Hey, Tim Jones, here.
Tolkien summarizes my feelings on the current financial mess;
"There
they were sheltering under a hanging rock for the night, and he lay
beneath a blanket and shook from head to toe. When he peeped out in the
lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants
were out and were hurling rocks at one another for a. game, and
catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they
smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with
a bang. […] They could hear the giants
guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.
[…]
"This won’t do at all!" said Thorin, "If we don’t get blown off or
drowned, or struck by lightning, we shall be picked up by some giant
and kicked sky-high for a football."(Visit Tim’s blog – Old World Swine)
Dear Tim J.,
Is the pigskin from an Old World Swine 🙂
Seriously, by the time everything is over, we peons might all just be sleeping out under the rocks. I get dibs on the blanket!
I take that back. You can have the blanket. I want roller skates.
The Chicken
When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers
There and back again, a hobos tale. 🙂
(Not that I think we will be hobos.)
Should ‘Hobo’s tale.’
The sobering part is that the stone giants game drives the party to incautiously seek shelter in a handy cave, where they are promptly ambushed and carried off by goblins.
People do things like that when they’re panicked.
Let’s not go hunting around for a cave, yet, is what I’m sayin’.
Talking about “Tolkien Speaking…”, as soon as I read the title of the post I remembered the first quote from him that I heard (from this book).
Very beautiful.
Tim J. You are scaring me.
Well, the House defeated the economic bailout. Everyone is jittery. I am glad that I do not understand economics as it is practiced by large corporations. Imagine what would have happened if they actually had to pay for things with cash instead of credit…
It’s so nice to see greedy people’s geese get cooked, but I fear that we poorer people were really the stuffing for the geese and we will get dragged down along with the geese into the pot.
Hmm, I’m getting hungry.
By the way, doesn’t anyone remember Matt 6:24 – 34?
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?
And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.
Be of good cheer.
The Chicken
Worse of all — the activists who pushed for the risky housing loans? Who shrieked that poor people were being shut out of homes?
At best, they will suffer nothing.
At worst — at one point there was a proposal to skim off 20% of all assets seized and funnel them to such associations.
I hate to sound so negative, but the vote by congress reflected the anger in the general population. I think McCain hasn’t got a shot, now. The republicans will get blamed for this mess, even if they are only partially responsible. People will be willing to try Obama because he looks different and untried. More risk taking. The sad thing is that a correction will take place that just happens to coincide with Obama’s second year in office and he will look like a hero.
The Chicken
Worse still, while you were all distracted by the $700 Billion bailout they just passed a $634 Billion spending bill:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/27/news/economy/spending.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes
“Tim J. You are scaring me. ”
What scares me is that fuddled voters in the “mushy middle” will be so unnerved by the ululations from Wall Street that they will seek shelter in gasbag rhetoric about Hope and Change.
Welcome to the goblin cave.
Yeah, I don’t understand this at all. Anyone who thinks that the economic crisis is obviously a clear and compelling reason to vote one way or another seems to me likely either in the tank for that side already or else hopelessly confused.
You can count me among the hopelessly confused. Our economic system makes absolutely no sense to me. How we can have gone on for so long with a dollar based entirely on debt is beyond me. The fact that a bunch of insubstantial blips on a bunch of computer screens can lead to widespread poverty and unemployment when nothing has changed materially is just… weird. It seems like sorcery to me, a trafficking in phantoms.
SB, one of the issues related to this bailout is credit availability, the reason that relates to unemployment is that if businesses are unable to borrow for operating expenses they may be forced to reduce those expenses by firing people.
Unemployment is expected to rise in the future. Some say possibly as high as 10%. But one should not read more into whatever figure eventually comes up than is warranted. Unemployment is simply the inverse ratio of (those employed+those seeking employment) versus (those seeking employment). Due to the economic crunch some, say homemakers, are expected to seek employment and that will give a lift in the unemployment stat, simply due to supply and demand.
I’m not sure what “blips” you are referring to, but the changes in the equity market (stock market) in terms of market price for shares do not such as cause economic problems as reflect them. However, economic problems can be caused by these changes insofar as it affects the amount of available capital for a company interested in offering more shares or making an initial public offering. It can also have other kinds of effects, not all of which are psychological. This equity market is distinct from the credit market, but events in one affect the other.
A general point is that the greater fear of risk is present, a fear that may be increased by events such as market crashes, the less money will ultimately be invested in enterprises that may yield economic development — real material things.
It’s really all not that complicated, if you receive a business channel, then listening to it will probably bring you up to speed fairly quickly. Some things are complicated in the way that the rules of some board games may be complicated, but the only math involved of complexity is game theory. The rest for the most part is calculus level or below. The concepts can be understood without any technical formulation. However, one must approach it without prejudice or ideological artifice. It is a science, economics, not an extension of partisanship of the political or religious stripe.
“price for shares do not such as cause economic problems as reflect”
should read:
“price for shares do not cause economic problems so much as reflect”
I don’t know what caused that typo.
Just to be clear, my last point was a reflection of a concern of the politicization of economics, a science, just as some have concern that science is politicized in the realm of climate change,