"... On Jul 14, 4:07 pm, archytas <[email protected]> wrote: ..."
> I believe many transactions should remain 'vanilla' Gruff and be very > transparent. There are many moves towards this that involve auctions > to supply goods and services. I agree. More transparency regarding certain aspects of a transaction would be very useful, but care must be taken not to overdo transparency. Some transactions involve information that would disrupt the marketplace and/or the industry and other transactions as well. Our business and financial dealings sometimes require confidentiality and even secrecy. There is nothing inherently wrong with either one as long as a basic set of moral equivalencies is followed. > Rajan's paper really points to forever > 'discounting cashflow' to do more with capital being flogged to more > and more 'efficiency'. Whilst one can see that banking the proceeds > of the day overnight to gain interest is a good thing, the way we are > now transacting over and over appears madness and also ends up > crooked. This is true, yet in spite of the recession and reform, which has just passed over here, corruption and cheating will find a way. It's part and parcel of the human makeup it seems. > Governments are heavily involved and banks make big profits > betting with entitlements buying government stock gives them. My > suspicion is it's a Ponzi scheme with a legal money printing press. Well, yes. Of course. In a sense inflation is a Ponzi scheme as well. Interest certainly is. However, Ponzi schemes are sustainable if they are done in moderation and without the ignominious albatross of the name. A Ponzi scheme by any other name, works the same. > Over here, we are cutting the public sector and hoping old rules on > private sector growth 'happen'.My guess is that is a long gone set of > rules. Yes, you certainly are and right in line with many other of your European counterparts as well. Personally I think it's moving in the wrong direction under the simple rubric of needing to give an engine more gas (closing the choke) on cold mornings when it's hard to start, then leaning out the mixture once things warm up a bit. I still strongly favor stimulus money being added. We can deal with the debt down the road a bit, but the economic engine needs to be restarted before we can even consider debt. > Jobs have either been public sector or part-time for many > years now. It's actually better now than it was a quarter century ago when more than half of our country was employed in one form or another by government -- Federal, state, county (or parish) and city. > Risk management in all this relies on a massive > spreadsheet (Gaussian copula) that can't work because the cheating > that makes money is excluded. Okay, I've no idea what Gaussian copula is or how it works but any plan that does not take into account the human element (cheating) is not going to work well. > Almost no services I use these days > require staff like they did, and none of the industries I worked in > has come back or been replaced. What has sprung up is all kinds of > financial service I don't need. My guess is economics is in real need > of a radical purge and a back to basics phase so that it connects more > directly with what we do. This won't happen. Social unrest and war > are the usual change agents. Maybe we've grown beyond unrest. I certainly believe we've gone further beyond war than ever before. (I hope I'm not blindsiding myself by giving too much credit to our species.) As for the radical purge, we're going through that now. Like any good depression or recession, one of its most important functions is to shake a lot of the bad apples out of the tree. Many businesses are cutting the fat and government needs to do the same, but that's not likely to happen given the political environment over here. Our government spends money wastefully no matter which party is in power. Both are profligate, just on different matters.
