Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Current Financial Crisis

in Current Affairs, Philosophy | December 14th, 2008

Ayn Rand’s clas­sic gets dust­ed off and humor­ous­ly brought into 2008 over at McSweeney’s. Worth a read. 

As a side note, you may want to revis­it the New York Times 2007 piece, Ayn Rand’s Lit­er­a­ture of Cap­i­tal­ism, which talks about the influ­ence that Atlas Shrugged (and its free mar­ket phi­los­o­phy) has had on For­tune 500 CEOs and par­tic­u­lar­ly Alan Greenspan, the for­mer head of the Fed­er­al Reserve, who helped archi­tect the dereg­u­lat­ed bank­ing sys­tem that’s now unwind­ing around us. Belat­ed­ly, Greenspan would acknowl­edge a “flaw in the mod­el” that he “per­ceived is the crit­i­cal func­tion­ing struc­ture that defines how the world works” — which is a fan­cy way of say­ing “on sec­ond thought, maybe the free mar­kets don’t always reg­u­late them­selves.” And there we have it, anoth­er utopi­an ide­ol­o­gy col­lides with real­i­ty. Not the first, and it won’t be the last.

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A Short Introduction to The Great Depression & The New Deal

in Current Affairs, History | December 9th, 2008

Eric Rauch­way, an Amer­i­can his­to­ri­an at UC-Davis (and an old grad school col­league of mine), pub­lished a time­ly book ear­li­er this year, The Great Depres­sion and the New Deal: A Very Short Intro­duc­tion. And it sets him up per­fect­ly to talk about an his­tor­i­cal moment that’s now back on our minds.

Rauch­way appeared last week on Econ­Talk (iTunes — Feed — MP3), a pod­cast that’s get­ting some play late­ly, and spent a good hour sur­vey­ing the eco­nom­ic cri­sis that all oth­ers will be mea­sured against. The con­ver­sa­tion starts with the after­math of World War I, where John May­nard Keynes saw the eco­nom­ic prob­lems begin­ning. (Read online his 1919 book, The Eco­nom­ic Con­se­quences of the Peace.) Then, it moves through the 1920s, the stock mar­ket crash, Hoover’s attempts to restore sta­bil­i­ty (which weren’t as bungling as his his­tor­i­cal rep­u­ta­tion now sug­gests) and final­ly FDR’s New Deal and the effects of World War II. If you have an hour, you’ll learn a good deal.

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Capitalism with Humility

in Current Affairs | December 1st, 2008

It’s pret­ty hard to pull this off, but the titans of Amer­i­can indus­try have made Her­bert Hoover look like a very wise man, at least when he said: “You know, the only trou­ble with cap­i­tal­ism is cap­i­tal­ists; they’re too damn greedy.”

But we should­n’t con­sid­er Hoover reha­bil­i­tat­ed. Not quite yet. The video clip below sug­gests that in Japan the CEOs have fig­ured out how to run their cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem with a degree of humil­i­ty. And they’re doing it vol­un­tar­i­ly. That’s a news flash that you can send to our polit­i­cal lead­ers before they fun­nel more tax­es to mis­man­aged insti­tu­tions with no real strings attached.

(A quick PS: Europe’s lead­ing philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist recent­ly spoke in the Ger­man press about the finan­cial cri­sis and what it means for the future of our glob­al­ized soci­ety. You can find an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here.)

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Peter Schiff on the Economy and What’s Coming Next

in Current Affairs | November 24th, 2008

Last week, we fea­tured a rather pre­scient video clip high­light­ing Peter Schiff and his warn­ings in 2006-07 that that our econ­o­my is in deep trou­ble. Since then, many have won­dered where Schiff sees things going next. So NPR’s Plan­et Mon­ey (iTunes — Rss Feed — Stream) caught up with him on Fri­day and asked him just that: The upshot is nowhere good. We’ve got some deep, under­ly­ing prob­lems — prob­lems that go well beyond asset bub­bles. We’re head­ed for anoth­er Depres­sion. And it’s in part because all of the gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion is hurt­ing, not help­ing, things. There’s noth­ing very hope­ful here. But, if Schiff is right again, it could pay to lis­ten and get his take on what the future could look like.

