naked capitalism

The lives of others says:

In “how not to play the game” the author advocates voluntary poverty, sort of growing most of your food, using woodstove for heat etc, as well as the “monastic life”. He also says that having nothing valuable, you are safe from thieves.
What rot! Women and children are “stolen” for sex and serfdom from times immemorial. Everybody else can also be stolen for forced labor or forced anything. Poverty, whether voluntary or involuntary, bears an “available for grab” billboard.
I repeat, bringing life to existence is a harm (David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been).

kevinearick says:

Panic

The economic motor is dead, and has been for quite some time. Now, the pony motor is dead too (illegal immigration for next generation mindless make-workers to feed the ponzi). The operators are not going to get another motor so long as the Family Law filter, which disengaged the economic gears for so long that they atrophied, remains installed.

All they know is exploitation, moving the cattle from meadow to meadow, relying upon a planet that is becoming increasingly inhospitable. All they can do is drop the relative price of oil, which has already closed all the exits, and monetize the debt directly between them, to pump the market feedback signal. How is solar, wind, and FracGas working for everyone?

The housing channel is already stuffed to overflowing, and, like the digestive system, the subsequent lack of circulation is spreading poison across the rest of the body. In this environment, the non-profits are now “learning” that they are losing the government funding necessary to control their properties, leaving them scrambling for real rent at 25% of their mortgages, due to the mirrored government overhead on both sides of the equation, subject to deleveraging, and their ignorant response is to seek real renters to carry both their mortgages and their pets.

Their bosses are planning to drop the whole spoiled population off at the family farm, and the family farmers are already shutting down operations in anticipation of the move. How long before they get rid of the homeowners tax deductions, credits, and subsidies, to clear the market, when Trump owns the front yard and the driveway, paying interest on interest on interest, at 0% effective? An intelligent community does not subsidize stupid, to hide a massive surplus of McMansions within dead governments.

“They had all benefited from the same quality education, and they shared a set of standards by which they lived, and they expected of one another adherence to these standards. Being one of the anointed elite meant belonging, meant freedom from self-doubt, meant always knowing what you thought and what you should think, meant comfort…Life can sometimes seem hopelessly complex, unpredictable, chaotic. Then a strange order makes itself known…This phase of the pattern, which benefitted him, was a wave that offered effortless surfing. Until it lost its benign character…In every complex system…just under the façade of order, which science has discovered and long thought it fully understood, lurked an eerie and disturbing chaos. But also, deep inside every chaos, an eerier kind of hidden order waited to be found.”

Behind the façade that poses for eyes to an empty soul, you see a skull cracking from the pressure in the brain. The manager becomes increasingly arbitrary, capricious, and malicious, because the box must be controlled amidst increasingly variable input and increasingly rigid output, as the bosses race for the exits. “Why” is an integral question; “because that is the way I was taught” is a derivative answer. Best to maintain your health, to keep a gap between yourself and those derivatives.

Peak government is the correct answer. What happens when the size of government contracts rapidly? All politics are local, aggregated into social behavior, with a feedback signal. What do you want to do with the energy in that slingshot, relative to the turbulence in the neutral line? If you owe the bank $X, you are in trouble; if you owe the bank $Y, the bank is in trouble. If the bank “owes” the me generation and its descendents $500 trillion NPV worth of entitlement promises, who is in trouble, and when does the buck break?

I eat breakfast with the farmers, ride a bike in the rain with boots hung over the bar, to a low wage job in an automated plant, and suddenly move away, after walking across town with my backpack. What do you do? What is each type of person in that small town thinking, if anything? Every empire maximizes productivity and then debt, with alternating feedback signals, in a recursive cycle, until it doesn’t, when all the exits are shut, and all the lies pop off the stack.

Calculate the square footage required per capita and compare it to inventory. Run a distribution for each sector and compare the result against currency carry trades. What is the economic effect of hoarding, and why does it happen?

At the cliff abutment, you are strategically pulling the looking glass back, shaving off sections of the cliff, and leaving the momentum of gravity to do the work for you. Allow Caesar to add rigid price controls. The larger the collapse, the more ingrained the lesson, the lower the overhead cost to the next system, and the bigger the battery, but you have to hit the next orbit. Critters will be critters; big is a least-common-denominator enterprise. Adjust Democracy accordingly.

So, you have a piston of pistons in the neutral line, with adjustable I/O surfaces, and a pathway for productive ignition of backlash…

Valissa says:

Sweden raises rates for seventh time this year http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fec7ba8-a6f1-11e0-a808-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1RFgB28Gw

Sweden’s central bank has raised interest rates for the seventh time in a year as the Scandinavian country continues to experience the fastest economic growth in western Europe. However, the Riksbank indicated that growth had peaked and highlighted the risks posed to Sweden’s export-dependent economy by the eurozone debt crisis and weak US recovery.

Sweden’s sensible economic policy, how refreshing and almost quaint considering the other ecnomic games currently in play.