Sunday 18 January 2009

KEYNESIAN INSANITY...

Kayfabe: "Our Government tells us it's expecting to borrow £60bn this year
and a further £100bn next. Many other countries in Europe will be doing much the
same. In the US, as we know, Congress famously approved an extra $700bn of
borrowing to fund the bail-outs. Obama says he's going to spend a similar amount
on New Deal style projects - in addition to the regular Federal deficit of a
$trillion or so. So I dunno... how much new Global borrowing does all this add
up to? Couple of $trillion? Five trillion.. more?"

Yep, much more! $ 53, 000 000 000 000 trillion, to be exact!

According to the financial expert David Walter ("An American Time
Bomb"
), America's total liabilities, including public debts, actually amount to
$ 11 trillion, added to which there are currently unfunded obligations in social
security benefits of $ 7 trillion. Unfunded medicare promises, apparently, add
up to some $ 34 trillion, to which for good measure he attaches another $ 1
trillion for miscellaneous requirements. All of which adds up to a grand total
of $ 53 trillion in terms of negative equity - or $ 175. 000 000 per person - in
order to deliver on the obligations and promises of the US government.

I, personally, cannot vouch for these figures. But anyway you slice it,
wowza! There is nothing in human experience to compare with it. What we are
dealing with here is not an event of negative equity, but a process of financial
meltdown at a rate ten times higher than the growth of population.

Meanwhile, in America, apart from the huge tax-cutting and public-spending
package sketched out by Barack Obama last week, its central bank, The Federal
Reserve, has already stepped up its quantitative easing, as if we could conjure
away financial immolation and find economic immortality through printing
banknotes. But perhaps our most spectacular failure is with the fundamental
problem of balancing the structure of the global economy with the demands of the
global ecology. While the future will be disintegrating in yet another ferocious
spiral of boom and bust, all efforts would have to be concentrated on urban
demographic growth in order to increase the world's fiscal population. Precisely
because growth and productivity are linked to the volume of consumer population,
the only answer to long-term economic decline, is more humans and plenty of
them. Nor - in the full understanding that this, too, is an adjournment rather
than a annulment of an inevitable confrontation - does it offset the burgeoning
new carbon emissions created by the requisite high birth rate and the steady
flow of migrants to the West.

Here is a human explosion waiting to happen!

And carbon capture technology, to tell the truth, will not be keeping
pace with the urban population increase. It is a classic case of untested
assertions. Carbon trading, too, is by definition a strictly temporary
expedient. I have no fundamental objection to such Keynesian ideas as
deficit-financing - I don't understand it, so I don't object to it - but if
Messrs Brown & Co are confident that we should continue to consume more than
we produce, it is obvious to me, that Keynesian insanity is a natural result of
the belief in charlatanism. Indian jugglers may perform such feats of
escapology. But then, of course, they are tied up inside a sack and thrown into
a river. Which rather suggests to me that Anglo-American conmen should be
treated likewise.

There is no way to spin it, folks. The dirty fact of the matter is,
that we can’t escape; we can’t hide; and we can’t possibly have the cake and eat it.


Dreamy

7 comments:

percy stilton said...

I have just purchased 6 Mr.Kipling mince pies for 25p. Not quite what you meant, Miss Dreamy, by "having your cake & eating it" not least because these are pies, not quite cakes...but you know what I mean anyways .
Seriously...I agree with what you say Selena....we are all piss-poor people and I hear the bankers cry
"let them eat pies"

Selena Dreamy said...

Let them chew glass, Sir Percy, and defecate razor-blades.

May their women be barren and their sons never be born. May the cloven-hoofed one arouse their daughters and implant in their minds lustful and perverted ideas. May their blood be infused with dengue fever and their dogs die of the pox. Theirs are the mortal sins of cupidita, and may the vengeful Lord get the bastards out of the way as quickly as possible, because that is the only way to treat them....

Anonymous said...

....well I would'nt go quite as far as that Selena but then again I am not a sado-masochist, I just happen to have a liking for discounted mince pies, it may be kinky but I can't help it.

All Shook Up said...

Beautifully spelled out Dreamy. I hadn't thought of the breeding extra consumers wheeze - but it's an excellent point.

Last time Britain was deeply in hock, after World War 2, greater production and a curb on imports was thought to be the answer; years of austerity until debt was paid down. Now it seems we can all buy our way out of trouble with IOUs payable by our grandkids - presumably from the Chinese who are expected to be generous enough to work for slave wages forever.

Barack might have got wind of the severity of the problems... I noticed today that he's shifting the onus on to the Great American People to pull their country out of the hole rather than continuing to claim he can do it by sheer force of charisma alone. No such rhetoric from Brown... I should think he's understandably wary of asking Britons to do the same - he's as charismatic as a radish, so blank looks all round when he has to tell them that basing an economic boom on borrowing dosh, importing stuff and.. err.. selling it to each other.. wasn't a bright idea after all. Making stuff and bridging the trade gap's what it's all about from now on

Ooohh... rationing, currency restrictions and import taxes looming. Brilliant... back to the 50s!

Selena Dreamy said...

"....buy our way out of trouble."

Yep, just add three zeroes, then start all over again - except, of course, every time the Gvmt announces another multi-Billion injection, the market reacts in a way one would expect it to react: it panics!

It is firmly opposed to such extravagant nonsense, but then, of course, the Government has the full weight of future generations behind it.

Bob said...

We will soon have to find other planets to colonize. Preferrably inhabited planets, with ugly looking aliens that do the work for us without pay.

This is the only way that our snowball system will continue to function.

SF-authors have been aware of this for generations.

The next problem will then be: what if we have colonialized all possible planets in the universe? Ah, but that is so far ahead, we don't have to worry about that yet.

Selena Dreamy said...

Yep!

There is only one thing, in my opinion, which can satisfy the necessary conditions for the continuity of our species. The Conquest of Space.

This is not a prophecy of course, but as anyone wishing to pronounce judgement on the future of the species can foresee, there is a fateful and increasing inevitability about the deadly inertia of a living system which, literally, cannot escape its own gravity. Having long since fallen into a pleasant routine of life under congenial material conditions, men’s whole treatment of history seems to be the expression of precisely that materially congenial method of living a singly idyllic system of social permanence, which in its necessarily consistent way, commits them implacably and inescapably towards some inevitable state of certain immolation.