http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/washington/19cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

So basically.. we are pretty fucked.

Well. The 20th Century was nice. Im glad we all this time together to live in a golden age or sorts.

I quote my tag line in full.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


-- William Butler Yeats (http://www.cs.rice.edu/%7Essiyer/minstrels/index_poet_Y.html#Yeats)

You left off the second stanza.

And yes, when your economy is based on a shared fiction, you'd better make damn sure nobody ever suspends disbelief.

All those poor congressmen, forced to stop and suddenly govern :>

I recognized the Yeats as well :) - and saw this excerpted today on Der Spiegel (major German daily). I think I'll be suspending my trip back out of the job market into grad school, and thanking my lucky stars that I more or less have 5 years left on my contract before they can shed me for economic reasons (and shoving money under the mattress in the meantime)...

"And when it *is* that time... hang on to your MF-ing hat!" The crazed axe-wielding and compulsive cake-binging, it comes...

Regards,
Nydia

And, the second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What indeed. At least now that the sky undeniably *is* falling, we're finally getting something (while Bush is off re-reading My Pet Goat) resembling acknowledgement of reality...

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b2/Fath_Ali_Shah_Flag.svg/800px-Fath_Ali_Shah_Flag.svg.png
http://patdollard.com/wp-content/uploads/parcham_iran_99.jpg

Uh oh...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Nadir_Shah_Flag.png

Ah, I love Yeats. Slouching toward Bethlehem indeed!

People have been claiming the End Of The World <TM> since Ghengis Kahn's ride across Europe.

We always think the times in which we live in, are the worst they can be. Things aren't as bad as they were as during the Great Depression.

Perspective, please?

I don't think you understand what's going on right now.

I do understand, and we don't have a dustbowl in the middle of our country as of yet. This country can go back to a manufacturing base economy, if it has to. The only drawback is people might actually have to *gasp* work!

You definitely don't understand what's going on, if you think it's that simple.

without doing the MAlse like research :P

Wouldnt it be if you stripped it down that simple? Granted it would take a long sophisticated process but wouldnt that help?

If Sixee's logic made any sense, The Great Depression should have never happened, right? We were still very agrarian at that time and had a substantial manufacturing base, yet a money supply crisis took the whole thing down (farmers and all).

Even if manufacturing in this country could be competitive in a flat world, what's the first thing necessary for a company to start up this mythical industrial re-revolution? Financial liquidity, the lack of which is exactly what's causing the current crisis.

People still think this is the sub-prime crisis, but it isn't. That caused this, but this has expanded far beyond the housing industry, at a fundamental level.

I've personally noticed a serious cash-flow shortage in my industry, which is one that normally profits in time of financial crisis. I've spent nearly every day of the past three months doing videos for companies talking about how they are doing fine despite the financial troubles, or advertisements to help pull sales out of the red into the black, or video taping government officials or financial investors or reporters talking about the financial crisis. Suffice it to say, business is BOOMING. I've had my best month ever in June, again in July, and again in September.

And yet, the cash flow is ridiculous. My company sends all our invoices out and expect payment in 30 days of the shoot. As of today we have a little over $28,000 unpaid which is close to 3 months worth of work for us (some invoices unpaid as of 5 months ago, and some paid 2 weeks after being sent). I've just had 3 of my best months ever, and yet I'm not getting paid, while having to pay my employees more than normal since they are working more than normal. The production/advertising/broadcasting companies that hired me are having the same problems, as they aren't getting paid from the corporations above them.

And this is all happening in one of this countries larger major exports: the entertainment industry. Think about how not just our economy, but economies around the globe are hurting, and our biggest export (international travel and recreation) isn't going to be doing too hot either.

It's funny you should mention that lack of flow but booming business. My gf also is experiencing the same thing, we were discussing this just yesterday. This month and the month prior she has done double the business she had ALL year. Yet, many of her invoices are unpaid 60 days+ from her most reliable clients. The payments are coming.....sloooooooooooow. On paper she has made 2x what she did the first 7 months of the year but her bank account says otherwise. This is troubling. July was the slowest month she's ever had and then suddenly a flood gate opened, she's been killing herself getting everything done but doesn't have much to show for just yet. And, she's going back to school next month which is a worry to both of us b/c of the cost and the state of the economy.

If Sixee's logic made any sense, The Great Depression should have never happened, right? We were still very agrarian at that time and had a substantial manufacturing base, yet a money supply crisis took the whole thing down (farmers and all).


I always thought it was the farmers that started that whole crisis:

When they got loans to buy seed, equipment, and livestock, they were betting that the next year's crops were gonna come in. When the drought happened that created the Dustbowl, the banks moved in, to foreclose on the farms and equipment, but soon realized there was nowhere to sell this stuff, because you can't farm when all of the soil is flying around in the air....

People that had put thier money in the banks, panicked, because all the banks had to show for the investments, was useless farm equipment, and arid farmland. They pulled thier money out of the banks (the lucky ones) and *BAM* the whole kit-n-kabootle came crashing down....

