THE BLOG
of John Gelles
February 29, 2008
Is it DOWN or UP from HERE and NOW?
Assuming America's current infatuation with casino capitalism-- and its disdain for a mixed economy, is the reality-- does that reality threaten severe collapse of our production and trading systems?
----- As capital assets are revalued in global markets, financial newsletters and others foresee a lack of know-how in the West and in Asia to rapidly recover--and to get on with the greater growth in our economic power to end poverty than has ever been imagined.
----- Our physical plants are ready. Our systems contain the know-how. The laws of property are adequate. Standing squarely in our way is debt and pricing that will have to be put through a wringer where it can come out the other side thinner and ready to go to work.
What are the chances we will falter: that the monetary system of production waiting on the exit side of the wringer will no longer function-- because the heart of all past progress will have been squeezed beyond repair?
----- I say the chance is zero.
But what of time lines? How much longer will the middle and working classes be left without effective leadership to enter the promised land?
When can we expect the forces of common sense law and Keynesian economics to compromise the values to be wrung from the past, and move (in the West) at the pace of the Asian continent-- to create the Utopia promised by the successful sciences?
I'll say we looking at about one year. Patches on our tires till then, when the Americans change horses, will keep unemployment and terrorism below the level to start the next World War.
In less than six months the Olympic Games in China will be a beginning. The election in November will be next. A vast expansion of American spending, to fill the need for clean energy, universal health care, effective education, massive new and better infrastructure, and less economic mismanagement and anxiety, will be launched a year from now.
----- Or so reads the optimistic scenario in which I prefer to believe.