December 2008
21 posts
Fred Block on Karl Polanyi and the need for regulation by market-based economies:
Real market societies need the state to play an active role in managing markets, and that role requires political decision making; it cannot be reduced to some kind of technical or administrative function. When state policies move in the direction of disembedding through placing greater reliance on market...
Happy Bonus Season!
Credit Suisse to Use $5 Billion of Illiquid Assets for Bonuses
By Christine Harper Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) — Credit Suisse Group AG’s investment bank has found a new way to reduce the risk of losses from about $5 billion of its most illiquid loans and bonds: using them to pay employees’ year-end bonuses. The bank will use leveraged loans and commercial mortgage-backed...
Level of Destruction
On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real
Clawing back the 2006 bonuses at Merrill would not come close to making up for the company’s losses, which exceed all the profits that the firm earned over the previous 20 years. This fall, the once-proud firm was sold to Bank of America, ending its 94-year history as an independent firm.
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”
– President George W. Bush, in comments to CNN that reminded me of Karl Polanyi’s words in 1944, “Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.”
“The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal…. That was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing…. The cure for that is to write things...
Calum explains the Singapore nightlife to me
Oscar: People tell me Singapore is boring.
Calum: Oh, no, Singapore is baaaaad.
Oscar: Good bad or bad bad?
Calum: Good bad. Put it this way--one of these days you're going to wake up in Malaysia.
Oscar: .... Oh.
Calum: Yeah.
Oscar: ...
Calum: I mean, it's going to be awkward.
What would Walt Whitman think of user-generated...
When I pass to and fro, different latitudes, different seasons, beholding the crowds of the great cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore—when I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons—at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so...
“I’m a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it’s best...”
– Barack Obama
An interview with Barack Obama on his faith:
So, I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as...
Art Till 8 →
Event of a lovely friend trying to drum up business in Auckland art galleries…
Wounder and Wounded
From The New Yorker:
There is an arresting moment early in the book when he offers a flash-forward, and tells us that Mr. Biswas’s fate would probably be that of a laborer, working on the estates like his brother, Pratap, “illiterate all his days.” Pratap, he writes, would become “richer than Mr Biswas; he was to have a house of his own, a large, strong, well-built house, years before Mr...
“Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or...”
– John Maynard Keynes
“You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in...”
– Heraclitus