Archive for October, 2008

This is one of the most grabbing artworks I have seen lately and the overall best example of conceptual protest art I have seen. I am talking about Jordi Colomer’s ‘Anarchitecton’ which is a serie of videos and pictures of people protesting with buildings as a protest sign:

That makes you think in these times of economic crisis: is capitalism actually a protest against itself?

Isn’t the only way to effectively protest capitalism becoming capitalism itself? The way things are build now there’s no way to escape the system, unless you manage to climb on top of it. The same is true about our so-called ‘democracy’: it has become the most intolerant political system ever invented, far more intolerant than any dictatorship has ever been. That is an interesting paradox.

View the whole work on Jordi Colomers website

…in other words the perfect day to invest in poetry. We at Loewak will soon open a special section of this site where you, stockholder or investor, can invest into one of the few clean and interesting markets left: the market of poetry. Expect impossible returns, expect a dead cat bouncing, if you waste your money anyway why not waste it on something with dignity? Poetry is the answer.

That’s exactly what I did today. I bought these poetry volumes:

New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 – by Cseslaw Milosz

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987: Bilingual Edition

The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Selected Poems of Sandor Csoori

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre

Perched on Nothing’s Branch – The poetry of Josef Attila

That should get me through this winter. Granted, these are rather ‘safe’ choices, but that’s what
we need in these times. Guaranteed investments. No surprises. World class poetry.

Another day of reckoning on the markets, with drops of almost 10% in a single day. Nothing seems to help: the 700 billion dollars plan had little effect, the global lowering of interest rates had little effect, the IMF’s announcing it opens a special department had little effect. It’s not so strange if you think what lies ahead on the markets. The fall of Lehman Brothers alone might lead to 400 billion dollars of insurance claims, which will press heavily on the markets. If these claims will prove to be not payable then it will result not in a win-lose situation but a lose-lose: the claimant wont get any money and the insurance company gets broke.

Compared to the infamous 700 billion dollar rescue plan, which now looks rather meagre if anything, if a single company can produce such giant debt claims, what will happen if other big banks or investment companies start to fall? That’s probably what will happen and it will result in massive amounts of debt the 700 Billion dollars, which would already be used on bad mortgage assets and not on claims anyway, is not an answer to.

These are strange times. There’s the Iceland situation, where the government simply announced it wouldn’t pay back the savings of over 600.000 people in England and the Netherlands. Absurd, but let’s remember that Iceland probably sees itself as the victim here: they invested heavily in the US market and had to take huge losses they could’t afford. However, if things go on like this I wouldn’t be surprised to see the English fleet end up on Icelands shores one day, and maybe they even should. If these were my saving I’d be pretty pissed, I can tell you.

There is more about the 400 billion dollars lehman insurance claim on Robert Peston’s site

M.H.Benders – Dutch writer and Freelance Economist

The US government’s debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.

The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.

The board was erected to highlight the $2.7 trillion level of debt in 1989.

The clock’s owners say two more zeros will be added, allowing the clock to record a quadrillion dollars of debt.

Source: BBC website

There is lots of people out there who do not understand what this crisis is all about. They have no idea what fractal reserve banking is, why banks can make billions of profits and all of a sudden be bankrupt one year later. Well, fractal reserve banking means the bank is not obliged to keep your money when you bring it to them but they can spend it. This usually means they will lend it out to someone else against a higher interest rate than they give you, and the difference is their profit.

However, when stuff got deregulated banks could not just lend out your money to someone else, they could also start to gamble with it on the stock markets. This is where things went wrong. Banks bought giant amounts of mortgage-packages that were promised to be good and they turned out to be bad mortgages that do not return any profit, at least not yet. They’re problematic. So they have spend lots and lots of our money on bad investments. This means that
the profit figures they have flaunted last years, based partly on these investments, were fake. They made it look like they were growing and growing, just to be able to cash in more money at the stock counter.

So now they’ve got called on, they have a huge cash flow problem. These bad debts are made of your money, and when too many people start asking their money back: euh, its just not there. In fractal reserve banking the bank keeps just a small amount of money inside to be able to pay direct transactions. For that reason they have put caps on daily withdrawal amounts too, too high caps would bring them into trouble.

That’s one side of the story: they wasted your money on bad loans and don’t know how to pay it back. But there is more to this crisis. The whole American economy and partly European economies and other economies are debt-based. The American national debt has risen in the last eight years from 5 trillion dollars to 10 trillion dollars. So it has doubled under the Bush administration. This is all borrowed money. It has to be paid back. And every time the amount gets higher, it gets harder to pay back because of the interest issue. So what we see here is a debt figure that has risen to such an astronomic amount it has become virtually impossible to pay it back, or maybe even to stop it from growing. This is the core phenomenon we are dealing with at the moment: Crisis which will return at accelerating speeds, like this debt money is accelerating in size all the time. The effect of this in the long term is an economy in perpetual crisis. There will no longer be good times, bad times, depressions or recessions. People who believe this is a returning pattern in our economies are right, but they forget that we already had a major crisis in this decade: this is the second one. The crisis is a circular pattern but its exponential: it will keep coming back at a faster and faster pace, because debt is an exponential phenomenon.

The American author Gore Vidal wrote a book called ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’. In it he suggests that America has to stay in a state of Perpetual war to afford their lifestyle – there is much true about that, and what we will now see is that the economy more and more will follow a Perpetual Crisis model: faster and faster will these Crisis return. Either that, or there will be a total collapse. I’m not sure which option is the worst one. In the long term a collapse might be much, much more healthy. The 700 dollar bailout plan is of course ridiculous: more debt, to keep ‘things running’.

There is no quick fix, this time around. It’s pretty hilarious to see McCain and Obama talk of nothing but tax cuts.

Martijn Benders, Dutch writer and Freelance Economist