Jobs going out the window, literally. Companies going under, literally. Houses and foreclosures happening so often now the news services no longer cover this issue. Wow! Like watching a huge ship sink, except this is in very slow motion.
My question here is how long do you think this is going to last? I thought it may last a couple of years, but when I look at this like an injury to a body, with the bleeding so profuse, and the cuts all over, the outlook for this patient is tentative at best.
So, what do you think? What treatments are out there to stop the bleeding, the damage still happening? The more minds working on this, the better, is my thinking here.
President Obama used words like “Catastrophe, disaster” and, by looking at the damage even now, I have to agree with this.
Solutions! We will work through this, there is no other choice. But how? Come on, give it a go!
You call your book THE PREDATOR STATE, what do you mean predator?
“JAMES GALBRAITH: What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies.
They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of the corporate agriculture’s markets in the third world. A whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That’s the predator state.”
That has been the way of previous governments, to enact laws that favoured corporate behaviour, corporate interests, corporate profits and extend the interest of the companies as much as possible.
Read this book: “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too” Written by James K Galbraith. We cannot remain in ignorance any more.
Read “The Crash of 1929” by John Kenneth Galbraith too. It shows just how closely what we are all living through parallels that time, but with some exceptions.
All around the world stock markets plummet, and there have been so many people thinking on this that some may end up with a headache trying to figure it out.
My own thinking, sans headache, is this. Banks, investment houses, lenders of all kinds as well as those who have bought into CDS and other hidden “instruments” are now being asked to repay, restore, and get the money back to those they owe. How can they do that? Sell off stocks,even at low prices, to pay up.
Remember there are a huge number of those hidden “instruments” now coming due. When the two investment houses, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs both went to full-service banks, they cut out a huge amount of funding to those who were in the investments. That money is no longer there.
Shorter version, the debts are now being called, and demands for payment are here. This time there is no room for renegotiation, no putting off “paying the piper” so the markets are seeing pain.
Federal Deficits. There is a howling going around about them. How can any country live with an increase in the national deficit. Well, the cold, hard truth is that there is NO other choice. A country can either refuse to go into debt and see the deficit rise regardless, or use the borrowing capacity to make decisions that will shorten or lighten the harsh reality down the road. I am not alone here in thinking this.
It’s the dollar or nothing. So the United States basically can finance itself to the extent necessary to deal with this crisis. And I’m right now quite sanguine about that, quite confident that we won’t face a problem.
John Kenneth Galbraith has authored a number of books, “The Crash of 1929” and others on political economics. He has been an ambassador, a writer of books and he has a solid take on the ways American influence has affected the world, good and bad. Ironically, he is a Canadian. If you want to read some enlightening books on economics and the world, find his books. They may have been written years ago, but they are certainly relevant now. If you want to cut to the relevant part here, go to around the 43 minute mark on this video. You will be astounded at how much things are almost duplicated then, and now! Bloody scary, bloody ridiculous!
There is an impression that if left alone, the government to stay out of the market that the financial markets, by some God given power, will solve the problem.
This is from the years just before the Great Depression Do these words sound like some of the current Congressional leaders? The Senators? Even the President himself? Take a look at how Eisenhower, Roosevelt managed to deal with economics, the withdrawal of the US in unpopular war (Korea) and realize how much history has to teach the current administration and any administration to come!
Even if they manage to pass the bill facing the US right now, the economies of the world are NOT going to be in any kind of rosy state for quite a while. This bill, in whatever form it takes, will NOT solve the problems, it is just a start. Period.
The massive consumption of goods is not going to continue. I figure that this will affect all of us for at least 5 years, maybe more, so if any of us figure that we can resume spending, borrowing using credit cards and other lines of credit, we are WRONG.
There are going to be jobs lost in Asia, China, the US, and Europe, but what this bill may do is to keep those losses to a lower level, not stop them. Business will not resume as it did before the banks and the toxic waste they devised became known. What is really mind boggling is that most of the very banking “experts”, the economists, and the ordinary people don’t even understand this. Most of us, including the banking and economics experts find this far too complicated, far too extensive, far too large in scope to figure out.
Regardless of how this comes down, I am going to see property prices drop more, although here the property prices are still way over the true level in value anyway. The foreclosures in the US will continue, they will rise and so will bank failures.
Get the idea? This bill is NOT a cure, not a way to solve the problem, just a small beginning, with pain still to come. The international news knows this, why on earth do the Americans in the administration, including Paulson and Bernanke not know it, nor the President?
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