Saturday 20th of April 2024

denouement …..

denouement …..

One of The Today Show reporters said that Lehman's employees were disappointed because they had been told by senior management everything was all right.  

Of course that is what senior management said. All senior managements lie in a crisis. Everyone knows senior managements lie – except their employees. This is the Enron factor.

Senior managements lie about imminent bankruptcy in the same way that politicians lie about virtually everything. If they did not lie about the imminent bankruptcy of their firms, shareholders would immediately sell the stock, which would immediately bankrupt the firms.  

Senior managers hope for the best. They hope for a miracle.  

They hope against hope.  

Nightmare On Wall Street

nightmare in genesis

Brother... I sometimes feel I live on a different planet. Yes, John, what Gary North says makes a bit of sense but I do not know why I sensed an underlying ulterior manipulation of purpose. Thus I went digging:

Honest Money: The Biblical Blueprint for Money and Banking
Gary North

The Bible establishes civil laws governing money. These laws rest on a specific theory of money. Theologians do not recognize this. Neither do economists, who would not care even if they did recognize this. Today's monetary policies violate the Bible's laws governing money.

The Bible is clear on three legal principles: (1) monetary debasement is wrong (Isaiah 1:22); (2) multiple indebtedness, which is the basis of fractional reserve banking, must not be allowed (Exodus 22:26) ; (3) weights and measures must not be tampered with (Lev. 19:36). All three are violated by modern economic policy.

The Federal Reserve System, like every other central bank, is a government-licensed monopoly. It is privately owned. The U.S. government has only indirect power over it through the President's right to appoint Board members. No government accounting organization has access to the records of the Federal Reserve System or its privately owned regional banks.

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Gus: Yes, the fellow who wrote the lines in the above article brought to our attention by John, is also an economic bible pusher. As if money and morality were bedfellows, using this premise to denigrate socialism or "economic democracy". I disagree.
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Gary North again
The Bible mandates free market capitalism. It is anti-socialist. The proof is here: 9,000 pages of exposition, verse by verse. Free.

The essence of democratic socialism is this re-written version of God's commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."

"Economic democracy" is the system whereby two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner.

Christian socialists and defenders of economic planning by state bureaucrats deeply resent this interpretation of their ethical position. They resent it because it's accurate.

When Christianity adheres to the judicial specifics of the Bible, it produces free market capitalism.

On the other hand, when Christianity rejects the judicial specifics of the Bible, it produces socialism or some politically run hybrid "middle way" between capitalism and socialism, where politicians and bureaucrats make the big decisions about how people's wealth will be allocated. Economic growth then slows or is reversed. Always.

Free market capitalism produces long-term economic growth. Socialism and middle-way economic interventionism by the state produce poverty and bureaucracy. If your goal is to keep poor people poor, generation after generation, you should promote socialism. But be sure to call it economic democracy in order to fool the voters.

The Bible is an anti-socialist document. Socialist propagandists for over four centuries have claimed that the Bible teaches socialism, but we have yet to see a single Bible commentary written by a socialist. If the Bible teaches socialism, where is the expository evidence?


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Gus: I thought the bible was "teaching" a lot of baloney. But then whom am I to speak ill of the book. So I went back to one of my own big books, 9 x 11 x 3 inches, more than 1000 pages with gilded edges and embossed cover. Actually, in my long gone past, I did a lot of bible study... and although I don't remember which bits Gary North refers to, I have a pretty good idea I do not remember it the way he explains it:
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Inherit the Earth: The Biblical Blueprint for Economics
Gary North

The covenants of God all have a five-point structure:

        1. Transcendence/Immanence (sovereignty)
        2. Hierarchy/Command (representation)
        3. Ethics/Law (dominion)
        4. Oath/Sanctions (judgment)
        5. Succession/Inheritance (perseverance)

The acronym is THEOS.

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Gus: I am more basic than that. Thank god I've long been an atheist... Because I would say the first chapter of the book, Genesis, is baloney. Science proves that. And I do not believe in Evil either... Thus in my view North is skating on very thin ice, when he attaches his economic view point to the "word of god". Sure, North could be right on the result of his economic gymnastics (as I mentioned before a dog full of flees would guess that much) but in fact there is more (or less) to it.

