Quantum World - A Post from the Past (Jul 2007)

A retort to the argument that: "Corrupt African leaders provide a big obstacle to African development".
Sure there are some dreadful leaders in Africa but so there are in Asia and South/Central America (often serving as client regimes of the US and/or business interests). Countries which have an economic value to the First World, in a broad sense, are impacted upon in two ways. Firstly, some money from, say, the oil or mineral deposits finds its way into the wider society (to an extent) but, additionally, it becomes a necessity for the west to exert absolute or client-controlled power to maintain economic and political stability in the country/region which is fortunate (?!) enough to possess the said commodity.
If we can accept that the leaders that have yielded power in the last half century in countries like Nigeria, South Korea, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, pre-Lula Brazil, Rhodesia etc share equivalence in mal-governance with equally appalling leaders in Chad, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, North Korea etc then we are left, logically, with the situation whereby a country that can bring nothing to the global economic feast is simply left to rot. If organisations in the First World applied themselves to any global famine zone with a clear strategy for sustainable growth to the advantage of the community/society at large, it could be done. You probably know about Jeffrey Sachs - this is what he does but his impact is limited as he does not achieve the backing that he should from the global institutions that could afford to bankroll the projects. Fortunately (again, to an extent), some of the highly effective business-orientated philanthropic ventures like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett pooling proper money and approaching the issue from a more stakeholder humanitarian than stakeholder or shareholder capitalist angle is potentially able to make a big change on the ground. Yet Gates and Buffett are merely the modern day equivalent of Schindler and may only be judged as such. The problem with the corrupt leadership in lower Third World countries is that the western leaders are only willing to make the effort to interact with the business/ political elite in such a Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPCs). It simply isn't worth their time and effort to penetrate any deeper into the hierarchy and attempt to source funding directly to communities under effective management. The very name HIPCs gives the game away. There are many names that the World Bank and the IMF could have selected as a generic name for the masses at the sharpest end of globalised capitalism - Countries Most In Need of Unconditional Financial Support, for example; Hellholes, perhaps?! By focusing on the issue of debt, the rich world reveals its true agenda and the overwhelming structural dynamic is for the west to give misdirected aid to ineffective leadership on the one hand while the other hand neatly takes much of this cash back in the form of debt repayments (with appropriate levels of interest, of course). And, don't forget, bribes were tax deductible until earlier this decade in both Britain and Germany! Whose corruption eh?!
To achieve proper change simply isn't complex. Community projects work. They by-pass the corruption in both the First and Third World (to fully exagerate a hopefully pertinent point) and they yield proper change at a great rate of improvement per buck. Unless one approaches it from an entirely racist perspective which, I suspect IS a hidden agenda with some of the more fascistic western business and political leaders, such a micro-business approach would be an enhancement to the economic system that these people purport to favour. The countries and regions as they developed stability would undoubtedly gravitate towards the huge elephantine global financial system that dwarfs them. It is a strategic choice by the First World. Unfortunately, the prime community projects developed by the First World are the ones that incorporate profit into the incentive spectrum. In India, for example, micro-lending is the template that is being utilised for financial control for the rural poor and, yet, the main impact has been to massively increase the rate of suicide among farmers who are unable to deal with the shame of debt.
Some American think tanks see an improved bottom line by implementing a carrot and stick approach of linking highly improbable possible future rewards (HIPFRs??) for entirely unachievable short term targets. It is not feasible for the vast majority of HIPCs to develop any form of western monetary infrastructure as the institutions necessary to oversee the projects simply do not and cannot exist currently. Its an impossible carrot. It can only be reached by, effectively, ceding ownership of your whole infrastructure to the IMF or the hyperpower. And, to be totally honest, they are not that interested. The incremental difference to the global economic pie that would be created by, say, Mali developing a sustainable economic system is just not worth the effort to the sort of capitalist who is unidirectionally focused on profit. Why should he care?
We should not expect a flawless execution. The western media selects any instance of corruption rearing its ugly head in a micro-economy project to justify its media positioning that such people are incapable of looking after themselves. Incidentally, but as an aside, I have lost count of the number of people who I have heard proclaim that the reason that they choose not to give money to the charities and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) is because of some fuzzy memory of a news story that somebody at some charity had their hand in the till. Do we deconstruct the whole system of shareholder capitalism on the very many occasions an Enron or similar explodes onto the scene? Of course not and neither should we expect unrealisable levels of performance from the disenfranchised as they struggle to claw an existence out of an economically unforgiving world. The very best of these micro projects have as flattened a hierarchy as is achievable in the immediate term although anyone on the left would be hoping for self-sufficiency and sustainability as a preferable societal quantum model in the future. It is a choice, remember.
One of the reasons that so many physicists end up working in the City of London and Wall Street is the application of quantum physics type thinking to global markets and structures. Physicists bring other key skills too like modelling techniques, self-similarity and holistic approaches. A quantum framework with chaotic fractals forms a robust paradigm. This ability to frame a fundamental concept is of value in the setting of news agendas too. The framing of a reality is quantumised by the global media barons (I bring up again the fact that 75% of French media is owned by two defence companies - what is their view likely to be on military matters? What happens to editorial and, even more so, journalistic freedom in such a get up?).
The selection of which of our global realities is aired is a fundamental corruption that underpins our existence. This is the prime reason why master mason Murdoch should not be allowed anywhere near the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones (in fact, he shouldn't really be allowed too near anything at all...).
In conclusion, our globalised system quantumises our existences, our realities. There is a limited spectrum of strategies that the globalisers are willing to instigate in the Third World and, indeed, at HIPCs level, no option. The media similarly quantises the realities and we all throw up our hands in despair at what we are told is a problem beyond solution.
Finally, this whole subject area is a prime example of one of those occasions when it is imperative that a short term strategy must necessarily replicate the longer term goals. The very poorest countries cannot just be provided with a rickety financial framework that sways in the wind of capital flight.
Community based and sustainable is a reality choice...

