"Employing PhD's in high mathematics, [CEOs] diced and mixed the financial offal, stuffed it in sausage skins, gave this dubious balogna properly pinstriped labels such as 'Mortgage-backed Securities' and 'Collateralized Debt Obligations', and sold it off by the slice to equally greedy and heedless financial institutions down the line. ... But reality is stubborn. The underlying loans went sputtering, then died. ... The mega-hustlers who steered venerable financial institutions into this mega-iceberg are not hurting. ... The banks themselves have not had to drink the hemlock they had brewed either. Instead of falling under the weight of their own malpractice, except for Lehman they have basked in the largesse of the Federal Government. ... America's main industry, finance, has turned out to be a pyramid scheme of reckless, interlocking bets, essentially a stratospheric swindle. ... What's going on is a base perversion of both morality and justice. It substitutes an innocent party to be punished for the malfeasance of another. ... Therein lies the specter of the Weimar Republic: people exchanging wheelbarows of banknotes for a loaf of bread ... and a strong, indignant leader saving them from the nightmare with passionate oratory, national socialism, and the goose-step. ... For fifty years now, and perhaps for the first time in 350 years, the West, en masse, has been retreating from the Enlightenment that had catapulted it to the pinnacle of civilization. The forces of reason, empiricism, truth-seeking, basic freedoms (before they become 'rights'); the flowering of genius in all areas of human endeavor, all are in retreat everywhere at the same time" Takuan Seiyo at Vdare.com, 23 September 2008, http://www.vdare.com/misc/080922_seiyo.htm.
Thank you Comrade Seiyo (CS) for your observations from Japan. CS makes some other points similar to those I raised at:
http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2007/12/of-quants-faith-and-alcoholics.html.
http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/09/dead-elephant-in-living-room.html.
http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/09/todays-sat.html.
2 comments:
Therein lies the specter of the Weimar Republic: people exchanging wheelbarows of banknotes for a loaf of bread ... and a strong, indignant leader saving them from the nightmare with passionate oratory, national socialism, and the goose-step. ...
hello i.a., It can't happen here, no need to be diligent. [/sarcasm]
BS:
We will be lucky, after the collapse, to get a Napoleon instead of a Hitler. With Zimbabwe Ben at the helm, a complete collapse of the dollar is possible. Book suggestion: "The Coming Ceasars", by Amaury de Riencourt, 1957.
Yes, I realized you were being sarcastic.
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