Jim
Cramer formerly of Goldman Sachs has a show on MSNBC called Mad Money. As you
might expect from the title of the show and the person who pretends to be crazy
while touting a very financialized version of capitalism. After the stock
market rout of February 8th 2018 he took
us through the exotic financial instruments that he said caused the crash that
day.
In particular Cramer dipped Into his
stockbrokers heart and said that frankly they would bet on anything.
That included, he claimed, raindrops on
the window. But for him to crash was caused by several stocks that bet on volatility on the market. He was horrified
that the SEC allowed them to exist and indeed generate $billions in business
that day. They have exotic names; SUXY, UVXY and indeed one – not sadly – died on
Feb 3 as it encouraged bets AGAINST
volatility.
Is this the truth, or
Cramer disavowing his own past in hedge funds? For example, the Shiller-Cape index independently suggests that the S+P and Dow should be at about half
their current level;
The Shiller index in
currently at 31.8 versus the historical average of 16.8.
Up to recently
capitalist boom/burst Cycles were explained by entities like Kondratieff Cycles which argued that boom bust was caused
by the delay in capitalists building plant and that they would occur about once
every 15 years. What is happening now is quite different particularly as
automatic trading means that we have a very out of control stock market..
Moreover our economy is
far more financial. After the crash of 2008 the capitalist class did two rather
brilliant operations. One was to get behind Obama which meant that they had
what Cornel West called “A black puppet of Wall Street” in the White House. The
other was to bet the national economy on Wall Street using a degree of state
control that Stalin would be ashamed of.
In particular, the Fed
gave money to the banks that until recently were then forced to deposit at the
Fed;
The bull market of the
past year is explained in these terms as this deposit restriction being eased
so the money went elsewhere, creating the very inflationary pressures that the
Fed is now trying to ease with interest rate hikes.
The problem is that this
has also created massive national debt and that several pundits like Rogers and
Icahn believe that this would be impossible to resolve even in the very painful
way we discovered since 2008; evicting millions of people before closing the
legal loophole that allowed banks evict
people from houses they, the banks, had sold the mortgages on; neo-feudalism
with the “gig economy”; trash like Uber, Airbnb and the new equally bad AI as
tech; and so on.
Where does Ireland stand
in this? As we always have been for most of our history; a colony, pushed
hither and thither by these forces. When they had to pin a tail on a donkey a
decade ago, we rather than Iceland (let alone larger indebted countries) became
the donkey. “Junior” debt was added to
the sovereign ( a big word that means you and me) for the first time, The resulting shambles has
been viewed as tough love with robust economic growth now seen as a certainty –
just as the world economy implodes, taking Ireland with it. In fact, according to Barry Eichengreen, the
ECB also forbade 50% reduction of senior unsecured debt which even the IMF
wanted;
It is
difficult to see how they're going to handle it in the United States. They have
sacrificed another generation to immensely High property prices and created to
freakish presidencies in Trump and Obama. After Hillary Clinton they can't
really put a woman there and ask for sympathy on the basis that she is woman in
the same way as they did for Obama being black.
Robert Nye the author of
the concept of “soft power” argued that only if Trump gets reelected or Worse
starts War can we decide that he is something different than freaks Like Joe
McCarthy or George Wallace..
What seems to be the case
for Ireland is that we need to get back to politics again rather than have the
economy drive politics and the whole society
The
other noticeable events today was the final demission of Gerry Adams;
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456284/gerry-adams-retirement-northern-ireland-still-unsettled
The
article misses the point that we southern republicans lost our whole country
because of the 1998 deal.
Readers
seeking any consistency in his life will look in vain 4 themes beyond the fact
he wanted to remain head of the Republican movement. As far as he was concerned
intern that involved simply dangling a nebulous United Ireland in front of his
followers while he shifted from communism to neoliberalism to God knows what
else in a far too long career.
One of the things of
this blog and of the Society of which expression is that we are underwent a
coup attempt in Ireland from 1998 to 2008. The coup was meant to be sealed by
an electronic voting initiative which
was intended to prevent elections for the rest of our lives at least. Will
simple Fianna Fail corruption explains an awful lot of what went on, it is also
true to say that experiments were being done like the privatization of the
universities, the privatization of traditional music, and a corporate structure
which was a new form of fascism. Part of the funding for this initiative came
from government promoted bonds which highly unusually are to be repaid in full;
with CIA personnel around to ensure this but see preceding entry
What we need to do is
forget about this “United Ireland”; any entity that the DUP is happy to enter
will be unrecognizable as Ireland. As has been stated here, simple access to
the web grants us 90% of what is currently valuable about Ireland. And yes, we
c an do much better; refuse to pay back any odious debt,
stress agriculture (in
case we need to be self-sufficient as globalized forces marginalize us), software,
and culture. We can do this in conjunction with Scotland, another high resource
and low population country (genocide will do that to a country)
Adams was actually a
bureaucrat, and was nicknamed the “draft dodger”. While there is evidence that
he betrayed Paddy Kelly and the others killed in the Loughall massacre, it is
altogether undeniable that his entourage was full of touts like Scappaticci, recently back from
the dead as Adams resigns, Kelly and others were a la ISIS about to occupy some
territory; it is arguable that Adams stopped them and the least we owe them, Mairead Farrell, Joe
McCann, Bobby Sands et al is the
assertion of a territory in which our values rule
Currently, Ireland is in
a power vacuum. Referenda are proposed by an unelected “citizens assembly” and
divide the country for years; we have an
“S+c” relationship between govt and oppo; bills are issued for water and then
withdrawn; and as happened here in California, civil servants go berserk in the
absence of government and start endangering Irish citizens. We owe it to
ourselves and to the world to create a
parallel Ireland