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Hitler’s Real Estate Downfall

in Comedy, Current Affairs | November 20th, 2008

What hap­pens when you take the 2004, Acad­e­my award-nom­i­nat­ed Ger­man film Der Unter­gang (The Down­fall) and turn it into a spoof? Here, the “down­fall” is all about the decline of the hous­ing mar­ket, and how Hitler becomes just anoth­er man with a home under water. There are some clas­sic lines here, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you looked to buy a home in recent years. Thanks Bob for the tip.

 

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The YouTube Presidency

in Current Affairs, Web/Tech, YouTube | November 16th, 2008

We’re about to wit­ness the begin­ning of the YouTube Pres­i­den­cy, as The Wash­ing­ton Post has dubbed it. When Barack Oba­ma takes office in late Jan­u­ary, he plans to give a new twist to a long­stand­ing tra­di­tion. The week­ly pres­i­den­tial radio address will now “air” on YouTube, mean­ing that you’ll be able to access the pres­i­den­t’s mes­sages in video, when­ev­er you want, on one of Amer­i­ca’s most traf­ficked web sites. The upshot? Some­one may actu­al­ly lis­ten to these week­ly mes­sages.

This move is part of Oba­ma’s effort to use tech­nol­o­gy to com­mu­ni­cate more direct­ly with the Amer­i­can pub­lic. It’s a way of bring­ing FDR’s fire­side chats into the 21st cen­tu­ry. In addi­tion to har­ness­ing the pow­er of Web 2.0, you can expect to find a lap­top on his Oval Office desk, a first for any pres­i­dent. And, if Oba­ma has his way, he might get to hang on to his Black­ber­ry as well. (See this piece in the NY Times.)

In the mean­time, here’s first of the YouTube videos that Oba­ma has launched dur­ing the tran­si­tion. Watch it below:

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The Death of Planet Finance

in Business, Current Affairs | November 14th, 2008

British his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son has achieved the aca­d­e­m­ic holy trin­i­ty, hold­ing posi­tions at Har­vard, Oxford, and Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion. Only 44 years old, he has 9 books to his cred­it (includ­ing a new one: The Ascent of Mon­ey: A Finan­cial His­to­ry of the World), and you’ll often find him writ­ing in the pub­lic press. In the lat­est edi­tion of Van­i­ty Fair, Fer­gu­son takes a good look at the demise of the glob­al finan­cial sys­tem and locates the cri­sis “in the long run of finan­cial his­to­ry.” The sto­ry he tells is how the 20th cen­tu­ry — and par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­ca’s urge to become a “prop­er­ty-own­ing democ­ra­cy” — brought us into “The Age of Lever­age,” which car­ried with it a “del­uge of paper mon­ey, asset-price infla­tion, [an] explo­sion of con­sumer and bank debt, and the hyper­trophic growth of deriv­a­tives.” The Lever­age Age is now over. But will its col­lapse have eco­nom­ic and social effects as dis­as­trous as the Great Depres­sion? Or will gov­ern­ment action pull us back from the brink? Def­i­nite­ly give this piece a read, and thanks to “Hanoch” for mak­ing us aware of it. As always, it’s great to get read­er sug­ges­tions.

As a relat­ed aside, I should direct your atten­tion to a new arti­cle by Michael Lewis, who first wrote about Wall Street’s excess­es in Liar’s Pok­er. It’s called “The End,” and it offers an inside account of how Wall Street sowed the seeds of its own destruc­tion. It’s also appar­ent­ly the basis for a new book.

Final­ly, you may want to check out a fas­ci­nat­ing piece in the Wall Street Jour­nal called “Mem­o­ries of the 1930s Still Sear.” It fea­tures inter­views with the old­er gen­er­a­tion who endured the Depres­sion, how they coped, and what lessons they learned.

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Funny, If It Wasn’t So Sad

in Current Affairs | November 14th, 2008

Sev­er­al years ago, I had lunch with the for­mer head of a large invest­ment bank who talked about how Wall Street had a built-in bull­ish bias, and any­one who goes against the grain, does so at their own per­il. Below you’ll find a good exam­ple of that. Here we have Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacif­ic Cap­i­tal, sound­ing the alarms repeat­ed­ly on Fox “News” in 2006-07, mak­ing pre­dic­tions that turned out to be remark­ably right, and watch the scorn that gets heaped on him. Imag­ine if the grown ups had both­ered to mind the store dur­ing the past decade, to see some of the obvi­ous prob­lems mount­ing. We might all be breath­ing a bit more eas­i­ly today.

via The Dai­ly Dish

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