Amateur, Armature, Armchair Finance Pundit

Here's a pretty simpleminded idea that I think might be right. Since 1995 we've seen a number of asset-price hyper-inflation bubbles. Basically, various classes of assets have gotten very expensive, very quickly. Then, suddenly, they have become cheaper.

Right now the markets are crashing. While commodities may continue to get more expensive, hard assets (like real estate) will fall in price. Those with the money to buy will be able to snap up some bargains and end up owning a lot of stuff. This is familiar stuff.

Here's my thought. If you sell something when the prices are high, you've got a lot of cash. The normal thing to do is to lend that cash to someone else in order to earn interest on it. (Holding on to cash is generally unwise because it loses value. You should "put it to work" as they say.) People willing to lend out money: that's what we suddenly ran out of. The credit markets "froze", remember?

A lot of reasons have been suggested. But what about this one: suppose there was widespread anticipation among the super-rich of an asset-price collapse. If you know there's going to be a lot of cheap stuff lying around to buy soon, you hold on to your cash. In fact, holding on to your cash (as you know) contracts credit (thus the money supply, in at least one sense) and decreases demand. As demand decreases, prices fall further.

You keep holding on to your cash. Prices plunge. Your money becomes worth more and more. And then, when the economy is in ruins, you buy. Suddenly you own half the world.

Or all of it. The amount of "fictional wealth" has been growing at a staggering rate. There is much more money floating around than real stuff to buy it with. (Because so many assets have been, as they say, "derivative".) It is conceivable that a small group of very rich people (maybe 1000, maybe a 500, I really don't know) will soon have enough money on them to buy, well, yes, everything. Prices just have to fall to their natural levels (or maybe a bit further.) And that seems to be happening.

Yes, I'm just thinking out loud. Any thoughts?

Creative Class

In a letter published Tuesday in the Alamogordo Daily News, Stirman wrote that she believes "Muslims are our enemies." Stirman [56, an interior decorator],told The Associated Press in an interview: "I don't trust them at all. They've sworn across the world that they are our enemies. Why we're trying to elect one is beside me."

TPM

For some reason, I would have expected greater sophistication from an interior decorator. Probably because of something I thought I overheard someone say Richard Florida had said at some conference one time in answer to someone's question.

For Fairness and Balance

People, like me, who are enjoying Sarah Palin's gaffes (if that term even covers it), do well to reflect on the double standard their enjoyment is based on. Campbell Brown has pointed this out head on; Kirsten Powers has worked on the problem from the other end.

There is something more vital about Biden's vanity (if that term even covers it), but I'm open to the idea that I just give him more credit up front.

Election Note

(I'm not sure election blogging is becoming of the Pangrammaticon, but I need to put these thoughts down somewhere...)

Sarah Palin: I'm like John McCain with bling on, I'm complex.

Anything?

Obama's Labour Theory of Value

In St. Louis, Barack Obama raised a good question: "Do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it?" Once again, we can take this out of context and agree with his critics. Maybe he really is a socialist! (Why that's a plainly bad thing we don't really understand here in Europe.)

But I've noticed something else, which goes deeper. I get the sense that Obama is really trying to foster conditions that will allow the individual American to work his or her way out of the crisis. That's real hope. And it's fundamentally American (as I understand it). The stimulus package that is being discussed is designed, I think, to ensure that there is work (the source of value) for as many people as possible and that this work ensures the circulation of sufficient cash, even if this will have to go mainly to bare necessities. Families will have to make do with less, but not so much less that a bit of hard work for a couple of years won't get them through.

Under McCain, I fear, Americans will get the sense that they will have to wait for initiatives stimulated at the top (even on Wall Street itself) to trickle down to them. Under Obama, they'll tighten their belts, roll up their sleeves, and get to work.

In Defense of Milan Kundera

Here's a perfectly good statement of the charge. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume it's true. The Economist suggests that it's a mild offense because he was acting out of more or less desperate self-interest. Others have proposed it's mitigated by the very opposite: that he was acting out of conviction.

