Hilary, Liz and Dodd-Frank

Oh, there was a time, when I was a young man, when I would fiddle around, and that was nice enough for a while.

Then life came and went.

Nowadays, I find myself content to merely listen while life slips by.

In ages past, a maestro such as Felix Mendelssohn could imagine something incredible; he could then summon up in his own mind and hands-- an exquisite composition, an intricate stream of vibrations--as sublime as any that could ever be coaxed from a mere box constructed of wood and wire. He could then write the composition. Then, 170 years later Hilary could set bow to instrument and, with help from the orchestra, make it all happen so perfectly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dBg__wsuo

There's a reason why my fiddle has been set aside all these years. Why bother? There's somebody who can do it better. There's somebody out there who can, in fact, do it perfectly.

Just listen. But I get to thinking. . .

Years go by. We pay attention, try to figure things out. There's always somebody out there who can do things better than we can. Leave the complicated stuff to experts. And listen. Listen and learn. Maybe you'll learn a thing or two.

Just daydreaming now; I think of Sally Field in Forrest Gump when she was playing his mother and she said life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.

Think about 2008. Everybody just lollygaggin' along. . .then whoosh! well, you remember what happened. Everybody's shell-shocked. Uncle Hank stammering on the Tube. They had to twist Congress' arm two or three times before they'd come up with the money to fix the mess, at least temporarily.

Then the experts get trotted out to analyze, to testify, to figure what the hell happened in stock markets that made the thing come crashin' down--something about market manipulations of MBS's, unforeseen incredibilities of CDO's, the incredulous defaulting of credit default swaps blah blah blah

As the thing unwinds, along come the explanations, the excuses, the wagging fingers, the committees, the commissions, the oversight agencies get rolled out, cranked up. Republicans in shock because Obama's in. Democrats trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Democrats got to fix everything, so what do they do. . .

Let's fix everything up, they say.

Ok. Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.

Years go by. Big shock when Trump comes blasting' into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave after those 8 years of Mr. Smooth.

Now this morning we hear Amy and Juan on the radio, and here's Senator Liz whining about how the new Republican whirlwind wants to wind down Dodd-Frank, which was supposed to be the big fix, the big Democratic fix. I mean, she's a little bit crazy, like all Democrats, but there's one thing about Liz, she can play the rhetoric like Hilary plays the violin. It's no wonder Mitch had to cut her off last week. Anyway, Liz is saying:

"Commercial and consumer lending is robust. Bank profits are at record levels. And our banks are blowing away their global competitors. So, why go after banking regulations? The president and the team of Goldman Sachs bankers that he has put in charge of the economy want to scrap the rules so they can go back to the good old days, when bankers could take huge risks and get huge bonuses if they got lucky, knowing that they could get taxpayer bailouts if their bets didn’t pay off. We did this kind of regulation before, and it resulted in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We cannot afford to go down this road again."

I mean, Liz might have a point there. If things are so ROBUST, why do we still get this feeling about the 20,000+ Dow? Is it deja vu, or deja due, or prescience, maybe too much twitter or not enough facebook, or a rerun of common sense or what? Maybe it's all just a bunch of hot air blowin' around and we keep wonderin' about the whole house of cards but we can't really put our finger on what's wrong cuz you know the answer my friend is blowin' in the wind and life is like a box of chocolates anyway, a mere lala land where we think we got it figured out but really we don't.

Although I do have to remind you, Liz, since I am a registered Republican: we can't fix everything. If we could, and if we did, why, how boring would that be?

So my advice to you is we'd best leave the fiddlin' to the experts. Sooner or later we'll all have to face the music anyway.

Glass half-Full

the Minotaur metaphor from Yanis V.

The day after we arrived in Greece for a vacation, they

held an election there.

The leftist Syriza party won, propelling Alexis Tsipras into the office of Prime Minister. With no delay, Mr. Tsipras appointed Yanis Varoufakis as the new Finance Minister for Greece.