In my book (unpublished) "grey sky, blue sky" which deals with depression, I postulate a few things. One of them is thus:

Living creatures feed and multiply from two fundamentals: aggressiveness and receptivity in a relative environment. From the smallest virus to the largest whale... Humans have sophisticated these two levers of life, beyond the necessity of survival into the realm of stylistic behaviour, in which style defines our interpretations of life rather than survival defining them for most of us. Those below the breadline still have stylistic interpretation to their hunger but it is of no comfort...

But despite our stylistic constructs, there are still strings attached to the animality, or animal-ness, whatever you wish to call it. Our animalistic aggressiveness and our receptivity can be magnified by our social styles in evolution, after having evolved in mechanical complexities through our DNA, but they are still derived from our "mechanical" (animalistic) evolution.

As an aside, I will mention too, that complexity does not mean superiority. For example there are plants and animals with more genetic codes than humans, yet they do not have the ability of human stylistic expression which we often accept as superiority over other species. It's like some computer programmes that are very complex in operation yet in order to go from a to z, will go through a b c d e... while a simpler more efficient programme can go from a to z directly.

Greed is a sophisticated product of aggressiveness
Poverty can be a product of acceptance or of unprotected receptivity.
Economy is the management of aggressiveness and receptivity, collectively in a social group. Individually and collectively we can falter or succeed, god or no god.
Aggressively we will want what someone else has. Receptively we will let someone take what we have. The ruthless needs to be managed, the weak needs to be protected, all in relative degrees. Thus starteth "economic democracy", still imperfect but less dangerous than total free market capitalism in which natural excess can take over big-time at speed unimaginable, even with the bible... — especially with the bible on side, where slavery is an accepted concept. And did I mention wars?

More can be said here but let's carry on with bashing the bible-economics:

They said to him, "Caesar's." So he said to them, "Then give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."...

And I say give back to the earth what belongs to the earth: basically everything including our life. Glib, I know. What I mean is that we should take better care of our environment because we are born from it, we react to it and we need it. God is only the product of our stylistic angst swimming in relative uncertainty. Yet we are afraid of understanding our little space. Let me explain the story of the little kid with the jingle bell:

The round bell was making such a "divine" sound... The kid was enchanted by it. the sound came through a little slot, yet the kid could not fathom the depth of the inner space and of the "magic" entity making the sound by looking through it...  In the back of his mind he was curious. He wanted to know what made such pure heavenly tinkle... Eventually, he broke the bell and found that inside was an old shrivelled pea. He was very disappointed but further more he had no more bell. He decided to never investigate such things again... Moral of the story? He should have gone to the bell-maker and admired the skills and the inventiveness of the bell-maker. Our bell-maker is nature in evolution. But we do not want to know. It's less traumatic to divinify our existence instead.

And true knowledge of the natural processes are very very very complex, and can be verified. The bible story although longish is simplistic and is full of holes.

Thus, the mechanics of economy are also under-laid by our aggressiveness and our receptivity, personal and as a social entity. The government, the media and all channel of information, including ourselves, push the levers of aggressiveness and receptivity via our personal perceptions. Our emotions are the resultant between the shift of these levers, themselves in reaction with our state of mind in which we accept the right or the wrong information or perceive information wrongly or rightly.


more can be said here but let's keep it simple...

We create allegiances, friendships, channels of influences, stations of employment, all dependent on everyone relating "fairly" to each other. But as a social group, we are still underpinned by some people having more aggressiveness than receptivity (learnt or genetic), leading to the pecking order in which we live. It also leads to the successful deviousness of psychopaths...

The social system should stop us from robbing each other, but it's often not the case. When the system allows some people to profit by deceit because they have appropriated the system, we have only ourselves to blame. In the process, some people will suffer more than others, and the process is always in a flux, thus difficult to define exclusively. Even if some characters, who have appropriated the system, leech from it, they are still dependent on others to make it work and to maintain their position. Thus the biggest thief has to be generous to survive.

Democracy is a funny beast. Laissez-faire free markets is as fraught with disasters as socialism can be... There will always be some chaotic space, even in the best of defined environments. This is the nature of the beast.

Godly-economics are as iffy as the rest of them plus they rely directly on a first-class furphy. This economo-bible format, I cannot accept. Honest money does not have to be biblical as in the end, this biblical system does not stop everyone becoming a honest thief...

(ps: acceptance is a product of receptivity in knowledge of the concequences)