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<DIV>Keynes was writing during the Depression, a time of serious rupture.
<BR>That's not the way things are in advanced capitalist economies today.
<BR>The state has taken on the role that Negri wrote about in his essay <BR>on
Keynes - of stabilizing expectations.<BR><BR>Doug<BR>Comment: Actually Keynes
wrote on this topic first as a philosopher of probability in his Treatise on
Probability, ahead of his General Theory . He was thinking of the
individual as a decision maker and not of economies yet.</DIV>
<DIV>But in any event, the partially managed economies of the capitalist west
have suffered from successful attacks on the dismantling of this apparatus
since the 1980's, not the other way round, as a wave of deregulation took
place increasing general investment risk levels. Evidence of this abounds in the
numerous currency crises in Mexico, Argentina, SE Asia and Russia in the 1990's
motivated by the introduction of flexible exchange rates and the liberalization
of capital flows. Locally this can be observed in the cases of the
S&L crisis, the bankruptcies of LTM Capital and Enron,
the Telecom and Tech Bubbles in the 1990's,the current Housing Bubble,
etc. True, the State through the central bank acts,occasionally , as rescuer of
last resort, but it is acknowledged this only increases "moral hazard"
encouraging excessive risk taking, especially as the economy has turned to be
dominated by the financial sector.The increase in importance of "risk
management" firms and specialists plus the growing number of hedge funds and the
continuous expansion of new financial instruments such as the
derivatives,MBS's,ABS's,etc, is vivid testimony of the widespread level of
risk taking in the economy. Actually, Floyd Norris was pointing out in last
Sunday's NYTimes how Greenspan is turning American workers into gamblers vis the
mortagage bubble and the possible privatization of S.S.</DIV>
<DIV>Cristobal Senior</DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>