Instinct for Freedom - A Post from the Past (Aug 2007)

Today's Flashback was originally posted on August 12th 2007. It represented a rather naive attempt to put forward a Libertarian Socialist vision and yet, with the recent exposures of massive co-ordinated global corruptions in the financial markets, its relevance has grown more valid.

US philosopher, J. Dewey: "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."
Dewey believed that this hyperreality would remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda."

The massive injection of taxpayer's money into the rancid financial system is an outrage.
$700 billion US bailout, £550 billion GB bailout, the effective nationalisation on poor terms of vast swathes of the banking sector, $125 billion pumped into AIG, the take over of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the gaming of the Depression by a Goldman Sachs team of insiders, the planning of the next crisis with the right hand (Dark Pools are the next crisis) while emptying our wallets with their left.
Socialise the costs, privatise the gains.
This simply represents a colossal global regressive redistribution of wealth.
It is a highly regressive bailout - remember how Psychopathic Paulson did not even mention housing in his initial application for government funding.

There should have been no bailouts without extensive global regulation in a socialised infrastructure.
After 1929 Depression, we got the New Deal and Bretton Woods.
Free market ideologists constantly worked to remove the restrictions on unfettered shareholder capitalism and the New Deal became the Bum Deal (unless you happen to be lucky enough to sit on the Forbes Rich List).

And, it is this Rich List that offers a far more just, meritocratic and sustainable solution to the current crisis.
The richest 400 people in the US are worth $1500 billion. If they each dipped their hands into their offshore bank accounts and handed 50% of their ill-begotten gains over to the financial sector that aided them in the stealing of their wealth, there would have been no need of a taxpayer-led bailout.
And, they'd still have an average of a couple of billion dollars apiece.
This is hardly poverty.

The rich bailing themselves out would have a further systemic benefit - no moral hazard. If they know that they cannot get away with operating tilted tables at the Capitalist Casino, then these tilted tables will become something more akin to level playing fields.

And, the rescue package entirely ignores this systemic level of the crisis.
From Paulson's point of view, he is pulling the levers of a vast state based economic system.
This is not a free market, it is the equivalent of China or North Korea or the Soviet Union.
As Carlos Ferrero's letter to the Economist stated: "The Economist supporting a massive bail-out? Now I’ve seen everything. The only thing left to do is change the name of your newspaper to The Communist."

Shareholder capitalism has two major non-sustainable idiocies at its foundation.
Firstly, externalities are ignored and risk is underpriced. So, you buy a car. But the true cost is far greater than the cash that changes hands - think pollution, climate change, petrol extraction, road deaths, destruction of environment etc etc etc.
So shareholder capitalism refuses to factor in the Real costs of climate change.
As a species, we are pushing up against Malthusian limits, and all the financial-heads are able to come up with are schemes that enable them, in reality, to trade the factors that are destroying the planet.
Lets trade those emissions schemes!!!

This would be almost humourous if it were not systemic suicide.

