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This is hardly a new vision of the future. In his 1909 novella “The Machine Stops,” which should be required reading for anyone who buys into the Information Age hullabaloo, E.M. Forster provided a remarkably exact dissection of contemporary cyberculture’s idea of its destiny most of a century in advance. It’s a great story on its own terms, but it also puts a finger on the central weakness of an information-centered society: information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information.
In Forster’s story, that substrate was the Machine – an interconnected technostructure that spanned the globe and provided the necessities and luxuries of life to uncounted millions of people who spent their lives in hivelike cells, staring into screens and tapping on keyboards like so many of today’s computer geeks. Adept at manipulating abstract ideas, the inhabitants of the Machine lost touch with the fact that their universe of information only existed because the physical structure of the Machine kept it there, and their attitude toward the Machine gradually evolved into a religious reverence devoid of any reference to the practical realities of the Machine’s workings. The skills needed to apply physical tools to pipes and wires dropped out of use, and the consequences – minor malfunctions snowballing into major ones, and finally into total systems failure – followed from there.
I am a hunter of black swans. Each night I go out into the trenches with a big gun to look for signs of a black swan. So what exactly is a black swan, and how do you see one? The concept of a black swan was introduced by the book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” The author explains how at one point in time there was a widely held belief that all swans were white. No one had ever seen a black swan, therefore all swans must be white.Then a black swan was found in Australia in the 17th century. So effectively the idea that all swans were white was blown out of the water.
The black swan is that single observation that shows our experience-based knowledge to be wrong.
That would be a dramatic change from Geithner's and Treasury's position (going back to Paulson) - in fact, its an outright flip-flop. Geithner has opposed this of course because it is not in the best interest of Goldman Sachs (and other sell-siders in the business) as price transparency means spreads contract dramatically and thus the skimming (and outright ripping off) that has gone on for the previous 10 years in this market will largely disappear. Bluntly: It is about damn time, and this marks the first real proposal, assuming it is real, that I've heard come out of the Obama Administration that has the potential to actually get price discovery going.
Stanford Law Review has a great interview with Warren Buffett's longstanding partner, Charlie Munger. Munger offers much less corn pone and more direct opinion than Buffett does. The entire piece is very much worth reading, but I wanted to hone in on some key topics. One is the neglect of the role of what amounts to accounting fraud in this mess. Much of this is technically not fraud under the current regime but would be if the standards of 20 years ago were still in place. We now live in a world where everyone knows that the authorities simply will not take down any of the Big Four. Four is now deemed to be the minimum number of big accounting firms permissible. So we de facto have accounting firms "too big to fail", which means "too big to be asked to eat much liability, not matter how indefensible their conduct." So if they do something bad, they might have to fire a few partners and pay a moderate fine. So effectively, we live in a world that echoes the Nixon Presidency. If the Big Four does it, it must be legal.
Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had warned nine US banks they would be obliged to accept USD 125 billion in government investments under any circumstances, according to a memo, published by Bloomberg on Wednesday. Information only recently made available quotes Paulson as saying “If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance,” to a gathering of lenders' chief executive officers on 13th October, 2008.
The conspiracy theorists will be ALL over this, because they will assume that if you can have an accident in a test tube, you can have a deliberate act in a test tube. Frankly I don't think we are that smart yet, but accidents? They are the mechanism of evolution. Now get this. The World Health Organisation is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.
Discussion of the 50% Retracement Rule,
potential future price levels, time studies, key dates, Fibonacci, Gann, Astro numbers, Robert Rhea's Great Depression analysis.
I’ve traveled 500 miles from Portland to Northern California, where I’m seated on the floor of a well-appointed cabana in back of a million-dollar home an hour south of San Francisco. I’m in a roomful of 20 other people, mainly well-educated professionals like the home’s owner, Nicolas Tchikovani, a real-estate agent and financial planner. We’ve each paid $100 to spend half a day learning the secrets of the universe from Eric Pepin, a balding, heavyset 42-year-old from Beaverton who claims he can heal the sick, control the weather, travel between dimensions and communicate with God. He teaches his secrets on CDs and DVDs that sell for up to $299 each on his website.
America is the most bankrupt nation on Earth. Our government is for the nonce relatively solvent, its AAA rating intact. But our citizens declare bankruptcy at a rate that astonishes the rest of the world. In 2007, two years after we tweaked our bankruptcy law to make it tougher on debtors, the number of personal bankruptcies had dropped by more than half, but we were still well ahead of Great Britain, our nearest competitor in the Insolvency Olympics: roughly one in 500 Britons declared personal bankruptcy that year, against about one in 300 Americans. Since then, of course, the subprime crisis has increased our lead. We are the Michael Phelps of debt liquidation.
You’d think that title would be one we’d gladly relinquish. But in fact, America leads the developed world in bankruptcies because for more than a century, we’ve worked hard to build the best—and, not coincidentally, the most generous—bankruptcy code in existence. We didn’t do it by design, but in fits and starts; the hodgepodge of innovations that have helped systematically ensure that debtors get a fresh beginning were as much the brainchildren of grasping creditors as of beleaguered debtors. Nonetheless, our system works so well that other nations are trying to move away from their harshly punitive treatment of insolvent debtors, and closer to our free-and-easy, all-is-forgiven model.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
