Minutes ago, he wrote:
Hey, the government has agreed to bail out Citigroup. Surely we'll now be saved from worldwide insolvency! Right? Or is this a profligate waste of money? We have to level with you: this whole bailout thing has now exceeded the media's ability to critically analyze it.
[...]
<http://gawker.com/5097516/thinking-about-the-bailout-how-much-is-a-jillion-dollars>
Although I'm a reasonably clever bloke who reads "Baseline Scenario", the FT, Left Business Observer, the WSJ and who routinely stops by the office of the hedge team's econ/mathematician/programmer with a cup of green tea for my daily session of 'holy shit, we're fucked! Here's the math and graphs' I feel a bit of vertigo, or something, coming on.
The speed, that's it. Well, the speed of events and the planet wide scope. On third thought, it's the speed, the planet wide scope *and* the astounding volume of information.
Acceleration. That is what perplexes. In the 1930s, as my grandmother watched the world melt, it probably felt like this but information traveled more slowly - shock waves hit after pauses. Now ever-changing data is available with 'up to the minute' speed. One moment, CitiGroup is described as stable. But wait! Another moment comes, it's in desperate straits.
Let's listen for a moment to Paul Verilio, a man who has spent some time thinking about speed and power:
GC/MG
Do you, like some people do, believe that capitalism is nearing its end?
PV:
I rather believe that the end is nearing capitalism. My field is urban studies. This crisis shows that the Earth is not large enough for progress, for the speed of History (as we have it). Hence repetitive accidents. We were living in the belief that we had both a past and a future. But 'the past does not pass', it has become a monster, so much so that we do not mention it anymore. And as far as the future is concerned, it is severely questioned by the issue of the environment, and the end of natural resources like oil. So the only place left for us to inhabit is the present. But the writer Octavio Paz said it before: "you cannot live in the present moment, just as you cannot live in the future". It is exactly what all of us are now going through, and that includes the bankers.
[...]
<http://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/news/paul-virilio-on-the-crisis>
.d.
-- "Obviously, women find it attractive when a small man makes love to them then vanishes in a "POOF" of green clovers and red balloons."
Mike Redmond .............................. http://monroelab.net/blog/