The second fundamental problem with state-based shareholder capitalism is the belief in efficient markets. For, the markets are not only not free, they are also entirely inefficient.
The irrationality of our collective behavioural psychologies take the True Price away from the Market Price.
Insider market manipulation, the banning of short-selling, the cornering of markets, rampant competitive speculation, all with no assessment of where the Real risk lies, results in markets that are largely arbitrary in the numbers that they provide.
These figures are not based on any scientific statistical evaluation of robust parameters within a physical system, it is more akin to modelling the human behaviours (both abusive and abused) in a casino, or at a racehorse track.

If a murderer were on trial, and, if it was known that he was planning another murder even while he stood on trial, would you give him a gun?
We no longer partake in your system.

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Instinct For Freedom

Football Is Fixed was established to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy and power both in sport and in wider society and to challenge their authenticity. Unless a justification may be provided for such institutions, they are illegitimate and should be dismantled in order to enhance our freedom and rights as human beings. This is, in essence, a Libertarian Socialist position.
In the words of Chomsky “we have, perhaps, reached a point in history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic institutions”.
Throughout this post, we will be incorporating the thoughts of prescient thinkers from over the last 250 years. We are not political scientists and we have nothing to add to the summation of their intellectual endeavours except, hopefully, to combine these thoughts logically and to illuminate them with pertinent examples.
Due to the rampant filtration of left libertarian views in the media of the First World, we should start with some definitions and explanations regarding libertarianism and the utilisation of language by civil society to disguise meanings and create confusions.
• Democracy – Equality of all citizens before the law.
• Liberalism – Rights of people over their own person.
Each of these basic concepts of human existence is demolished by the realities imposed by capitalism in all its forms – a capitalist democracy is obviously a contradiction in terms. To quote Edmund Phelps of Columbia University who was awarded last year’s Nobel Prize for Economics: “Europe will continue to lag in productivity and innovation because it is stuck in a corporate [ie stakeholder] model of capitalism that takes the wishes of government and workers into consideration”. Like this should be regarded as a bad thing…
• Libertarian Socialism – There are two entirely different types of libertarianism. Libertarian Socialism is a truly bottom-up democratic system where the institutions and the frameworks that provide advancement and enlightenment are the possessions of each and every one of us. Social responsibility is at its core. This type of libertarianism shares many facets with the Anarchist philosophies of Bakunin and others.
• Libertarian Capitalism - This form of libertarianism is neatly described by “gain wealth forgetting all but self and, under no circumstances other than short term tactical, show any indication of a sense of responsibility to others”. It is evident that this breed of libertarianism shares equivalence with fascism.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a conscious effort by the captains of industry to warp the meanings of these terminologies. Is democracy really what the coalition of the willing are exporting to Iraq? Does Anarchism deserve its association with destruction and violence? Of course not… By reframing the political arguments, the non-democratic elite steals the language of equality and rights and transforms this language into their propaganda.
This is not just a recent phenomenon. In the late eighteenth century, Rousseau stated that “civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder” while von Humboldt noted: “the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits”. Our modern world is run by a whole battalion of such listless voluptuaries who refuse any freedom of expression for the masses while accumulating incredible wealth in their offshore bank accounts. As Alexis de Tocqueville said: “what can be expected of a man who spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins?” The same question is of equal relevance to the call centres of Mumbai and the workhouse slaves of South East Asia lacing up Nike trainers.
Capitalism has moved forward in a series of clearly defined steps. Previous centuries endured the impacts of free trade and slavery as the forerunners of today’s system of globalisation. The politicisation of the people following the French Revolution, the Famine, two World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the crushing of the Anarchosyndicalist collectives in the Spanish Civil War forced this fiercely non-democratic system to allow certain rights for the peoples of the First World – welfare states were created to offer safety nets for work, health and old age. Workers were even allowed a say in the running of the companies that employed them. This system of stakeholder capitalism, although still evidently an abuse of democratic rights, at least allowed wage slaves an input to their existence.
In the eyes of a corporate capitalist, stakeholder capitalism was an accommodation and not a goal in itself. The last quarter century has seen the establishment of a progression towards a far more abusive system of shareholder capitalism which entirely eliminates the rights of workers and their families (see Phelps’ opinion above). Capitalism was only able to move forward in this manner due to two coincident facts. Firstly, media propaganda had demonised democratic institutions such as the unions and, secondly, industrial sectors were maturing which significantly reduced the number of individual companies operating in any one sector. At present, aircraft manufacture is effectively dominated by Boeing and Airbus; there are just four global accounting firms; similar restrictive choice is seen in the oil and food retailing and many other sectors. This maturing of the marketplace puts massively increased abusive power in the hands of a very small number of companies with the obvious related potential abusive structures of cartels, oligarchies, monopolies and duopolies.