I want to suggest a simpler defense: he snitched on a traitor. I think it's important to keep in mind that he was not informing on an internal dissident, i.e., someone who may have been stirring up trouble under an assumed name, or organizing civil disobedience, or distributing pamphlets. Dissidents are serving their country by opposing it from within. Informing one's state about the activities of one's own countrymen in trying to change it is contemptible in the usual way.

But Miroslav Dvoracek seems to have been working for a foreign spy agency. I think that's an altogether different matter. There is a big difference an American who thinks Hugo Chavez should be treated with respect and one who sells secrets to the Venezuelan spy services. Even if you are one the former, informing on one of the latter is a perfectly respectable activity. And that remains true even if you were right about Chavez.

Conversely: suppose Chavez is a garden variety dictator. I would respect dissidents working against him within his borders. But I don't think people who start working for Venezuela's enemies are necessarily worthy of the same respect.

I haven't thought the Kundera case through yet; this is just a first observation.

TPM: Sit Down With the Thugs and Talk

There are no contradictions, only degrees of humour.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

I think these remarks are dead on.

We use the Brits because they've done this stuff a lot. They've sat down with thugs throughout their history, including us in our early days, I suspect ... a point we never miss an opportunity to remind them of.

This sense of not just an "imperfect union" but an imperfect world, this (for lack of a better word) sense of humour, which Obama and Petraeus seem to share, gives me a strange kind of (not at all tranquil) hope for life in the Empire during the Obama Adminstration.

(PS I'm only just starting to realize the profound service to the citizenry that Talking Points Memo is performing.)

The Ownership Revolution (improved)

To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.

Ezra Pound
Canto LXXXI

I'm quite proud of this version. I think it gives us a good sense of the rhetorical tradition (or at least one rhetorical tradition) from which Obama gathers his unconquerable flame.

Post-Debate

Well, Kirby was right. "They both did fine," Mickey Kaus tells us. I fell asleep before the debate started but, like the first Obama-McCain debate, I got up very early to check the post-debate chatter. Once again, not as a dramatic as one had hoped.

CNN identified the "Say it ain't so, Joe" line as a canned sound bite she was waiting to use. I think they're right about that. Actually, she blew it by saying "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again" turning into a reference to anothers (at the time appearantly) improvised jab. You can feel her coaches cringing. "'Say it ain't so, Joe,' would be a good line," they might have said to her, "Sort of like Reagan's 'There you go again'."

Of course, the canned line may have been simply, "It ain't so, Joe," which she was supposed to use to correct him on some important fact. That would have been a campaign-changing moment. That coaches may have said: "Say, 'It ain't so, Joe'".

To her credit, it looks like she knew she flubbed it right away. She ends up rambling, seeming somewhat distressed. And, as some people have noted, the views on education she presents here seem very liberal. Almost a gaffe: "Her reward is in heaven"??? As she was talking her way through this she reminded me of someone, and then I realized who it was: Edna Boil.

I know that isn't fair at all. But that's what she began to sound like to me.

Pre-Palin-Biden Debate Theory

Watching Joe Biden and Sarah Palin talk about the Supreme Court, a thought struck me that might make the basis of a pretty good conspiracy theory. It's now clear that McCain's pick was not very well thought out. In fact, it seems clear that he picked his running mate as a PR stunt. McCain can't really have cared how good a vice president she would make, and certainly had not given any thought to how she might do as president. It just seemed like "the ticket" somehow. A way to win the race. At the time, a way to get through the next couple of months.

By contrast, Obama might have been a bit worried about how well Biden would "play" in the campaign. Would he stay on message? Would they look good together? How many gaffes would he make? But there is no doubt that Biden will make an excellent vice president. He can also do a good job as president.

It's interesting, actually. There may be reasons he could never get himself elected, but if he should be needed to step in, I don't think anybody really doubts his judgment. And after serving in an Obama administration for eight years, his electability could change. There's a critique of democracy implicit in that fact: being the right guy for the job may only be tangentially related to your electability. Biden proves that point in one direction. Palin may prove it in the other.

