Hulver's site || Everyone else is blogging about this financial crisis so why can't I?

Everyone else is blogging about this financial crisis so why can't I?

By lm (Thu Oct 09, 2008 at 10:30:31 PM EST) (all tags)

Bollywood budgets cut due to global meltdown make me sad. The worst bit is that this will probably spark a return to formula. Over the last decade or so, there were some interesting film makers experimenting with some interesting themes in Bollywood.

Democracy Now! has an interview with Namoi Klein whereshe lays responsibility for the current crisis at the feet of those who put Milton Friedman's economic theories into practice. I found this especially interesting in an email being bandied about from someone educated at the University of Chicago in economics which made the observation that most of Europe is far less regulated than the US vis a vis the banking industry. Given the EU, I guess this makes sense that banks would be less regulated within member states.

There aren't many blogs over at LiveJournal that I follow. But every now and then, I'll scan the view of my wife's friends list. This past time there was an entry that argued that it was the liberals in the US Senate and the US Congress that pushed through the deregulation that led to the current crisis. To be honest, I'm not really up on who pushed what banking bill. And even though it might be counter-intuitive to have some of the most liberal folks in congress like Chris Dodd push deregulation when it's the GOP that is supposed pushing `the government that governs least governs best', I'm willing to concede the point. But it would really be odd to see the left wing pushing an agenda that contradicts their agenda. Not that stranger things haven't happened, mind you.

In other news His Excellency Honourable President of Pakistan should marry Sarah Palin for the greater good of humanity.

At the Asia Times, if I understand his point correctly, Spengler argues that Asia needs the US to be irresponsible because Asia isn't irresponsible enough to create massive wealth.

One of the big questions now is how much lower the market will go. The big indexes are just now getting to the point where I think they should be if growth since the early nineties had been of a health sort instead of irrationally exuberant. (Of course I'm pulling that entirely out of my derrier. There is no good reason to use the early nineties as a starting point. Nor is my estimate of healthy growth based on any economic theory.) If the markets keep falling, I'm going to start to enter the territory of `oh crap! this is bad!'

Maybe I'm too cynical, or maybe things are just too early to see the full brunt, but it doesn't look anything like the Great Depression to me. It may build to that overtime if everyone starts unloading their stocks, as so many people put `savings' into investment vehicles rather than banks where savings should go, it might be akin to the good old fashioned bank runs that kicked off the Great Depression. But on the other hand, I think most people, especially those that really need it, have their money in banks insured by the FDIC. And we have Social Security. At least in the US, we're not going to see the widespread starvation and destitution of the early and mid-thirties.

Not that this means it's going to be fun.

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