At the beginning of the twenty first century, we may only view life through the distorting prism of the coercive and personally destructive system in which we live. Freedom is a commodity – one can have as much as one can afford to purchase. Fraud by the poor is rampantly criminalised; tax evasion by the rich is creative accounting. Black youth smoking crack lose their freedom and, in the US, their right to vote; white investment bankers snorting cocaine is not an issue. According to Eduardo Galeano: “the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, illusions of power to the weak.” The privatisation of government goes hand in hand with the privatisation of the market. This is the central theme of modern political culture.
David Hume noted: “force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion”. Shareholder capitalists are more than aware of this fact and their coercion necessarily involves the incorporation of propaganda in their media and publicity machines. But Hume is obviously correct. If the disenfranchised of the world were simply to fold their arms and say “no!”, the whole abusive structure would grind to a halt.
It is, consequently, a critical input to the system to buy off a managerial and/or skilled level in society in the ultimate form of divide and rule. A few statements related to the selfish obedience and acquiescence of the blinkered middle classes are given below:
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor - “Ignorance, and admiration arising from ignorance, are the parents of evil devotion and obedience.”
Chomsky – “The specialised class is offered the opportunities to manage public affairs by virtue of their subservience to those with the real power in our society – dominant business interests – and this is a critical fact that is, not surprisingly, ignored in the self-praise of the elect.”
Von Humboldt - “When a man is acquiescent, we may admire what he does but despise what he is.”
Chomsky (again) – “Since they are usually not very bright, or are bright enough to know that they better avoid the arena of fact and argument, they’ll turn to misrepresentation, vilification and other devices that are available to those who know that they’ll be protected by the various means available to the powerful.”
And, yet, it is the individuals who have effectively sold out on their fellow human beings who are most at risk from the impacts of the future path of capitalism. The regression from stakeholder to shareholder to private capitalism is almost complete. Having been bought off by the selfish fruits of their labour and limited power (wages, promotions, property, access to the stock and bond markets), the acquiescent will be entirely excluded from such constructs as capitalism advances to a world of private equity, market manipulation, hedge funds, cartelisation, monopoly, offshore financial centres, corporate corruption and currency manipulations. Those of us who have learned to accept our degree of disenfranchisement in a fascistic system will be psychologically (if not financially) more able to deal with the final progression of capitalism on its route from stakeholder – shareholder – psychopathic.
The power of the oligarchy always rests on fraud as it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not cooperate if they realized that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. This opinion was put forward over half a century ago by a right wing ideologue called James Burnham and, despite an abhorrence of his political agenda, respect must be given as his vision is coming sharply into focus.
Bolshevism and capitalism are equivalent – they are both totalitarian systems. In the words of Martin Buber: “one cannot in the nature of things expect that a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forward leaves”. Libertarian Socialism according to von Humboldt establishes “the fullest, richest and most harmonious development for the potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race. Progress will follow the creation of freedom at every step”. We are a creative, inquisitive, learning species but freedom of thought and enlightenment should not only be for the rich. Education is the key input here – not the current educational system orientated to maintaining the existing social and economic structures but an educational system that allows us to transform such structures in a more creative and egalitarian manner.
One of the prime kneejerk responses to suggestions of a more utopian system for our planet is that such a goal is idealistic. Not so. Incrementalism has transformed our world as the autocrats have been forced to (allegedly) abolish slavery, give the vote to Blacks and Women, create social safety nets for the poor and allow workers to organise and share information (albeit in a repressive infrastructure). Libertarian Socialism is a work in progress. For example, Libertarian Socialists perceive a strategic future without the need for the corrupting powers of government and, yet, in the immediate term, government is our only structure whereby we may decelerate the progression of capitalism to its psychopathic conclusion of unaccountable private tyrannies. A further objection raised by opponents of even making the decision to seek a better future for the planet is that Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists are unable to provide a comprehensive template of the structural requirements and the ongoing development of a new social system. And yet, such an opponent would agree, if they were able to produce a valid argument at all, that science moves forward in incremental steps as people work together for a social and informational advancement of the world. Why should political science be any different?
John Stuart Mill provides, I think, the clearest description of what happiness is. “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness - on the happiness of others; on the improvement of mankind; even on some art or pursuit - followed not as a means but, as itself, an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way”. One of the things that most befuddles the acquiescent in the capitalist machine is that their obedience to the system results in a deficit of happiness and fulfillment. There is a significant amount of medical research that shows a positive correlation between life/career satisfaction and life longevity. In the words of Emma Goldman “Anarchism is the only belief that shows men and women their true selves and who they can be”.
No Cartesian Gods, No Capitalist Masters…

Polychrysos - The Illusory Game of Exchange (A Post from the Past 13/01/09)

The Illusory Game of Exchange, the Giant Poker Table where our Realities are determined...

