You could live in this shithole.
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Joined Nov 10, 2007
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fly is god.
or you could be detained there, like that one dude from nyt and that other famous guy.
I speak from experience growing up in Cape Town. My relatives used to live in Rhodesia, but their farms were seized. Bernie Madoff is a saint, next to Mugabe. The government, confiscated all of the farms from the established white farmers, and redistributed them to non farmers. (fact) He has killed many more than Saddam ever did, probably. This is a travesty, I hate to see these kids, hungry and uneducated. Sad Shame. Life is not fair. Sorry to rant.
Thank you so much for posting that. You are so right about how bad it could really be for any of us. Our church raised money Sunday to send to a couple of pastors in Zimbabwe who our pastor knows as they are trying really hard to keep a group of orphans safe and fed during Zimbabwe’s crisis. Two of my friends live there and tell us it is an absolutely horrific and unbelievable situation from where the country was a few years ago.
From reading comments on the clip from youtube readers, I know many feel “they did it
to themselves” or “so what? who cares?” or say it is all occurring because of racial issues.
But it happened because of corruption at the top. And no one addressed the corruption soon enough as too many were personally benefitting. The very rich are still doing fine.
The rest of the country is in terrible shape. (I just saw Dan’s post after I posted– and he
is right about what happened with the farms)
Austrian School economist gives a decent summary of the crisis.
Note the last bit:
On Newsnight on the recession
I’ve just got back from BBC television centre where I was interviewed for a segment on tonight’s Newsnight. The brief was in relation to Ben Bernanke’s claim that “we’ll see recovery beginning next year”. The interviewer was excellent and I am anxious to see whether they can edit all of the incoherent and uninteresting comments into, well, anything at all actually. Can they find 60 seconds of punchy relevance amidst 10 minutes of me rambling?
Find out for yourself, Newsnight 10:30pm BBC2.
Before going on I was double checking some of my factual assertions, and found this Minneapolis Fed page very helpful. I couldn’t find an equivalent for the UK, but I relied on the Office of National Statistics’ GDP figures, and The Guardian’s 2008 pre-Budget report. Also, to preempt possible criticism I am not a liquidationist. On this issue see the debate between Brad de Long and Steve Horwitz. Finally, best op-ed of the week goes to Larry White.
I don’t know how much experience of recorded interviews you need before you stop coming out thinking “ok, now I’m ready to start”, but I want to use the benefit of hindsight to clarify my thoughts on this issue. I will post them here once the show has aired.
Update: I can’t find a way for people outside the UK to view the clip – can anyone help? I was pleased with the final outcome but as mentioned before want to use the opportunity to add some additional thoughts
* Compared to previous US recessions this one is fairly typical in terms of falling output, but worse than many previous ones in terms of unemployment
* Most of the previous US recessions had rebounded by now, or at least had bottomed out. This is perhaps why Bernanke thinks the upturn will be within a year
* Bernanke has access to better data than me, so I’m reluctent to make different projections about the path of GDP
* Note that Bernanke’s projections and the actual path are not independent – some of his comments might be wishful thinking since his job is to “manage expectations” and “restore confidence”
* Bernanke is fundamentally misguided to say that “we’ll see recovery beginning next year”. The recovery is happening NOW. We have had a false boom, in which people have squandered scarce resources funded through impoverishment. The correction (i.e. a fall in output, a fall in unemployment) is the inevitable and necessary consequence of the boom
* If GDP stars to rise again this should be a cause for concern, since it might suggest that the underlying structural problems that caused the crises have not been rectified
* One of the reasons for the 2008/09 recession is the policy response to the 2000 dot com bubble – because we failed to allow the correction to take place, we merely set in motion a new bubble. If our fear of recessions means that we do the same thing again – stick a band over the balloon and start pumping it full of air – a short term rise in GDP will count for little
* A rebounding GDP doesn’t mean that the economy has recovered. GDP growth looked healthy four years ago, but as we’ve since discovered that was the consequence of an inflationary bubble, and the underlying economic conditions were problematic.
* There is a disconnection between the policy makers and the general public. By only looking at these indicators – e.g. GDP, CPI, the stock market – they ignore the structural imbalances that cause the labour market adjustments that we all see. Share prices are not the same thing as the health of the economy – 1933 and 1935 were two of the best years in US stock market history, but occurred during the Great Depression
* The response to the credit crunch – an unprecedented expansion of liquidity (the monetary base in the US has doubled since this time last year) – will fuel more inflation. We should expect stocks to rebound since that’s what tends to happen during a bout of inflation
Okay the Troubled assets program is going to announced on Monday.