Or she may not even come close. And that brings me to my conspiracy theory. Trust in politicians, pundits like to say, is at an all time low. In fact, nobody really knows how to take politics seriously. ("Jon Stewart is a America's greatest journalist.") Obama offers hope that politics can be serious stuff, full of gravitas, real leadership, etc. But there's a part of all of us, I suspect, that doubts, sometimes, whether Obama is really any different than all the other politicians we don't, finally, trust. Just as there is a part of us that Obama, sometimes, brings to tears.

Enter Palin. When the American electorate chooses Obama and Biden over McCain and Palin they will do so conscious of what they did NOT want. They have an opportunity to have a serious politician in the White House and to reject an obvious show pony.

Watching Biden and Palin talk made me realize that I think Biden is an intelligent, serious, knowledgeable, politician. I believe him when he says he talks to conservative scholars who are friends of his. Because he's a serious person. He's interested in culture. He's not just a lazy, lying, bag of scum. An Obama-Biden administration will be trusted. It will be the Camelot that Kennedy never had a chance to prove he couldn't run.

If I were pulling the strings behind the scenes, my aim for the 2009-2017 administration would be that it restores trust in Washington. In fact, by rejecting the bailout, Congress has also won a bit trust from me (not that my trust matters). They said a lot of sensible, honest things along the way. They're showing character, seriousness. It would break my heart to discover that all this was just for show, that my favourable reaction to Biden was carefully constructed in some back room and that the Palin pick was all part of the plan.

J.A. on the Bailout

A national bank of deposit I believe to be wise, just, prudent, economical, and necessary. But every bank of discount, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent, is downright corruption. It is taxing the public for the benefit and profit of individuals; it is worse than the old tenor, continental currency, or any other paper money.

Now, Sir, if I should talk in this strain, after I am dead, you know the people of America would pronounce that I had died mad.

John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 1811

(Adapted by E.P. in Canto LXXI, p. 416)

[Earle Davis notes that, in Jefferson's opinion, "The National Bank mortgaged public taxes for private gain" (Vision Fugitive, p. 123).]

The New Cartoon Crisis?

"Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations:"
Hamlet

Irony is sometimes tragic in its proportions. Some of you may recall that when a group of ambassadors from Muslim countries asked the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to do something about the offensive cartoons that had been printed in a major newspaper, he said that he would have to stay out of it. The PM can't go around criticizing the exercise of free speech.

Well, this morning we can read the Prime Minister's review of his perhaps most famous caricaturist, Roald Als, who has collected his cartoons in a book. Apparently our PM can participate in the media hype surrounding a book launch, by offering some good-natured ribbing for the occasion. In his review, he thanks Als for sharpening his "brand".

I think this is outrageous. When foreign ambassadors object to the sense of humour expressed by a national newspaper, instead of denouncing the cartoons (like many other Western leaders), our Prime Minister condescendingly explains to them that "in a free country" the nation's leader cannot comment on the editorial decisions of the press. But when it's not the sentiments of unwanted foreigners that are at stake, there is apparently no problem. Here he even notes (i.e., criticizes) the cartoonist's bias towards Anker Jørgensen, a long-reigning social democrat from the recent past.

But there is something even stranger, even more embarrassing. Als has a copy-writer and "sparring partner" named Poul Einer Hansen. Funny thing about these two white guys: Als affectionately calls Hansen his "nigger". Fogh notes this in passing, chuckling along with them between dashes. And Politiken (the newspaper that publishes both Als's cartoons and Fogh's review, and is the publisher of Als's book) gives this word a prominent place. The editorial summary of the article mentions it. And it is used under the illustration of the cartoonist and his n...

Argh!!! I know a lot of my countrymen will object to this outburst. He didn't say "nigger", he said "neger", they will say, arguably translatable as "negro". I leave it up to you to decide whether my translation is correct.

Though it is not entirely out of circulation, it is an outdated expression. It is offensive because ... and it is surprising that this needs explaining ... it makes a joke of slavery. Our blindness to this is one of the interesting and unfunny effects of the layers and layers of irony that serves as a kind ersatz national culture in Denmark. (Kierkegaard's first major work, his masters thesis, let us remember, was called On the Concept of Irony).