In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.

Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).

To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.

The Hyperreality (continued)

* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...

Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."

* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.

Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."

* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.

Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."

* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...

Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."

* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.

Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."

* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."

George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."

* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.

Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.

Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."

Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets

* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.

As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."

* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."

* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.

In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.

For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.

Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...

So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.

There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.

Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."

The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.

* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.

Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."

Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."

Ponzi Capitalism - Is the Truth, the Truth? A Post from the Past (29/01/09)

"Interest rates are losing their potency to aid the economy" - Jennifer Ryan (Bloomberg).

"Government spending has converted a private sector problem into a public sector financing problem" - Satyajit Das.

"The Treasury has decided to turn itself, in effect, into a catastrophe insurer" - the Economist.

"This is undeniably grim. Two or three quarters more like this and you're talking about depression, not recession" - Stewart Robinson (Aviva Investors).

"Britain is facing the deepest recession of any big industrialised economy, the International Monetary Fund signalled on Wednesday, as it said that the UK economy would shrink 2.8% this year... and the world economy will suffer its worst performance for more than 60 years" - Financial Times.

"... a once-in-half-a-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event" - Alan Greenspan.

"We are building the foundation stones of a recovery plan" - Gordon Brown.

Look here, Slack Jaw, as a primary architect of the Permanent Depression, should you not have considered the impacts of your economic policies just a shade earlier?

And check out their optimism.

Slack Jaw, Jack Straw, Mandy and Darling don't have a recovery plan.
Slack Jaw et al don't even have the foundation stones available to reconstruct their hyperreal recovery programme.
For Slack Jaw is still building the very stones themselves.

Still, and here is where the unintended consequences of a downturn might work in his favour, there are masses of unemployed Polish construction workers willing to be paid less than the minimum wage to create these foundations of an eventual pseudo-recovery.

The International Labour Organisation envisage that between 18 and 30 million jobs will be lost worldwide if this is merely a Recession.
If, the more likely prognosis by some distance, it is a Depression, then we are looking at over 50 million losing their jobs globally.
That would be normal people rather than bankers, of course...

One of the most entertaining aspects of the Recession/ Depression/ Permanent Depression triptych of Real Probabilities, is the disappearance of publicly available information.
It morphs, in mysterious circumstances, into publicly available disinformation.
They are dissing us as well as robbing us blind.

Government data and statistics have been manipulated in both the US and Britain over the last year at highly disturbing levels. The US election was one reason and Britain being the most fucked industrialised country another.
But this is not all...
Market prices are influenced by systemic tilting eg the banning of short selling of financial companies, in addition to all the everyday shenanigans like insider trading and cornering markets.
But this is not all, at all...
Mervyn King, another primary architect of this state of affairs who, astonishingly, is still in his job of governor of the Bank of England despite his Titanicesque stewardship of the central bank, says that there is another option on the poker table.
Namely, officials could buy up securities in Britain to fakely bolster the market hyperreality into a truly neohyperreal illusion of some magnitude.

We've got news for you...
According to our analytical data, this process is already underway.
Selective purchases have been undertaken to establish a fake floor in the Depression.

Perhaps these are the foundation stones Slack Jaw was wobbling on about?
Well, they are fake too.
Although we must restrict what we disclose in this place for proprietary reasons, the already fake level of the FTSE 100, for example, has been inflated by approximately #% utilising ####################################################
##############################################
Although Slack Jaw and the Spooky Transylvanian-Looking One have allowed illicit and, in effect, public support for the stock market, their reconstruction will not withstand the next phase of this Depression.

"... it won't last long. The most probable mechanism for collapse will be the bond market. The combination of reappearing inflationary trends and a soaring budget deficit will cause "buyers' strikes" at Treasury bond auctions, sending interest rates through the roof. Indeed, the first such buyers' strike has already occurred, in Germany, where a €6 billion 10-year issue on January 7th was only 85% covered by bids. The rise in long term interest rates will choke off economic recovery while the resurgence of inflation caused by excessive monetary growth will force the Fed to reverse its policy and increase short term rates to some margin above inflation" - the Economist.

