The great thing about these rhyme challenges is that I would otherwise never have imagined a rock opera about 19th century political economists. Oh, who am I kidding, that’s the sort of thing I think about all the time.
Ok, so: steampunk rock strut, tempo di ‘Back In Black’ or actually more like the Beastie’s ‘Rock Hard’. Hit it:
John Stuart Mill versus Thomas Carlyle
Slavery and desi-yah!
Gold and silver, supply and demand,
A manuscript on the fi-yah!
Reports from 3AM, or: How I respond to a global financial crisis.
Which is why I’m going on an economics news fast and teaching myself Haskell. Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation, and all that.
Clichés reconsidered
All metaphors and parables are deceitful, to some extent – “here is a little story which is a bit like what we are actually talking about. Isn’t it delightful? Don’t you agree? Quick, now please apply that agreement back to the matter at hand before you notice” – but some are much more deceitful than others, and this rigmarole about babies and bathwater is very bad indeed. We’ve heard a lot of it lately from measured voices who are warning us against letting the global financial crisis goad us into something insane like attempting to reform capitalism.
Whenever it is used, there is some dispute about whether or not a certain thing may be gotten rid of, and it is certainly loading the scales unfairly to represent that thing as a baby. Even those who don’t like babies will hesitate before casually throwing one away.
What kind of monster would do that? A harmless baby!
Throw out the bathwater, by all means, it’s filthy with all sorts of unnameable debris. But look at the baby. Isn’t he beautiful? How could you even think of throwing out a charming little baby?
The baby has big blue eyes, golden curls and cannot work for anything less than $US500,000 per annum. It has simply no idea of how the bathwater got into the state it’s in. It destroyed three investment funds and a merchant bank yesterday because it’s a wicked naughty ickle thing isn’t it! Goo-goo, gah-gah, baby! Smile, baby!
Awwwwwww.
Categories: clichesreconsidered · economics · words
Fear of deflation has seen a revival of interest in the Depression-era idea of Stamp Scrip or Freigeld, a form of currency which loses value gradually over time, forcing holders to re-spend their earnings and increase the velocity of money.
I think we can combine this concept with the appeal of a return to the gold standard – always a popular idea in times of crisis – and shift whole economies onto the gold-foil-wrapped chocolate money standard.
James Lieber, “What Cooked the World’s Economy?”
But hedge funds later diversified their practices beyond that easy definition. These funds acquired a good deal of popular mystique. They made scads of money. Their notoriously high entry fees—up to 5 percent of the investment, plus as much as 36 percent of profits—served as barriers to all but the richest investors, who gave fortunes to the funds to play with. The funds boasted of having genius analysts and fabulous proprietary algorithms. Few could discern what they really did, but the returns, for those who could buy in, often seemed magical.
But it wasn’t magic. It amounted to the return of the age-old scam called “bucket shops.” Also sometimes known as “boiler rooms,” bucket shops emerged after the Civil War. Usually, they were storefronts where people came to bet on stocks without owning them. Unlike their customers, the shops actually owned blocks of stock. If customers were betting that a stock would go up, the shops would sell it and the price would plunge; if bettors were bearish, the shops would buy. In this way, they cleaned out their customers. Frenetic bucket-shop activity caused the Panic of 1907. By 1909, New York had banned bucket shops, and every other state soon followed.
This makes a nice change from the boring state-v-free-market rhetoric which has been passing for analysis. Although it is fun to watch the cognitive dissonance seep through The Economist. The free market platitudes and scare stories about how we must hold our ground and not be tempted by Communism seem half-hearted and sporadic, as if they are slowly realising that this isn’t just another post-Cold-War cafeteria argument.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman is off joining a literary round table about a Scottish sf writer.
Categories: economics
It’s everyone’s favourite time of the year, as jolly old Santa Keynes, with his heart-warming cries of “Ho, ho, ho!” and “I’m not sure that’s quite what I meant” distributes largesse and mare’s milk to pensioners and low-income families, which in Australia these days means, roughly, “anyone with a kid who is not on the board of a publicly listed company” so it’s time to spend up big!
Each Crashmas bonus will be enough to enable you to buy 15 iPod Shuffles, 6 whole pairs of sneakers or around 50 shares in Macquarie Bank (NOTE: DON’T DO THIS)
Q. Can the Government force me to spend my Crashmas bonus?
A. Technically, no, but commencing on Boxing Day, all recipients of the payment who have not yet spent their Crashmas bonus in full will receive an automated phone call of the Prime Minister sighing and tutting with disappointment once every twenty-four hours.
Q. Do I have to give my Crashmas bonus to my kids?
A. First, make sure you ask them what they are planning to spend it on. Good answers are ‘lollies’, ‘robots’, ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘a deposit on a house’. Bad answers are ‘my piggy bank’, ‘Macquarie Bank shares’ or ‘bullion’.
Q. Can I spend my Crashmas bonus on hookers and blow?
A. Although money laundering is an excellent pathway for fiscal stimulus, it is, unfortunately, still illegal to spend any part of your Crashmas bonus on blow. However, you may spend it on hookers, provided that said hookers are going to circulate the money back into the economy in turn. If your hooker has copies of The Economist on her night-stand or has ever used the phrase “Baltic Dry index” in post-coital small talk, you should probably get a new TV instead.
Q.If I spend my Crashmas bonus and Australia has a recession after all, will I get a refund?
A. Merry Crashmas!
Last week it was the word that dared not speak its name…
- ABC News, 1/12/2008
But this week, the climate of fear that shrouded Australia during late November 2008 has lifted, and the much-maligned ‘D-word’ has agreed to grant Nannygoat Hill the privilege of a brief interview.
NGH First, let me just say what a pleasure it is to have you here with us today. I know you’ve been very busy lately.
‘Deficit’ Oh, don’t get me started! [audience laughter] It’s bad enough that I’ve had to run around all the economics blogs. But then when you have to be on the tip of every politician’s tongue….
NGH Ewww.
‘Deficit’ Exactly. Me and… oh, I don’t like to name-drop, but we’re old mates, so, yeah, me and ‘Keynes’ have been absolutely flat chat. Of course it’s a bit easier now that we can speak our names.
NGH There’s something I’m dying to ask: what actually is your name?
‘Deficit’ Gregory. But please, call me Greg.
So now even The Australian is wondering whether some guy who ran a really bad property investment trust deserves to keep the enormous amounts of money and houses he made now that the trust is completely failing.
What limited liability means is that people take risks not in their own right but using a fake person called a corporation, so that when the corporation goes belly-up, the guys in suits still get to keep their big houses. There are exceptions to this principle but they are rare and only cover cases of criminal fraudulence or negligence, not bad luck or even incompetence.
At law school I was given to understand that without this form of protection, hardly anyone would bother to start a business of any scale at all. Admittedly my law school was full of Marxists but the guy who taught us corporate law was definitely not one of them. This is why when I hear pious talk about ‘moral hazard’ from economists and finance journalists I hold my nose.
Sorry I had to go into all that. Anyway, on Friday night Grace and I discovered Barack Obama’s Flickr account, so now I’ve friended the President-Elect, which to be honest felt a bit weird.
And there’s now an animated version of Get Your War On.
Categories: comics · connections · difficulty · economics · literature · science · theory
“When the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold.”
I’ve read and heard at least two journalists trot this one out in the past two weeks. I suppose it’s meant to be soothing and cute but just at the moment it seems a little too euphemistic. How about:
“When the US deliberately injects Wall Street with steroids until it explodes, the rest of the world gets bank cancer.”
Too much of a mixed metaphor? No?
