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A popular attitude is that zombie banks must be avoided at all costs, and that we must have a healthy financial sector before we can hope for an economic recovery. Japan is cited for proof. Thus we're told, we need to bite the bullet, restructure bank balance sheets and inflict some real pain on bank lenders (insurance companies, pension funds, etc.) in order to restore health to the banks. Funnily enough though, many of the advocates of the short, sharp, shocked approach to dealing with the banks (like Paul Krugman) advocate just the opposite when it comes to actual real businesses and consumers. Rather than let the wave of foreclosures run its course, we have to have zombie homeowners who are pressured to stay in homes they can't afford for as long as possible.
Euphoria managed to out-run swine flu last week as the epidemic-du-jour, with "consumer" confidence jumping and the big bank stocks nudging up. The H1N1 virus fizzled for now, at least in terms of kill ratio, though we're warned it might boomerang in the fall with a vengeance. No one was surprised to see Chrysler roll over like a possum on a county highway, but the memory of their muscle cars will linger on like a California surfing song. Here in the northeast, where Sundays are not spent at the Nascar oval, the spring foliage reached the tenderly explosive stage and it was hard to feel bad about anything.
Former Fort Lauderdale "philanthropist" and Bernie Madoff money man Michael Bienes gave an interview to the PBS investigative news show Frontline and it looks to be a doozy.
In it Bienes, who was a member of the Broward arts board and has his name on placques all over town (including Holy Cross Hospital and St. Thomas Aquinas High), tells Frontline correspondent Martin Smith that he never worked hard for his millions and that his association with Madoff was like a "money machine." Why did he have such an easy ride? "God wanted us to have this," he says he and wife determined. "God gave us this."
P.J.O’Rourke writing in Eat The Rich (1998) observed that: "Economics is an entire scientific discipline of not knowing what you’re talking about."
Dick Durbin knows his way around the Senate. He’s been there a long time, long enough to know how things really work. Over the years, the man from Illinois has come to realize that it’s not the elected officials who are in charge. Last week, he said it was the bankers “who run the place” acknowledging that Senators may be in office, but not necessarily in power.
Coming in May
Examining "The Cult of Buoyancy," a dangerous following dedicated to the ceaseless, ignorance-based worship of upward pressure on all equities and other select securities in Western markets, is a new, but significant theme for finem respice. After almost thirty years of infiltration, indoctrination and integration, the Cult's connection to other prominent themes explored on finem respice, and, indeed, all of economics and finance, has spun an intricate and pervasive web with this sharp, dull gray threading woven coarsely into any market relevant enough to examine. These are the kind of jagged threads that might draw blood should you try to pull them bare-handed from the patchwork fabric they presently bind. But this, after a fashion, is less concerning than the realization that markets are not the most daunting institution "in the thrall" of the Cult of Buoyancy. This last distinction almost certainly now belongs to the financial regulatory apparatus of the United States.
As all the pieces of all the world’s economy started crashing around our heads, I realized that the person I most wanted to ask about it all was Naomi Klein, whom I had met briefly last year when Laurie Anderson put together a protest evening at St. Anne’s. Naomi Klein’s books, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, examined the roots of what is happening now. Here’s what she had to say about the present crisis. -JJB
JOAN JULIET BUCK: You must be having some very intense reactions to everything that’s happening right now.
NAOMI KLEIN: It’s an adventure reading the paper every morning.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