What was needed was someone with Deep Pockets to come in and bail the whole mess out. The Federal Government comes in, and starts providing a place for people to put thier money (war bonds, treasurey notes). The war was timely in the fact that it helped people focus efforts back into the place where the money was being put. A lot of out great-grandparents and grandparents made some good money because they put thier money into something, then worked their asses off to make it grow.

The problem with investing has always been, you are betting against the future. If the future throws you a curve ball, then you take a loss.

I feel dumber after having read that.

Well, its as good a theory as any. No one really seems to know why the Great Depression happeped, just what signs took place before it did.

And it's starting to look like those signs are rearing thier ugly heads again.

But it wasn't the End Of The World <TM> then and it won't be the End Of The World <TM> this time.

That's "dumberer", San.

I've seen people claim that no one knows why the Great Depression happened, but that's bunk. They are either stupid, lazy, or don't want to acknowledge it. If you really want to know, you can.

The end of the world is subjective. To all of the people who starved to death, it was the end of the world, wasn't it?

I don't even know where to begin on something that completely unright. I don't think a single causal relation was even accidentally remotely like what happened.

And plenty of people know what caused the great Depression. They know there was no single smoking gun, but a set of conditions greatly exacerbated by financial policy so stupid you'd think we'd have learned from it. When you build a house of cards, the first wind that comes by knocks it over regardless of which joker you had on the bottom.

I think Sixee derived his viewpoint on the causes of the Depression via watching "The Grapes of Wrath" :). Don't mistake the symptoms for the underlying cause! First of all, the first year of the "Dust Bowl" drought period in the Midwest was 1930, *after* the crash of 1929; it didn't get really severe until 1933, the fourth year of the Depression and Roosevelt's second year in office, and by then a myriad of other factors were forcing people off of the land as well, far more related to a lack of liquidity than the drought itself (pardon the pun :) ).

Then, as now, the decade prior to the collapse was one wherein the economic possibilities seemed limitless, and businesses were acting in an environment of almost completely unfettered ability to move capital. Then, as now, there were enormous sums of wealth being created out of nothing but futures transactions, the factories were pumping out tons of new consumer goods (cars, refrigerators, washing machines, for starters) all new to the post WW1 consumer and it was a period in which significant consumer debt was incurred. Additionally, the lack of regulation in a large number of industries, as well of the banking and investment 'industries', had created a situation were wealth was becoming increasingly polarized; the gap between rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth at the top, intensified throughout the 1920s.

Eventually something had to give, and that something was consumer confidence, followed by consumer credit, and on 'Black Friday', the stock market crashed. People's (well, banks for most people) investments began to plummet in value, and because there was no FDIC guaranteeing bank deposits in those days, there were runs on the banks, strangling them from both ends. Banks desperately called in their loans and/or collapsed, capital dried up long before the prairie did, and the Great Depression was born...

Bernake, Paulson, and both Wall Street and Capitol Hill are crapping their pants at the thought of this (credit strangulation) happening again and hence the proposed bailout. I personally am not too crazy about the idea; while I view it as a somewhat necessary evil, what the administration is seeking is carte blanche, no oversight discretion to bail out the foxes, while we, the hens, get plucked twice over - and what is served by effectively rewarding our fleecers, without 1) oversight and 2) substantial reregulation and restructuring of US investment law? Reading today's Der Spiegel, btw, Andrea Merkel and the German fuming at us for dragging Europe into our mess via refusal to adhere to proposed international law or at least sanity with regard to what we permit, and their economists have downgraded their projected economic growth for the year as a result...

While I think some of us would like to effectively send Phil Gramm, the heads of the surviving investment banks, and everyone else who knowing and willingly set this bubble/crisis in motion to the guillotine for screwing our futures, I think we have to think about how we're going to crawl our way out of it, and not panic while doing so, and not rush pass something that is going to compound our problems in the name of 'doing something'...

Regards,
Nydia

You can really boil the Great Depression down to monetary policy. Even Bernanke has acknowledged that.

The beginning of this century saw monetary policy identical to that of the 20s, which led to the same speculative bubble. Now, they can either inflate their way out of it or depress the system by allowing the money supply to contract (what they did in 29-33).

We lose either way. We will always lose as long as we're on this ridiculous fiat currency at the whim of the FED.

The quote you guys were talking about was in Heroes tonight :)

yeah i jumped on to post that too Kelraz

Granted it's a famous poem - but very creepy when the narrator started into that.

I think Sixee derived his viewpoint on the causes of the Depression via watching "The Grapes of Wrath" :).
Blame my English Teacher. She made me watch it! :o

In regards to the poem, it this another instance of life imitating art, art imitating life, or the cyclic nature of things? Doomed to repeat the mistakes we didn't learn from, as it were?

We're supposed to think that there's a cyclic nature of things. The business cycle, as it were.

That's only the case when we have bad monetary policy though. When countries have real money, not created as debt, they usually enjoy steady prosperity.

So the gov't basically has told us money doesn't mean anything. I'm going to start printing my own!

'You can really boil the Great Depression down to monetary policy. Even Bernanke has acknowledged that.

The beginning of this century saw monetary policy identical to that of the 20s, which led to the same speculative bubble. Now, they can either inflate their way out of it or depress the system by allowing the money supply to contract (what they did in 29-33).'

- For a better comparison, read up on the South Sea Bubble.