|
Casino Aficionados Will Have A Busy Day
Warren Buffet:
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
—
One large dealer was quoting Credit Suisse bonds at levels that were as much as 6.5 points higher than Friday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private activity in the over-the-counter market.
—
Holders of Credit Suisse Group AG bonds suffered a historic loss when a takeover by UBS Group AG wiped out about 16 billion Swiss francs ($17.3 billion) worth of risky notes.
The deal will trigger a “complete write-down” of the bank’s additional tier 1 bonds in order to increase core capital, Swiss financial regulator FINMA said in a statement on its website. Meanwhile, the bank’s shareholders are set to receive 3 billion francs.
…
Pacific Investment Management Co., Invesco Ltd. and BlueBay Funds Management Co. SA were among the many asset managers holding Credit Suisse AT1 notes, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Their holdings may have changed or been sold entirely since their last regulatory filings.
…
AT1 bonds were introduced in Europe after the global financial crisis to serve as shock absorbers when banks start to fail. They are designed to impose permanent losses on bondholders or be converted into equity if a bank’s capital ratios fall below a predetermined level, effectively propping up its balance sheet and allowing it to stay in business.
—
HSBC Holdings Plc fell as much as 6.6% in Hong Kong trading, the biggest drop in nearly six months, with its newly issued AT1 bond declining more than 5 cents. Standard Chartered Plc slid as much as 5.6%.
The complete write-down of Credit Suisse’s AT1 debt as part of a Swiss bailout has investors in the $275 billion market scrambling to determine how much protection the notes offer in a crisis.
—
A $1 billion AT1 bond with a coupon of 4.5% was bid as low as 1 cent on the dollar, Tradeweb pricing showed.
—
Hong Kong plummeted 2.7 percent, with heavyweight HSBC off nearly six percent on worries about its exposure to risky bonds related to Credit Suisse. Standard Chartered also sank.
The losses came even as the city's de facto central bank said its banking sector had "insignificant" exposure to Credit Suisse.
Other regional bank shares were also hit, including Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, National Australia Bank and India's ICICI.
…
London, Frankfurt and Paris all fell in early Monday trade.
Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul and Mumbai were also in the red.
Shanghai rose after the Chinese central bank cut the amount of cash banks must keep in reserve, hoping to boost the country's economy.
Re: NemesisCalling #112
Your self-study of philosophy is admirable. Yet your attempt to reconcile Hegelianism Idealism with Catholicism will prove futile.
As with many who came before him, Hegel proposed that “the rational alone is real.” Yet we know first principles immediately, and those first principles serve as the basis of rational thought, not the converse.
The school of Realism is exemplified in the epistemology of St. Thomas Aquinas. What is meant by that is simply that human beings are capable of knowing truth. Innately capable. We have the immediate grasp of Being as true and we can intellectually assimilate the “whatness” or quiddity of things. The reality of Being is foremost–we know that we are. We know that the external world exists.
Etienne Gilson in his magnificent work The Unity of Philosophical Experience, points out that Ockham, in asking “What are the Platonic Universals?” ended by believing that our general ideas cannot be mental presentations of any real thing–and so he redefined the terms abstractive and intuitive in a new way, a way that facilitated the breakdown of the medieval school over the next several centuries, which led further to the skepticism of Montaigne, who concluded that a well-trained mind is never convinced of its own opinions and that doubting was therefore the highest mark of wisdom, a severe contradiction in terms.
And then came Descartes, who, in response to Montaigne and admirably so, sought certainty. His thought delineates the transition from the Renaissance to the modern world.
So how did Descartes try to find certainty? He reduced the formal object of the power of knowing, which is truth, to that of a habit of thought–the habit of mathematical logic. Descartes sought to use concepts to understand reality. It is important to stress that logic concerns formal relations between concepts. Concepts must therefore exist in the mind of the thinker before he thinks about the relations between those concepts. So Descartes put the cart before the horse. More than that he applied his method to try to prove the existence of primary concepts, such as Being, through logic.
But Descartes could not accept the primacy of knowing over his primacy of mathematical logic, and his method caused him to end up where he started.
Consider his Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) which is backwards–we are, and we know that we are, therefore we can think. For as St. Thomas taught in his first article of De Magistro, “there preexist in us the first concepts of the intellect…which the intellect grasps immediately.” Being is indeed the first object to be grasped by the human mind and is the first principle of metaphysics.
Descartes’ mathematical idealism regressed through Hume, who was certain that all reality is uncertain and possibly a mere phantasm of the mind (a remarkably illogical idea when retorted upon itself), who impressed upon Kant the notion that metaphysics is pointless and unable to teach us anything. As Descartes used mathematics, Kant’s thought was heavily influenced by the material progress of science, which dismisses all that cannot be demonstrated as mere idle speculation. Kant tried to free his metaphysics from mathematics but he substituted empirical knowledge, and so replaced the mathematical approach to one of physics, bringing Newtonian methods to philosophy.
Cartesian idealism reduces Man to a thinking substance, while Kantian idealism makes him pure reason limited by his senses. Neither is sufficient in itself, for they both deny first principles–that we know certain things immediately and that they neither need to nor can be proven. And the entire process of the destruction of Thomistic epistemology is analogous to turning a magnificent church such as Notre Dame de Paris into the monstrosity of Corbusier’s Dominican Monastery of La Tourette, the design of which was so divorced from its transcendent purpose that the Order of Preachers removed their friars from it due to depression and thoughts of suicide.
The Hegelian Triad of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis is simply a further attempt to prove rationally what we already know but which cannot be proven through logic.
Today’s Western culture, perhaps as a result of the insufficiency of reliance on rational thought alone, worships Power. Only power. Coupled with the misuse of modern technology, Western society increasingly offers a dystopian future far worse than the brutalities of the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia and the China of both the 1960s Cultural Revolution. The remnants of Magna Carta, written by the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, are virtually gone. Law itself no longer exists, except as a means of selectively applying power to achieve increasingly centralized control in order to promote ideologies that are utterly inconsistent with the Telos–the Final End–of Man qua Man–who is a creature made by God, meant for eternal happiness with God and for a life here on Earth that will prepare him for that eternal possession of God–and that life is THE GOOD LIFE.
Pick up one or more of Gilson’s works, or go directly to Aquinas.
Posted by: Ciaran | Mar 22 2023 11:40 utc | 115
|
