Bacq2Bacq: Ben (and Xty's!) blog

“At the present moment people are unusually expectant of a more fundamental diagnosis; more particularly eager to receive it; eager to try it out, if it should be even plausible. But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.  Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

John Maynard Keynes (1936)

Er, um, ah, well, yes, indeed, dear defunct Johnny!

If you seek to understand finance and economics (as much as it can be understood!) it is important to first understand money, and the critical role it plays in allowing economic activity to occur as efficiently as possible. We didn’t always have “money”, it actually had to be invented, and it has been invented and re-invented in many forms many times over. Money has been: tulips in Holland; split wooden sticks in England (from whence we get “stocks”  and stock-markets, by the way); seashells in Samoa.  The economist will tell you that anything that serves as a measure of value, a medium for conducting trade, and a store of value is money.  And he’d be right.

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Goebbels: “Control the medium and you control the message”

It seems far more rational these days to quote Goebbels than Marshall McLuhan on this, as one can’t help but get the feeling we are being fed propaganda by the financial media.  Plus, Goebbels said it first, and McLuhan plagiarized.  To try to get to the bottom of the mess made of our economies, and our currencies, one must now seek alternate sources of news and analysis, which I have been doing for a while, but on a very ad-hoc basis.  If you read the mainstream media, at least do so with a skeptics eye.

But keeping a score of tabs open in Firefox, and relying on the good old “Well, this is embarrassing, would you like to restore your session?” message to remember where I have been after billg crashes my machine yet again doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzy I seek.  So here I am going to capture a bunch of the tabs I have open, so neither I nor Firefox forgets where I have found what appears like genuine, thoughtful analysis. I’ll get to details and rationale later. For now, here are some other angles on what is going on.

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