to think about the problem start to come into view. Another world isn’t just possible, but other worlds have happened, almost nothing but other worlds. And this is, I think, the richest and most engrossing part of the book (and to which I must, by necessity, give shortest shrift), Graeber’s survey of the vast anthropological record which is available to us, but so often unread, describing or at least suggesting how different human societies have considered these questions, human societies who did not believe that paying one’s debts or facing the consequences was the very highest of moral imperatives.
Valediction – on saying farewell to Tony Judt – G.J. Meyer – LA Review Of Books
Towards the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century’s last chapter, Judt suggests the chillingly plausible possibility that we are, perhaps, in the process of becoming China: of becoming, that is, “an unfree capitalist society” in which the government stays out of the economy except at the loftiest strategic levels (eliminating competition from outside, for example) while remaining brutally repressive politically, systemically corrupt, and, yes, indifferent to injustice. He notes that American voters, in expressing their preferences at election time, seem to be indicating that they prefer the Chinese model not only to European social democracy but even to the genuinely democratic achievements of their own still-recent past.
That, Judt says, is what he finds “terrifying.”
Bonus:
The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement – Yves Smith – Naked Capitalism
Here are the top twelve reasons why this deal stinks:
- We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.
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As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.