Looks about what we were expecting. However there are a couple of things that need to be looked at.
1. The asset managers running the funds may back off after the shit from Congress and the way they can simply break contracts.
2. The TARP money is basically tapped put and the word from the congress is that the chances of topping it up are close to zero. So the choices they have to to tap the Fed. Tapping the Fed essentially means printing even more money.
Net effect… I reckon bank stocks will take off next week.
Here’s the piece.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758981404500225.html#mod=testMod
thx for taking time to post that j –hadn’t thought of it that way until you laid it out like that
Our problem is simple. The central bank expands it’s power base by creating debt and using the government as a tool to tax people just to pay off the egregious interest. Eliminate that process and we will be in the green just like Russia and China. Then convert 80% of our prisons into hospitals and academic centers and we might have a chance of being the admirable world power we once were.
This is bullshit, Fly I am disappointed you lost in the final four. I want you to be able to throw feces in our direction while your pics drop the homohammer down on us. Its like seeing your dad cry for the first time.
Anyway in less interesting bullshit its time to get long DZZ in the next few days. Do what you want but I am getting long this fucker as gold is homofied. As usual I am hedging with long DXO which I have surfed from buys between 2.25 and 1.70. Off to piss off my balcony and practice my bowling.
J – congress didn’t break any contract. They simply taxed the windfall, same as they voted a windfall profits tax on oil companies in the past.
And keep in mind that had AIG not received a bailout the bonuses would have been treated as senior debt in bankruptcy and would never have been paid.
As a trader we eat what we kill and starve if we don’t. We don’t suck on corporate cock. If you want to steal from people be a man. Get a gun and rob a liquor store.
gapping – Illiterate idiots that think its cool to say gold is homified are, in fact, weak. Congrats.
Obama will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of ‘sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation’, NY TIMES reporting Sunday, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE… Developing…
Mama- semantics. understand
Gappy- TIGHT stop. I don’t want to see you hurt.
___ understand
Fly, thanks for the video – very sobering and informative, and puts things in perspective regarding our own level of suffering in this country.
A good weekend to you.
The other thing Fly’s video points out is the extent of the damage the State can do to a healthy country’s economy. It’s a great lesson to those that believe redistributionists prompt a less stratified society. Rather, they are a return to brutal feudalism, as illustrated here.
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Gap
I guess you are a mathematical imbecile. I advance to the next round. Take a closer look at the numbers.
Remember, “The Fly” can’t lose.
Jake,
Not to be devil’s advocate, but I don’t know if the problem is the “state” writ large as much as an insane dictator supported by other nearby barely democratic and possibly also klepto regimes…
…On the other hand, you’re right: redistribution in these cases creates a tiny class of politburo-level haves and a massive majority of have-nots with a few sometimes confused soldiers in between. It’s keeping the bayonets pointed in the right direction that Mugabe and his ilk will be worried about in the next year as things really fall apart…
My guess is he will end up in the $10 million house he was building a couple years ago in Cape Town with a lot of ANC support. Maybe then the country can start back down the road to normal..
In this instance “the State” is, for al intents and purposes, Mugabe. Whether the stealing is done by an authoritarian legislature (as in the case of Congress recently) or by a dictator, it is the ends- the shortcut to utopia, if you will- of which I speak.
There are no short cuts and there is no substitute for freedom. If you want to take it away, poverty via capital flight is its swift correlary.
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mrkcbill has tried the three leading detox colon cleansers in order to select the very best one for himself.
In this instance “the State” is, for al intents and purposes, Mugabe. Whether the stealing is done by an authoritarian legislature (as in the case of Congress recently) or by a dictator, it is the ends- the shortcut to utopia, if you will- of which I speak.
There are no short cuts and there is no substitute for freedom. If you want to take it away, poverty via capital flight is its swift correlary.
______
In other news, Vanillanova is beating UCLA like a drunken red headed stepchild from the high school league, Beast Coast Style!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dENsduWXrg
Fook! Sorry do the egregious double post. Damn Crackberry was telling me it wasn’t going through.
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I enjoy spanking asian monkey in toxic rice paddy.
Let nobody forget how then President Jimmah Carter (and his partner Andrew Young) allowed the avowed Marxist Mugabe take power in spite of another being democratically elected.
This was back in the late’70s.
I see similarity between then and now (Obama) via Iran,Hamas, etc. It’s either naivete or love of dictatorship and Marxism.
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/jimmy-carter-zimbabwe-and-wrong-side-history
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/746zsgtg.asp
I’ll sit on FAS & DXO for a while and bank stupid coin by the end of the year.