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Your view seems to be that the fundamentals of land
rents is a great bulwork against the crisis. I don't get it that we
have enough information to judge this here. But I remain interested and
open minded. Of course I will continue to shoot "fund manager" data at
you until I'm convinced you have the tanking right.
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I have been testing out on this list these ideas for a friend who has worked for about 30 years of more in the cooperative and land movement in England. I think they have stood the test fairly well including the challenges Doyle has put.
Fine if he can shoot further "fund manager data". That is the test I posed at first. But I think we already know the answer: Soros, has fingered Honk Kong, and found it too hot to continue fingering. Even if the yen slumps further, as it is doing tonight, and further devaluations take in the PRC and Hong Kong, the point has been made in practice.
Concerning the edge in these exchanges, well it is better to have some feedback than none, and criticism sharpens up an argument. Funny as it may be, I could not make out what Barkley was getting at by talk of tanking. There is a lot of jargon in finance and some jargon and slang of course is known in England but not in the USA and vice versa. I feel I know Barkley well enough that if I had missed an important point he would have stepped in.
I am sorry if it came over personally, but I doubt if it is wise to think of any of us as "just working class guys". By training and education, to use media like this and to compete and contribute in turn, people are likely to have to be members of the intelligentsia, or to be self-educated up to a comparable level. And the intelligentsia as a whole serve the ruling class. There are many reasons for this, and some pressures are more overt than others. To try to go against this involves all sort of personal risks and compromises. One of the most basic things is who is paying for the information from which we are drawing. There is also a hierarchy of ideas between those that are regarded as serious and those regarded as ridiculous. My impression is that competition takes place to quite an extent in terms of how well informed one is. Subtle put downs can be quite effective and reinforce the received hierarchy of ideas, effectively excluding the ventilation of other ideas.
The most money will be invested in getting information that will provide the quickest financial gain. The information, and the service to which it is put, is not value free.
Chris Burford
London