A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend reads like spin control as managed by the Federal Reserve: Crises Fall Short Of Going Global‘. This orchestrated sigh of relief reminds one of the scene from Dr. Strangelove when the George C. Scott character, Gen. ‘Buck Turgidson’, offers up a prayer in the War Room when it appears that the U.S. has successfully thwarted an accidental nuclear attack on Russia. Turns out they were wrong: One bomber has actually slipped under Soviet radar, dropping a nuclear payload that would trigger The Doomsday Machine.
Well, it’s true that the financial markets have not collapsed as they did in 2007, notwithstanding the fact that the news from Greece and China has been more than a little worrisome. But to infer that the financial system is in the clear simply because there has not been a panic seems to be inviting trouble. To be sure, the reporters who filed the story, Greg Ip and Jon Hilsenrath, are two of the Journal‘s best. And they do make clear that any number of problems, some of them not even on the banksters’ radar, could set off a financial chain reaction that could have devastating consequences for the global economy and the banking system. But the emphasis is mainly on the “good” story about how well we seem to be coping. So far.
However, one statement in particular, from McKinsey Global Institute spokeswoman Susan Lund, would seem to tempt the Furies. Lund is quoted by the Journal as saying that each of the current problems is localized, “without big international spillover.” As such, she said, they are more like the S&L crisis of the early 1990s than the mortgage collapse of 2008. Oh really? This isn’t quite as fatuous-sounding as Prof. Irving Fisher’s statement, just before the 1929 Crash, that stocks appeared to have reached a permanently high plateau, but it certainly seems like the kind of hubris that Mr. Market loves to punish.
Comments on this entry are closed.
John Jay,
“Slavery was a fact of life for thousands of years…”
Don’t know if you meant that it isn’t anymore, or if you simply accentuated the fact that the slavery isn’t anything new, but by all metrics the current world wide economic system is still slavery.
Just because some people were taught not to see it, doesn’t mean it is not present. We teach children that one must have a chain and a ball to be a slave. This is akin to teaching them that one must have eggs to have a breakfast.
But if we admit that the definition of slavery in involuntary work for the benefit of others, then yes, we are all slaves now, not just some Africans, like it was before.
Ip and Hilsenrath are two of the best propagandists, and occasional direct mouthpieces, for the FIRE economy.
And McArthur led the violent suppression of the Bonus Army in the 1930’s, with assistance from Eisenhower-he’s no hero, just another MIC stooge.
&&&
&&&
&&&
The problem lies not with Ip and Hilsenrath — both are top-flight reporter whom I’ve followed over the years — but with the Wall Street Journal’s front page; it has been cheerleading the “recovery,” such as it is, ad nauseum for the last five years. This is in sharp contrast to the editorial and op-ed pages, which tend to present a more balanced picture of an economy with very deep structural problems. At the political level, the divide between news and editorial departments is manifest in the paper’s coverage of Hillary’s campaign. The news editors take it at face value, while the editorial-page editors convey the sense, although not in so many words, that she is a lying, stealing, self-serving, narcissistic, bribe-taking piece of human crud — a low-life even by the standards of the political class. RA
Well Rick, we have already passed through the pathetic and the bizarre, and have arrived at the surreal!
There is talk of declaring Damnatio Memoriae on the Founding Fathers of this nation because they were slaveholders!
That makes about as much sense as crucifying the driver of the last car in a five mile traffic jam for holding up traffic!
Slavery was a fact of life for thousands of years and to vilify Washington, Jefferson et al for being at the end of that practice is just silly.
Next, as Chicago morphs into Detroit, there is talk of a 30% property tax increase etc. to pay for unfunded pensions!
Remember we discussed this scenario a couple of weeks ago on this forum, and decided people were already fleeing Illinois to avoid getting trapped with real estate as state and municipal taxes hyper-inflated?
We never thought it would arrive this fast, did we?
And the Bruce Jenner saga has surpassed the surreal and is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench!
Our economy and our society have become half zoo, half psychiatric ward!
It is probably best to just fade away into the hills like some GI trapped behind enemy lines in the Philippines in 1942, and wait for MacArthur to return and restore order.
But this time we are fresh out of MacArthurs, aren’t we?
No way out, is there?