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My new book will make you laugh. Git one! Click.
Like entropy, the diminishing returns of technology
never sleep. The hubristic techno-narcissism of the day, as seen in
mankind’s efforts to fake-out the universe, will eventually get our
one-way ticket to Palookaville punched. Perhaps
there’s such a thing as being too cool after all.
The trick so far has been to
create massive inflation, export the effects of it to other trading partners,
and end up with a lot more money here in the USA, or the illusion of more
money. Well, loans, for houses, cars, and college tuitions. In a word: debt.
Let’s call it “Rainman Economics,”
because it begins to resemble the behavior of a severely autistic human being
who performs a small range of obsessive actions over and over and over, often
centered on numbers. Rainman Economics is the
policy of the Federal Reserve and, indirectly, the government under Mr.
Obama.
The suave and genial Mr.
Obama just doesn’t know what’s going on — despite being
surrounded by minions with briefing folders, sages and vizeers,
quantitative augurers neck-deep in mathematical
goat entrails, and (always) the lone, silent soldier toting the dire nuclear
“football.” Mr. Obama doesn’t know that the universe has
launched us on a journey to a place beyond techno-industrialism — and
it’s not Ray Kurzweil’s infinity of orgasms. It’s a place
where no ring-tones are heard and not so much as a stretch-mark of the Kardashians remains to be found.
This is the eeriest summer.
The coordinated effort to devalue gold — so as to maintain the sagging
reputation of the world’s re$erve currency
— has had the effect mainly of funneling it out of weak hands in the
west to strong hands in the east, to countries that at one time or another we
regarded as adversaries. China and Russia have been backing up their
respective trucks at the gold warehouse loading dock, and before too long
they will have yuan and rubles with more
credibility than the US dollar.
In these games of
currency war, there are too many moving parts for comfort. Paradoxically, the
American position is all about maintaining undeserved comfort,
that is a standard of living that is no longer earned but borrowed
from the darkest pool of magic capital: the future of declining expectations.
Enjoy the flat screen TVs, water-parks, RVs, and Happy Meals while you can.
There is sand in the gears of the moving parts that have made all that
possible. It’s quite a trick to debase your currency for strategic
advantage and at the same time maintain the world’s credibility in it.
The strategic advantage is that debasement allows you to dissipate existing
debt by stealth. But that trick is not working too well at the moment in the
USA because too many other players are trying the same thing, and doing it
badly, so people in foreign lands are dumping their currencies to take refuge
in the dollar. The chief product of all this motion is not
“prosperity” but instability. That is the last thing that
economies need, even if the gamesters in the financial markets can arbitrage
it to their advantage.
Instability translates into
uncertainty, especially about the relative value of currencies. For the
moment, holders of weakening currencies are seeking refuge in seemingly
“stronger” dollars in bubbling equity markets. Many more dollars
have been stashed on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve in the form of
bonds purchased in galumphing bales since 2009 — only the catch is that
many of these bonds are worthless, especially the mortgage-backed securities.
The collateral exists in the form of mold-infused sheetrock, swimming pools
with algae blooms, and strip malls left with a single tenant: the wig shop.
The Fed will never be able to unload this hoard of garbage, even if it
“tapers” its buying of new garbage. The dollars that the Fed
creates out of nothing are trapped in this fetid backwater of rotting capital,
destined to go nowhere — surely not into activity that produces real
wealth, or the means to continue being civilized.
Something’s in the
air this hot, soggy summer and it smells like the loss of faith. In another
month, as the nights grow cool we’ll approach the sober season of fall,
when the air seems to possess powers of magnification and suddenly things can
be seen clearly. The high frequency robo trading
bots are good at detecting microscopic differences in digital quant pools,
but they don’t have the finer sensory antennae of human brains for
forces outside the rather narrow math narrative.
For instance, I communed
with my fellow citizens this Fourth of July weekend for a few hours at a
little beach in a Vermont state park. It was a family kind of place. The
mommies and daddies were putting on a competitive tattoo display (along with
competitive eating). So many skulls, Devil heads, snakes, screaming eagles,
flags, and thunderbolts. I suppose they acquire these totem images to ward
off some apprehended greater harm, the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life
remains in this nation of rackets, swindles, and tears. All was nonetheless
tranquility, there by the little lakeside, with the weenies grilling and the
pop-tops popping. A three-year-old came by where I was working on my tan on a
towel in the grass, supine. He asked me if I was dead. Not yet, I told him.
Behind him a skull smoking a doobie loomed in blue and red ink on his
daddy’s thigh. My
people. My country.
__________________
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