|
|
A
lot can happen in two weeks, which is what remains before the glorious orgy
of gifts, sugar plums, and roast goose. Imagine what a global bank run would
do for that ole holiday spirit - not to mention the GDPs of the world. Oh,
weeping celestial choirs! I suppose we generally assume that God Almighty
himself would move heaven and Earth to prevent such a dire convergence of
Christmas and a banking collapse, but perhaps the Old Diety
is asleep at the switch like the US Department of Justice, the SEC, and a whole
alphabet load of other watchful regulators in this, our only known universe.
Reality
is a harsh mistress. She insists that you pay attention and then, having done
so, take care of business. Politics, on the other hand, is more like stage
magic. The man in the tuxedo is always trying to divert your attention. The
world has run out of money, that is credible money
of the type that represents real wealth, and yet is up to its ears in paper
representations of putative wealth-like stuff: mortgages, credit default
swaps, Gold ETFs, synthetic CDOs, naked shorts, bonds of all sorts. And now,
alas, at Christmas time, the world has gotten a margin call and needs to fork
over a whole lot of collateral in order to demonstrate that the global system
of financial obligations is legit. Only the collateral turns out to be all
this dubious paper, really just a bouquet of promises to pay in distant
future Tuesdays for trillions of hamburgers today.
Nobody
who observed the proceedings in last week's European Union talks came away
from that spectacle feeling reassured. Brussels is like a ventriloquist's
dummy sitting on Germany's knee. Germany cannot just step up and act like the Boss of Europe. Too many bad memories of an
earlier instance, when a gang of maniacs wearing uniforms studded with
grinning totenkopf insignia turned the whole
region into a charnel house. So, Germany has to pretend to speak through
Brussels. The message was: listen up all y'all nations of the Eurozone! Prepare to live on a whole lot less than you're
used to! Do not exceed your borrowing and spending! Or else!
Yes,
the lingering question: or else...what?
It
is safe to say that nobody believed this mummery. Anyway, Great Britain
(a.k.a. Old Blighty) simply checked out. The sceptered isle is now Europe's dog-house. They stayed out
of the Euro currency for a reason: so that their equivalent of Wall
Street, the City of London, could short the shit out of it when the time
came, a strategy that begins to look absolutely brilliant - except
considering what Old Blighty is otherwise left with
as an economy: Scotch whiskey, mints, and a whole lot of Hallel
grocery shops, with the Royals as window dressing. (I'd sooner invest in
Argentina, with its amber waves of grain.)
The
old animosities are leaking out of Pandora's History Box. Stolid Angela
Merkel is stepping on Nikolas Sarkozy's size 14
½ neck - how long before he starts to buck and holler? The astrologasters cannot come up with any math that shows
Italy can meet its forthcoming debt payments. But they are only the leaders
of a deadbeat posse that includes virtually everybody else in EuroClub, except perhaps Holland, Germany, and Finland.
Could they really start beating up on each other with armies again? It would
appear unthinkable. But that is exactly why the First World War destroyed the
morale of Western Civ in 1914, too, after the Long
Peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars. You're standing there on a lovely
street corner in Verdun and the unthinkable whaps you upside the head. So
much for the quality of advanced thinking in the Modern Age. Maybe its
Poland's turns to rule the world?
In
any case, the storyline is as much about the banks as the nations they are
in. The banks are at the point where they can conduct business with each
other only by pretending that exchanges of value are taking place. Nobody
sees any lines of depositors forming on the sidewalks outside their branch
offices, but then again nobody can see the digital zeros and ones streaming
through the fiber-optic cable, either, and that's certainly where the action
is. For the moment that action has a direct line into the perceived greater
safety of Wall Street. Oh, yeah, follow Jim Cramer's advice and buy buy buy. Invest in a nation of
lawless slobs with a two-second attention span oscillating between Nascar and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Did
you catch President Obama on 60 Minutes last night.
Charming fellow. Sincere and even purposeful, too. But displaying a big patch
of cluelessness, like virtually everybody else in a position of authority in
this benighted land. The President intimates that we will surely return to
the turbo economy of a fast-receding yore. He is missing something big there.
We are not going back to that. The fiesta is over. And his job is not to try
to go back there, because it is impossible. His job was to lead an epochal
re-set of the economy to a very different disposition of things, smaller,
finer, more local. It is so far outside the box he's
in that light-years cannot even begin to describe the distances involved. And
I completely dismiss his claim that the reason no prosecution of Wall Street
misconduct happened was because, however odious their schemes and scams were,
they were technically legal.
Anyway,
I'm already looking forward to the nominating conventions of next summer,
when angry mobs of the swindled and desperate descend on Charlotte and Tampa
like ravaging locusts. Won't that be a wake up call!
And
now to bake all my Christmas Cookies.
|
|