Let's see how it works here: One very white guy (Danes are ethnically very, very white) says, "He's my neger," referring to another white guy. At the first and most literal level, it means "he's my black guy". Since he's white, that's, you know, "ironic". So what truth is he expressing with this falshood? Well, he's obviously saying "He's my slave". But that's "ironic" too because, you know, there's no slavery in Denmark. One level further down, then, he's saying "he's my little helper; he does what I tell him to do; he's an obseqious little friend". But, no wait, he actually has great respect for him and they are equal partners. Okay, so that is ultimately what he meant.

In this age of political incorrectness there is that last irony. Isn't "neger" a racist term? Oh yes, the stock answer goes, of course, but racism is obviously wrong, so when we use racist terms we "must be joking". In this case everyone is careful to put that little word in scare quotes every time it is used. Sorry, my fellow Danes, this just ain't good enough. Our irony has become a "heavy-headed revel east and west" and we do better to honour our custom for it in the breach.

Thine evermore, whilst this machine is to him,
HAMLET.

PS In a hundred years we will no doubt praise the moderation of our friends by calling them "Muslim". We are, sadly, to the manner born.

[Update: I am told that one established sense of "neger", especially in journalistic circles, is "ghostwriter", i.e., someone who does work for which someone else takes credit. It can be argued that this usage is based on an implicit critique of slavery. Als is not saying (with irony) "he does what I tell him" but (with somewhat less irony) "I take the credit for his efforts". There is still something unfunny about this, though. And certainly something unbecoming of a prime minister.]

A.G. on the Bailout

"So what Pound is pointing out is that the whole money system, banking system, is a hallucination, a shell game, and he's explaining the structure of this hallucination and going back historically, because the structure changes from bank reform to bank reform era."

Allen Ginsberg
April 26, 1971
(Allen Verbatim, p. 175)

[NOTE: The Fed has traditionally been lender of last resort to commercial banks. On March 18, 2008, it "ripped up its rule book" and made itself lender of last of resort also to investment banks. At that time I vaguely felt the nature of money changing. The "hallucination" felt, you know, different. A new banking era. On September 17, the New York Times could announce that "by acquiring almost 80 percent of A.I.G. in exchange for lending it $85 billion, and holding $29 billion in securities once owned by Bear Stearns, the Fed is now becoming the investor of last resort as well." Welcome to the ownership society. Like the man said, You are on ... your ... own.]

E.P. on the Bailout

"employing means at the bank's disposal
in deranging the country's credits, obtaining by panic
control over public mind" said Van Buren
" [...] giving nomimal loans on inexistent security"

in the eighteen hundred and thirties

"on precedent that Mr Hamilton has
never hesitated to jeopard the general
for advance of particular interests."

Canto XXXVII (p. 184)

Now We're Talking

"I’m talking about sensible analysis by prominent, mainstream economists and other experts explaining that a market economy in which profits are private while losses are socialized is, well, not a market economy at all but a socialist or corporate-fascist state." (Peter Klein)

Why Heidegger?

I have been asked to explain why I take Being and Time to be "a crucial pivot point above all other philosophical texts (Wittgenstein excluded)". It is a very good question that is related to this curriculum suggestion, which I have been thinking about for some time.

What makes Being and Time and the Philosophical Investigations pivotal like few others (if any)? I chose them because they make an important contribution to our understanding of modern language, and are themselves important moments in the development of modern thought. They are also, and more importantly, inexhaustible sources of literary pleasure.

You go back to them again and again and each time you learn something about thought and language. Other texts, you get through. But not these. In fact, I'm always skeptical of people who say they are trying to get "beyond Heidegger". How far did Heidegger get with Being and Time? How far did you get in your reading of Being and Time? In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Heidegger's own attempts to get beyond himself are ridiculous. (As a person, Heidegger may well have been ridiculous. So was Wittgenstein.) He hadn't even let anyone try to understand him before he was profoundly undertaking his "turning". A turn I believe I have thoroughly deconstructed in paraphrase.

