utilitus

The Intrinsic Value of Nothing, Part 2

To coin a phrase, money seems to be the root of all drivel. If you want to go Austrian, start with Wittgenstein...

Brazil as a Hedge in the New Economic Paradigm

Good thinking & writing- thanks.

'Bad Money' by Kevin Phillips: A Terrific Primer on Today's Issues

On Sep 12 12:35 PM Buckoux wrote:

> "In Bad Money, the reader is finally offered a glimpse of the consequences
> of “American Capitalism.”
>
> I don't think that the true culprit to our predicament is "American
> Capitalism", but American government and the ignorant morons who
> vote for the likes of the Bush's, Clinton's, Kennedy's, Kerry's,
> Daschel's and McCains. Need I go on?

Yes, please do go on, to Reagan and Lyndon LaRouche. Same difference, same system, same ultimate result, with some small variation in how the loot is distributed. American/Ignorance/Dem... - a seamless web. Smart/Serious/Honest people like Kevin Philips transcend the category.

China: Spreading the Sovereign Wealth to Buy Overseas Commodity Assets

The Chinese represent the faction of the human species that has evolved pragmatically over millenia under the less than 'disneyland' conditions the western hemishere provided at the beginning of the industrial revolution (once the original inhabitants and other 'guest workers' were dealt with).

Capitalism is manifested most often just as an ideology run up the flagpole by naive average americans marinated in propaganda as intense as any cooked up by Mao. American democracy has so far failed to produce an electorate smart enough to handle either government or the market, yet that's all they talk about. Humans have always adapted creatively without such blather, though Ghandi and others thought they would they be 'good ideas'.

Science, socialist or otherwise, is the way foreward. Marx was probably right about the ultimate end of capitalism, where the rope manufacturers would have to sell their leveraged production to those non-capitalists about to lynch them with it, or I would add, to those who will hoist the white flag over Wall Street.

Question is, how are the Chinese, Arabs and those nations which can live within their means and without loutish capitalist rhetoric going to treat the enfeebled, destitute giant. What job will they offer? He does pack a big pistol he bought on credit, and has a 'legacy' slot awaiting him at a top university, if he can pass the entrance exam and pay the tuition.


On Sep 06 12:15 PM john s. gordon wrote:

> chinese understand the nature of capitalism better than we do.

Armageddon Part Two: Securitization Is Too Big to Fail

The following comment was the first posted in reply to Hank Paulsons' article in the FT entitled "Reform the architecture of regulation", published March 18, 2009 (see blogs.ft.com/capitalis...) :

"Recent reference has been made in these pages to the 'worldly philosophers' who framed conventional economic discourse for centuries, and after all that , here we are. Enter Bentham, and his Panopticon: "Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — public burthens lightened — Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock — the gordian knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied — all by a simple idea in Architecture!"

Information architecture, that is. Apply standardized Semantic Web technologies to the flow of data through all regulated institutions and put an end to this travesty of 'financial innovation' as the simple discipline of having to define terms and specify processes reveals what's really going on."

Peter Schiff vs. the Fed

One afternoon when I had nothing better to do, I followed a live online discussion thread among noted economic commentators, including Mr. Schiff. Out of what seemed to be genuine curiosity, one of the participants quized him on his views on some finer points of Austrian theory, and his knowledge thereof seemed thin and brittle. Similarly his message about the unsustainability of American parasitism on world consumption has a basic logic, but its implications for practical political policy seem minimal.

Government involvement in the US economy seems moderately incompetent and corrupt, but mainly as it involves, as in the current health care debate, private interests which exert and maintain influence through what are ethically squalid but otherwise legal democratic proceedures. AFAIK, Mr. Schiff has no insight or policy other than to starve the beast, which would pit that subset of activist taxpayers not glued to the government tit one way or another against those who are. How's that workin' out for ya? World market forces should over time continue to undercut domestic labor rates, and the dollar and its denizens will be poorer than they were, relatively speaking and hedonics aside. The popular political reflex will likely as not be protectonism (again), probably not Mr. Schiffs prefered policy but one me might adopt in hopes of re-election and just to "get us back on our feet".

I'm no expert, but it's always seemed to me that the Austrian's critique of central planning was ill suited to a technological era when ideas and information, even when embodied temporarily as intellectual property, are so broadly impactful, generally relying on the cultural rather than economic medium of transmission. What would you call a society organized to inform and motivate its' citizens and partners toward national and worldwide, mutally optimal personal and collective outcomes, even if it required proactive social and economic coordination through technology, especially informatics? Six Sigma? If the US and its' current brand of capitalism is so smart, why is the US broke and its' population fat and ignorant?

Peter Schiff vs. the Fed

On Aug 08 02:50 PM yellowhoard wrote:

> The solution to the social security problem is to kill the elderly.