"The economy will at this point go into a second decline. The second decline will be concentrated in the real economy" - Martin Hutchison.

"[If overseas investors seek to sell their bonds], they will not only ruin the US economy but the value of their existing portfolio as well... At some point, government bonds will surely suffer a horrendous bear market" - Nick Carn (Odey hedge-fund).

"For the government to run simultaneously, monetary and fiscal policies that are breathtaking in their expansionism and expect to escape unscathed is a triumph of wishful thinking" - Martin Hutchison.

"Banks are stockpiling the cash or using it to purchase government bonds" - Satyajit Das.

"It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination that was implicit in this gargantuan insanity" - JK Galbraith (talking about the 'Great Depression').

We are living in remarkable financial times.
We should expect continued volatility.
We should expect a complete lack of incrementalism.
We should expect more instability.
We should expect extensive underground secrecy courtesy of Dark Pools and Basel II.

And Slack Jaw, with his zombied hand gestures, keeps telling us that this is a global problem and, in a sense, he is correct. But the roots of this crisis are in the free market economies, and it is they who are suffering, and will continue to suffer, the most (in the allegedly developed world, of course).
Iceland went bust, not Sweden.
Britain is the most recessed industrialised country, not France.
America is one fucked hyperpower, not China.

Meanwhile, half the world away, it is the Chinese, whose banking system has been the least demolished, who hold all the aces now, boyo...

At Davos this week, Wen Jiabao, quoting the Financial Times, "made scathing comments about "inappropriate macroeconomic policies" of some unnamed countries and the "unsustainable model of development characterised by prolonged low savings and high consumption". He attacked financial institutions' "blind pursuit of profit" and their "lack of self discipline.""

ObamaWorld offers us no respite - Tim Geithner is the new Treasury secretary.
As Geithner was part of the team that entirely misallocated the government handouts to date, we should expect equally informal financing from the man in the future.
No change. No hope, just more of the same...

Still, as Mr Berlusconi capably noted this week, Obama is black and not just tanned. The racist US machine will put up whoever is necessary in order to be able to resell the message.

Net-geners should expect Eric "Respect My Authority" Cartmen and Stewie Griffin as future presidential candidates.

"Attempts to regulate finance to make it safe often lead to dangers as clever financiers work around the rules" - the Economist.

"Ronald Cass, a former dean of Boston University School of Law, has argued in the Wall St Journal that Mr Madoff looks as if he broke plenty of laws that are already in force. His ability to mislead everyone around him "illustrates the limits of the law", not the need for more of it" - the Economist.

Run that pair of nonsenses by me again...
Clever (sic) financiers working around the rules are the foundation of this crisis.
So, the regulatory system has failed.
Although, no doubt, future "clever financiers" will also seek to circumvent any restrictions on their personally profitable psychopathy, their endeavours may be made considerably more awkward and less profitable.

How?
Twist the incentives.

After proper global regulation has been put in place, reward the regulators with million pound performance-related bonuses while market analysts, traders, brokers, investment bankers, hedge-funders etc have their salaries capped at a level of, say, £75,000 per annum.
Sorted.
With the incentives adjusted, we will experience markets that are semi-sustainable within eco-systemic pressures, to allow time to be bought to deliver a system that is open source, sustainable and made social for shared gain, rather than one that is privatised, patented and made proprietary for personal gain.

According to Eichengreen and Gordo, financial crises are twice as common as prior to 1914. This has absolutely nothing to do with the demise of the Gold Standard.
Nothing at all...
Ever since this date, capitalism has been one giant Ponzi scheme, no different in template from the one perpetrated by Mr Madoff.

Shareholder capitalism regressively redistributes assets "up the pyramid" by means of the boom-and-bust matrix of operation.

Consider yourself in three parallel hyperrealities...

In the first, your are an insider at a previous Davos, you attend all the right gatherings, and you are aware that a bull market cycle is to be engendered with immediate effect. The markets progress and profits are made by those who were "in the scheme" from the beginning. The second tier of participants are also financially rewarded, and word of mouth combined with a general state of financial bewilderment, results in more and more people buying into this fake market boom. Obviously, in the end, the really gullible individuals are buying overpriced assets that are guaranteed to decline in value.

In the second hyperreality, you set up a dodgy pyramid selling scheme in Albania. Poor people become stable financially within months, while the rich acquire fleets of the black Mercedes that populate Tirana's streets. Once again, the pyramid selling scheme implodes at the moment it reaches the most gullible.

The third hyperreality is Bernard Madoff...

If anybody is able to point out any operational differences between these situations, I'll gladly listen.

