Blogger is at a rally in favor of American foreign policy, including regime change in Iraq ( Fall 2003 ).
Karen Loberg (Ventura Star) took the picture. It made the front page. He was famous for a day.
THE BLOG
of John Gelles
August 4, 2007
IMPENDING FINANCIAL CRISES?
[Copy of my message to email forums about possible financial crises ahead]
Dear James Cumes,
The great difference time has made from 1932 until today is --
the communist and fascist reactions (that gave us WW II) to laissez faire reliance on invisible hands, and
the recent emergence of Asia as a powerhouse of production of middle-tech and hi-tech necessities and thought.
The invisible hand is dead. Keynes and Bernanke live on in thought about a methodology for response to deflation and inflation.
Assume the worst on the deflation side: whole financial sectors become insolvent and must find a lender of last resort. NO PROBLEM. The USA will do it. China will do it TOO. China copies everything that works.
Assume the worst on the inflation side: the dollars drops to a dime when it tries to pay for imported commodities from everywhere (and finished goods from Europe and Asia): NO PROBLEM. The multi-national corporations, with the know-how to produce wherever skilled people are found, HAVE NO GREAT ARMY of GERMAN or RUSSIAN generals and soldiers. They will do what they are told. Their money will be worthless. Politics, without money, will rule the day.
CAUTION: Possibly, America will implode on account of politics -- capital versus labor. In this case, we may see the cold war come back to life. Suicide may be the result. Your book does have a point!
PRESCRIPTION: The academy must join with the likes of Gates and Buffet, Ruppert Murdoch too, and we may even need talkers like Clinton and Blair.
The goal will be to craft a compromise between the new super-powers and near-SP's, to create a multinational police force that prevents chaos -- and a multinational brains trust, like the one that met at Bretton Woods.
The brains trust will suggest a new money system -- focused on price not balance sheets. They will create a version of computer assisted barter that ends up with a new fiat money -- money managed by supply chain sensors, and sensors for and measures of savings -- as they become the shock absorbers of the system, in place of taxes and interest.
YES, I'm totally optimistic. Yet suicide and murder remain constant as alternatives to logic and information.
Among current world leaders I see only good guys present. The bad guys all seem to be hiding out in caves.
But it would be nice if the great intellectual Noam Chomsky would sit down with his intellectual equals who happen to love the English Speaking democracies -- and, together, they put an end to cursing the cold war actions of anti-communists on our side.History will deal with Kissinger and all that.
What we need today to guide our intellectuals is the wisdom of the likes of Lincoln, both Roosevelt's, Keynes, Churchill, de Gaulle, Tim Berners-Lee, and more -- nominated by James Cumes (and every reader -- not excluding themselves).
What Karl Marx did to screw up the outcome of the first industrial revolution, Chomsky tries to do today. Fortunately, he has never found a Lenin.