"Soylent Green is...money!"

Books: Revisiting 'Mr. Market Miscalculates', by James Grant

Ben Graham's 'Mr. Market' model/metaphor may sound 'homely' (a term applied by my logic professor at Berkeley to some metaphors or examples found useful in that discipline), but Graham's student Mr. Buffet, among many others, find it similarly useful.


On Aug 01 08:47 AM nkbay99 wrote:

> I think your columns are great and usually find something that makes
> me think. However, there is just one thing. I think you and every
> other author/blogger/analyst should stop talking about "Mr. Market"
> The market is not a person, male or female and it just sounds DUMB.

Real-Time Search: How to Capture Consciousness

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:
"Today's SDI ( selective dissemination of information) systems owe a great deal to a 1958 paper by Luhn, "A Business Intelligence System"], which described an "automatic method to provide current awareness services to scientists and engineers" who needed help to cope with the rapid post-war growth of scientific and technical literature. Luhn apparently coined the term business intelligence in that paper."

Defending Cramer's 'Madness'

This posting has as shabby a feel as Cramers' product. Thing is, Cramer is a smart, creatively fluent guy who has quite candidly copped on air to his psychological motivation on at least one memorable occasion. He's playing to the groundlings, which is noble in principle, but he ends up as what Mark Haines calls the Rev. Jim-Bob of the Church of What's Happening Now. From a northern Californian perspective, such money grubbing just seems vulgar. Go invent something real.

Oil: Up to $200 or Down to $25?

On Jun 07 06:54 AM Tom Armistead wrote:

> Bill Clinton ... released 30 billion barrels...

Right, but that wasn't oil....

Open Platforms and End User Innovation

The expresson 'fatuous twits' comes to mind...

...but not re Prof. von Hippel, who, based on a presentation he made at that obsolete PhD. factory Berkeley, has studied, at that other notorious value trap, MIT, how sophisticated industrial users feed back into scientific and especially engineering practice. Also, check out Doc Searls' VRM project at that Potemkin Village of cognition, Berkman/Harvard Law.

Highlighting International Real Estate ETFs

Using more instinct than expertise, I've been building a pretty big position in the Alpine product AWP. It's not a REIT but closed end fund, mostly holding international securities in "a favorable balance among three pillars of real estate value – Premier Property Owners, Premier Property Developers, and Premier Property Financiers/Investors.". It is flexibly currency hedged, a key point given my dire view of the US$, and RE is of course an inflation play. It was down maybe 90% since it's ill-timed introduction in 2007, and I'm up about 70% in several months while its' yeild has devolved from 15% to 8.5% now. Recently, it's behaving rather well on both up and down days.

Also, this morning, inspired by something someone said on CNBC World overnight, bought a bit of China Housing & Land Development (CHLN), only to find that is was up 23% half an hour later (now up just 13%). The dollar is doomed, so leveraged Forex trading is my new frontier, and I'm planning to buy a nice house in Mexico.

2009 Commodity Fund Performance - Part III

Tim just wrote:

"In fact, in the scheme of things, it seems kind of funny that there are gold and silver investment products at all... why (are) people using paper money to buy real money through paper certificates(?)"

Oh, come on - 'cause that's the way it currently works. A Kruggerand attached to a string can be used to hypnotize someone to give you some good or service, and that's yet another mode of value exchange, however dubious; it might just work.

If/when a merely rational economic regime employing even fiat electrons is rigorously applied, probably in the context of an ultra-wired, knowledge-dense future information utility where risk as we know it is vastly reduced, modes of exchange will probably forthrightly involve pure abstractions. In the meantime, I hoard assorted gold coins from various nations, own GLD, GDX, and securities of select miners, for reasons we all understand, but < 10%.

Even Martin Wolf over at the FT has intimated that fiat currencies may have only have one more chance until what he considers the absurdity of gold becomes a viable replacement. Economics, like goldbuggery, or the Republicans, will never realize their ideal outcomes because each fails to model the complex externalities of the real world. Gold or C (the speed of light) are good hueristic parameters of value, where the American flag, diplomas in economics and other bumper stickers are not.

Is the Time REIT for Real Estate ETFs?

Using more instinct than expertise, I've been building a pretty big position in the Alpine product AWP. It's not a REIT but closed end fund, mostly holding international securities in "a favorable balance among three pillars of real estate value – Premier Property Owners, Premier Property Developers, and Premier Property Financiers/Investors.". It is flexibly currency hedged, a key point given my dire view of the US$, and RE is of course an inflation play. It was down maybe 90% since it's ill-timed introduction in 2007, and I'm up about 60% in several months while its' yeild has devolved from 15% to 8.5% now. Recently, it's behaving rather well on down days.