Surely the fundamentalism you speak of causes a lack of investment opportunity due to the ultimate lack of demand. This lack was in fact recognised resulting in programs such as stimulating demand by lending for mortgages to people who could not pay and who were suckered with poison pill mortgages whose terms worsened with time. These were pushed by promoters and then bundled and sold as high quality paper instead of toxic waste. This is fundamental greed rather than market fundamentalism and is based upon marketing the US dream of home ownership and using government policy to subsidize the dream because that is the only way the dream produces the reality of profit. As any libertarian will tell you market fundamentalism is the last thing the US really stands for. It is simply ideological rhetoric useful at times but at others to be thrown overboards as it is now.
cheers k hanly
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Fri, 11/14/08, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> From: dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Bonds and the Economy
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, November 14, 2008, 10:07 PM
> On Fri, November 14, 2008 11:52 am, ken hanly wrote:
>
> > You may be right but what about his point that as long
> as treasuries are
> > high yielding investors will shy away from other more
> risky investments
> > that would actually increase production?
>
> Untrue, for three reasons: (1) most real investment takes
> place via
> reinvested profits or bank lending, not stock options or
> bonds, which are
> speculative claims on future production. (2) Investors
> nowadays are mostly
> institutions - hedge funds, banks, chaebol, keiretsu, and
> governments
> (China, Russia). They want security and predictability, and
> T-bills (US
> Government bonds) are still a reasonably safe investment.
> (3) The
> fundamental problem with the US economy isn't lack of
> investment
> opportunities, but rather 35 years of market
> fundamentalism, which has
> enriched the few at the expense of everyone else. Result:
> US consumers
> went deep into debt on their mortgages, cars and credit
> cards to maintain
> their living standards. Now all those debt bubbles are
> unraveling all at
> once. To avoid catastrophe, we need major government
> spending to bolster
> consumption right now, and then redistribution from the
> rich to the rest
> of us, to bolster savings in the future.
>
> -- DRR
>
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