Swiss banks understand the Real value of money.
If you are one of the independently wealthy and you wish to store your financial assets in Switzerland, you are paid a negative rate of interest as the Swiss bankers understand that, eventually, all cash will be worthless - wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks buy loaves of bread, remember?
And, as this crisis deepens, Osmium Capital Management is offering to price in Gold for any clients wishing to sidestep the risk of the symbols of money.

As for the banks, pay me my money down.
The risks associated with Fat Wallets are greater than those linked with Stuffed Mattresses.

Everything is fake.
But we're bored of the fake and we need something more fake for stimulation.

The next bubble is in bonds, baby...
... government bonds.

And, besides all this stuff and nonsense, what's this whole truth thing anyway?

Football Is Fixed - We Reconstruct An Order On The Other Side Of Chaos :)

In The Lap of the Big Bang - A Post from the Past

Why Free Market Capitalism Cannot Work; Why It Is Pointless To Reform Something That Cannot Work; Why Nobody Believes In Free Markets Anymore Although We Want To Maintain Appearances; Why It Is Time For A New Equilibrium State

Fractally speaking, all of our existences are to be determined to a major extent by the Physics of the Big Bang.
For financial economists, this is a pretty large externality to have left out of your risk assessments!
And, yet, that is exactly how flimsy is the intellectual rigour underpinning Friedman, Hayek and the Chicago School so mighty in ObamaWorld.
Of course, all other externalities are stripped out of the pricing system too, in order that psychopathic growth may be achieved despite the production of Real Super-Systemic Risk.

Carcinogenic Capitalism.

Occurrences that have already happened, some in the dim and distant past, are affecting the dynamics, trends and movements in the financial markets today.

Behaviouralism and Darwinism are primary drivers of the financial markets and yet such structures as 'Moral Hazard' (where market operators take excessive risk safe in the knowledge that there is no personal downside to such risk) were built into the very fabric of the free market model.

None of this Fractal Mathematics, Psychology of Finance or Behaviouralism has been utilised by regulators, government or the financial system despite such knowledge having been freely available for half a century - Mandelbrot, Kahneman and Tversky published in the early sixties.

Benoît Mandelbrot: "Financial economics, as a discipline, is where Chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation."

Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals were rewarded for public displays of their psychopathy in action, we should hardly express surprise that the elevation of such antisocials up the economic, financial and political ladders has produced systemic psychopathy in the atmosphere of the system.
Short-termism leads to a lack of strategy which increases risk.
Refusal to accommodate externalities produces feedback loops that also engender systemic and super-systemic risk.

And while these characters were filling their pockets while we were all still focused on all that smoke and all those mirrors, they were basing their illusion on prehistoric 'science'.

Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary it is not!
Then there are the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinkered to any Holistic Reality but following the same data, the same prices, the same (dis)information, plotting the same lines on the same charts utilising the same off-the-shelf software which, if it were of any Real value, would be being used in a proprietary trading environment for isolationist profit. Actually...
Then came the Idiot Physicists - Econophysicists - to spread disaster far and wide.
Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with a new twist - black boxes.
Algorithmic analysis has grown exponentially in the last decade.
Curiously enough, this neatly coincides with the onset of the Permanent Depression which, as we all know, began in 1997, or thereabouts.
Black boxes are perfect for shenanigans.
You feed in the inputs.
You train your black box to recognise patterns in this data.
You mock trade the black box.
You build the black box into your overall trading portfolio.
And cybernetics works, to an extent, but not if any econophysicists are involved it doesn't!

It is all dependent on the quality of the inputs.
There are many additional issues with relying solely on black box technologies for trading including different pattern relevance in different market phases and the impacts of Black Swans, for example.

The key charges laid on the Chicago doormat are damning in their veracity - archaic theory, non-multidisciplinary, no Real risk assessment, unsustainability as a core competency, belief in 'magic' technologies, an absence of any atmospheric analysis and engendering super-systemic catastrophe scenarios.
Meanwhile, our Chicago Economist In Chief, Barack Hussein Obama Himself, doesn't understand the basic concept of the price-earnings ratio, thinking it is termed the 'profit-earnings ratio' in a Friedmanian Slip.
This cannot be a good thing.

Before entirely deconstructing this nonsense, we need to take a closer look at the Real reasons why such a system can NEVER work.
Gosh! This is pretty exciting for a Monday morning, I can tell you :)

On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century.
The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50.
Mandelbrot: "You could span the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe - and still never meet such a number."

