We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Ben Bernanke’s record Brian Doherty has an article slamming the record and conduct of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. It will not be news to the likes of us hard-money advocates, but still, well worth your time.
I like Doherty’s recent book on the American libertarian movement, by the way.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I just learned today that Bernanke’s thesis adviser at MIT was our own Stanley Fischer, who is set on importing inflation to Israel to the tune of $50billion in reserves, to “protect Israeli exporters”. We are so screwed.
Sorry, back OT.
Major revisions to the Commerce departments economic statistics have been released.
Apparently everything Ben did will now look better. It probably won’t help him. O will want his own person at the Fed; No matter how pliable Ben has proved to be there remains the danger that he may balk someday. Obama’s appointee won’t.
The revisions are complex but their gist is:
1) The economic figures for the last year of Bush’s administration are revised downward significantly.
2) Obama has not yet ended the recession but it turns he is doing better than previously reported.
I have no doubt that by next summer we will learn O ended the recession in March 2009 within days of taking office.
OTOH the revisions to Bush’s last year are probably honest. I thought it worse than previously reported.
The figures I distrust from here onward will be O’s. Everything he says or does or his henchmen report will be as dishonest as they dare.
Even more OT. In the “Who are we?” section you describe yourselves as “…heavily armed…..” Given that most of your posters are British, in what sense are you/they “heavily armed?” Do they/you have large arms?
Enormous, large, hairy and tattooed (“Mum”… “Molon Labe”… bulldog).
OMG, am I lucky I wasn’t holding anything liquid…
Thanks Perry, that is an image I didn’t need.
The left’s (this mutant mixture of the ideas of Karl Marx and J.M. Keynes that dominates the Obama Administration) idea of “ending the recession” is to spend, borrow and print – on a scale never before seen in the history of the United States (including during World War II).
The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no great free market person, warned that if such fiscal and monetary policies were followed there might be a temporary boomlet – but there would be an “even worse crises in five years”.
The lady was right – accept that “five years” is, in my opinion, rather more time than it will take.
As for Barney Frank close personal friend Ben Bernanke (although not, I hope, as close a personal friend of Barney as the former head of Fannie Mae – who still has a nice government seat by they way, although it may hurt him to sit down).
I once unwisely said that Alan Greenspan was the worst Federal Reserve Chairman ever that “no one could be worse than Greenspan”.
Then Ben Bernanke came along – and I have had to eat my words.
We are armed with a deadly sense of irony, and we are not afraid to use it.
Paul, take a look at the comments on my last reference to Krugman and Kaletsky on that post I did a few days ago. I was trying to debate a guy who reckons massive Keynesian pump priming is okay so long as we try to engineer a collapse in land values via a LVT. Jesus H. Christ.
In my Tract The Age of Turbulence: Plea for a New World Economic Order, I explain the nature and causes of economic depressions.
It proves that the ominous fate of this economy is Keynes’ Liquidity Trap.
Its consequences are a new, bigger Crash causing, this time, a real Great Depression II.
A turbulence in fluid mechanic is a chaotic state of a liquid. It Owns Most of the Proprieties of The Liquidity Trap, Origin of The Crash.
Preparing for the Crash, The Age of Turbulence. Proposes a way to profit from The Crash.
Using the yield curve as a predictor that strategy covers Treasuries, Corporate Bonds, Minerals (Oil, Precious Metals and Base Metals.) and Stocks.
Its aim is to profit from both the Asset Price Bubble and Irrational Exuberance and The Crash and Economic Depression that will necessarily ensue.
It tries, and for the time being very profitably, to accomplish Alan Greenspan Mission Impossible:
“That is mission impossible. Indeed, the international financial community has made numerous efforts in recent years to establish such oversight, but none prevented or ameliorated the crisis that began last summer.
Much as we might wish otherwise, policy makers cannot reliably anticipate financial or economic shocks or the consequences of economic imbalances.
Financial crises are characterised by discontinuous breaks in market pricing the timing of which by definition must be unanticipated – if people see them coming, then the markets arbitrage them away.”
….
The clear evidence of underpricing of risk did not prod private sector risk management to tighten the reins.
In retrospect, it appears that the most market-savvy managers, although conscious that they were taking extraordinary risks, succumbed to the concern that unless they continued to “get up and dance”, as ex-Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince memorably put it, they would irretrievably lose market share.
Instead, they gambled that they could keep adding to their risky positions and still sell them out before the deluge. Most were wrong.”
Alan Greenspan
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World [Economic Order?].
I propose a plausible alternative solution to the depression: I designed a System that will allow us, when The Crash will come, to get out of Credit Based Free Market Economy, Capitalism, and transfer to my Adjusted Credit Free, Free Market Economy and Abolish the FED:
To participate in our new economy you need to ¥€$ Enter Your €5 in The Cra$h R€gi$t€r. Before The Crash.
I.10.82
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.
But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
I.10.83
A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it.
I.10.84
A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.”
Adam Smith
June 5th, 1723 – July 17tn, 1790
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Inequalities Occasioned by the Policy of Europe.
March 9th, 1776
Buy Now The Tract That Will Be Published September 17th, 2009.
but if oh We are armed with a deadly sense of irony, and we are not afraid to use it.
Shalom, er, I’ll have what you’re smoking!
“by their book sales shall you know them”.
Of course I do not really believe that, but it is comforting that the books on the pro freedom side (such as Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense”, Dick Morris’ “Catastrophe”, Thomas Sowell’s “Housing: Boom and Bust”, Thomas Woods “Meltdown” and now Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption” ) have so massively outsold the leftist books.
As for “monetary policy” – even the Financial Times today reported that American banks (and other such) made most of their recent money trading with the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury – although I doubt they fully understood how much that stinks.
Although they may understand it – accept that the F.T. folk would just use it as excuse for why the finance sector companies should be de facto nationalized.
The “left” can understand these things as well as the “right” – they just draw opposite conclusions.