You don't get "beyond" these works. You use them to improve your understanding of thought and language. Another work that has the same quality is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Before announcing that Kant was profoundly wrong, we should acknowledge everything he got right on the surface of things. That precision is what makes modern thinking possible, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein themselves, arguably, got "beyond" Kant. But mostly they understood what Kant understood. (Heidegger seems to have learned it by reading Kant himself. Wittgenstein may have found some other way.) We can't know how far they got until we acquaint ourselves with their work in detail. That's what the curriculum I propose is designed to do: to acquaint students with the basis of philosophical insight.

Obama as Anti-capitalist

"We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America."

I know he didn't mean it like that, but here's a sentence that, when taken out of context, gives me the audacity to hope that an Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez can talk like civilized people (rather than lipsticked Orwellian pigs?) after the former is elected and the latter resumes normal diplomatic relations with the Empire. Obama of course meant that the current state of the economy, not the state-capitalist economy as such, creates hardship for families. But I'll take what I can get in this age of phony outrage.

Fascism is Complicated

Fascism was a more complex phenomenon.
Gianni Alemanno

The arts have a complex relation to society.
William Carlos Williams

When I inaugurated my project of "kulchural studies" I knew that at its core was a rethinking of fascism. Also, that this rethinking would have to engage with what is clearly, I think, a renaissance of fascist thinking globally. More certainly, it would have to engage with the intensification of global conditions that are conducive to a fascist renaissance.

Today, I find myself sympathizing with the fascists; specifically I find myself agreeing with Gianni Alemanno. Given choice between the proposition "Fascism is an absolute evil" and "Fascism was a more complex phenomenon" it is difficult not to choose the latter. This from a strictly intellectual point of view. The first is not an occasion for thought, and we really do need to think seriously about fascism.

Alemanno offers the following elaboration:

Many people joined up in good faith and I don't feel like labeling them with that definition. The racial laws desired under fascism, that spurred its political and cultural end, were absolute evil.

What more could we ask of a reasoned position on fascism? It was complicated; there were perfectly good reasons at the time (say, 1925) to prefer it over the alternatives; and it was brought down by its own petty hatreds, which, if you insist, were absolutely evil.

The idea that if you want to say something nice about fascism you shouldn't say anything at all is, well, a sort of fascist one, in the pejorative sense of those who might say it. It simplifies important aspects of a complicated phenomeon.

The Metaphysics of Sitting

One of those titles looking for a "book-length project". Consider also, Groundling, or The Metaphysics of Sitting. Kantians will get it. Right up there with the Critique of Pure Riesling. Which was once a real wine and now seems to have become a book.

Unsolicited Application for Speech Writer to Barack Obama

I would love to be one of Barack Obama's speech writers. It would give me some practical experience with the theoretical link between poetry and politics, the "ethical stickiness" of poetry, to use Kasey Mohammad's phrase.

I've actually got some experience already. I once rewrote Bill Clinton's inaugural address here at the Pangrammaticon, and I'd like to get this job before something similar happens to Obama's eloquence. It's less likely, so I'm not really worried, I should say. But I'd like to be part of the solution. In fact, I didn't really think I had anything to contribute until I saw this:

In this video, Obama says:

This campaign is not about Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or John McCain. It's about your hopes. It's about your dreams. It's about what is possible when

a new generation of Americans stand [sic] up and say [sic]

we are not going to settle for what is, we are going to imagine what might be.

The line breaks indicate brief faltering pauses, where he seems to be looking for words. Now, it was probably ad-libbed, not read off a teleprompter and we should keep that in mind. It probably did not undermine his momemtum at the time. But here is what he should have said:

This campaign is not about Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or John McCain. It's about your hopes. It's about your dreams. It's about what is possible when a generation of Americans stands up and says, "This country has to change!"

Notice what happens when the "generation of Americans" is made timeless (dropping the "new") and when its desire is expressed as an imperative demand rather than a refusal to do one thing and a promise to do another. What do you say? Do I get the job?