Free market capitalism underprices risk.
In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely.
The outcome of this blinkered approach to all of our Realities is that, in the words of Mandelbrot: "The odds of financial ruin in a free, global market economy have been grossly underestimated."

October 19th 1987 simply should not have occurred.
Last Year's Crash should never have happened either.
But they did and such Black Swans will continue to blight this myopic system until it is nicely deconstructed and put away in its box, under the bed.

Fractal Mathematics are the key here, obviously.
Butterflies flutter and hurricanes hit mainly Black areas, only to be ignored as an Unreality by government.
Decisions are made, systems developed, regulations changed, globalisation created, insider trading enacted, markets are cornered, monopolies allowed, cartels fragment, the state gets involved, new financial markets are established, private markets and Deep Pools established etc etc etc. Each of these quantums of influence set in process the fractal future.
Every single quantum Reality impacts on the future market price.

Behaviouralism cuts across all these feedback loops as a further fractal input.
As Slavoj Žižek states: "The problem is today when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping."
Chaos reigns.

Take volatility.
There were more daily swings of 5% or more in the FTSE 100 in November than in total since the Second World War.
Were the market hyperrealities really more volatile in November or was Mass Psychology at play?
All fundamental, systemic, regulatory and cybernetic fractals are massively disordered by the impact of the Behavioural.
Although listed under their sub-sections of Gestalt or Psychoanalysis or whatever, there is a Darwinian dynamic to the manner in which markets evolve.
This, of course, brings us back to the 'animal spirits - psychopathy' doublespeak.

And this is why super-systemic risk is being so massively underpriced in the financial system.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists in the seats of power are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet (which, unfortunately, there probably is) and extending this pretence to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed fractally in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection.
And not just by climate change scientists either...

Fractals are the most worrying aspect of the whole array of worrying factors that make up the subject of climate change.
If fractals can do 10 to the power of 50 with financial markets when destabilisation takes hold, imagine what fractals could achieve in an eco-system that is no longer in a sustainable equilibrium state!

Mandelbrot: "The two poles of human experience - deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability."
The latter of these poles dominate the analysis today both in financial markets and in climate change.
Better frame the argument around the issue of bankers and their bonuses then...

Jean Baudrillard: "These systems, even when they are based on radical indeterminacy (the loss of meanings), fall prey, once more, to meaning. They collapse under the weight of their own monstrosity."

Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia" - a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives.
But this is merely the first layer of "disaster myopia".
The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the quantuming between different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer - more "catastrophe myopia" really...

If free market snake-oil salespeople included the primary and secondary levels of externality in their pricing system, the entire edifice comes crumbling down under the weight of its own "monstrosity", a monstrosity based on inconsequence of intellectual input to the issue at hand.
There is no growth once externalities are built into the equation.
Once one takes the holistics into account, the trickledown effect, already entirely illusory, becomes, instead, a Cinderella-fantastic fairy tale of a neohyperreality.

There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme.
And the weight of monstrosity is the gravity.
Every free market capitalist infrastructure is Pure Ponzi - from Albanian peasants to credit default swaps.

And, because the people who have been receiving excessive bonuses for the last quarter of a century made the selfish decisions that they did, even to the detriment of their own lines of offspring (psychopathy again), we are now in what Sun Tzu might have called the Worst Variety of Ground.
The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium.

So, a 'system' that produces negative growth if the externalities are included, produces this deficiency of utility on a foundation that spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally due to historical indiscretions.

These foundational externalities have been magnified by the Greed of the Great and the Good of the last centennial quartile.
They tell us that tax doesn't have to be taxing which, in self-application, would suggest that the Great and the Good would be more than willing to return all of their ill-gotten gains so that we all might start to implement a sustainable strategy that just might provide us with the remote feasibility of halting man-made climatic change.

Free market sorts, when still willing to defend their myths, frame their discussions around new regulation and innovation and growth and other words that have no directly Real meanings in our lives.
Free market sorts are enacting massive systemic ructions on the global financial architecture without any methodology or strategy whatsoever.
Big Butterflies produce Huge Hurricanes.
But their big thinking always stops short of being out-of-the-box; big ideas exist within the walled gardens of their illusory system.

We don't need tinkering.
We need deconstruction, thank you very much.
And sustainable negative growth, economic contraction, stopping breeding, the promotion of instincts for freedom, those sort of things...

But, in the meantime, to keep your pecker up, why not wander out into the spring sunshine and anarcho-happy-slap a banker today...

Arghhhh!!! The minutiae! Don't get wrapped up in the minutiae...