Before that week was over, these two men were visiting national leaders all over Europe. They were abruptly leaping into the Continental fracas of unbalanced financial equilibrium between their bankrupting government and the Euro creditor overlords up north.

Messers T and V immediately let it be known that their negotiating strategy on behalf of the Greek people would be very different from that of their predecessors. Austerity was not working to solve the problem, and would no longer be tolerated by the poor people of Greece. And it was time to acknowledge that fact. Something had to change.

That was about 3 and a half months ago. Now, in May 2015, the then-newly-appointed finance minister Mr. Varoufakis has already been replaced; he is now moving on to other roles in the international order of things (if "order" is an appropriate word for whatever it is that holds our nations together.)

As I write this, on a Sunday morning in May, in the USA, I am 2/3 of the way through reading Mr. Varoufakis' book The Global Minotaur;

http://www.amazon.com/The-Global-Minotaur-Financial-Controversies/dp/1780324502

I can tell you I am not surprised that his role as a negotiator was so brief. The man is a truth-teller. (of the leftist type; there are truth-tellers on both the "left" and the "right".)

As a regular ole conservative-leaning working-stiff kind of guy, I've done quite a bit of reading on this financial Crisis that has engulfed us since the fall of '08. Mr. V's explanation of that 6-year devolving tsunami is the easiest to understand that I have seen.

Yanis' strategy is centered on what we call these days a narrative. That is to say, a kind of story. He converts the whole unfolding circus of events into a story based upon the ancient Greek mythical tale of a terrible flesh-devouring beast, the Minotaur. If this sounds far-fetched, it is.

My conservative brethren these days disdain the narrative approach to elucidating current events; they prefer, as Sgt. Friday used to say back in the day. . . just the facts, ma'am.

As if such a thing--separating facts from fluffy hype--were possible in this day and time of cyber bewilderment. Even statistics, raw numbers, are near-nonsense nowadays; they're almost useless for making sense of contemporary fiscal/financial conundrums.

One has to survive by intuition in the 21st century.

There's "spin" imposed on everything! Consider the unemployment figures that the BLS cranks out every month. Talking heads await those stupid numbers on the first Friday of every month, so they can have something to talk about, forming projections and predictions about future events based on stuff that already happened last month. Looking for the "trend."

To hell with the trend! What's the truth?

Unemployment rate, or Labor participation rate?--you tell me which one really tells the tale.

It's like the CPI, Consumer Price Index. They leave fuel and food costs out of the equation, when those two factors comprise the biggest impact on every "middle class" household budget. Go figure.

But I digress.

Here's this lefty, Mr. Varoufakis, an economist. He writes a very interesting book, using the Minotaur analogy narrative, and helps me understand what the hell has been happening in the world of money, which is to say the real world.

And though he claims to be some kind of neo-Marxist, I don't care. If some conservative can do a better job of explaining why the free market has been buried under a landfill of toxic assets and leveraged finance-babel, let him/her do so.

I've blown my wad here in ranting, which is something I hate to see in other blatherers online, so I'll not weary you with more of this grievance;

I'll not explain the Greek's minotaurial metaphor. Except to say it involves the global recycling of economic surpluses since the post-WWII Bretton Woods financial arrangement that slanted everything in the world toward American advantage.

But now, since 1971, when Nixon shut down the gold window, all of that US-favoring international baggage has been lost in an airport somewhere between Brussels and Beijing and so the great recycling flow of surpluses has reversed. So that now it morphs into recycling deficits instead of surpluses and the winners will someday be losers and vice versa and so austerity is for the birds and now Mr. V thinks the Bretton Woods potentates should have listened to Mr. Keynes in 1944 instead of Harry Dexter White.

Or something like that. More about this later, probably next week after I finish the book. I suppose I'll have to jump over to Hayek or Schumpeter or Mr. Volcker for some right-leaning controlled financial disintegration explanations after this tragi-comedic death-toggle with Greek mythology.



Glass Chimera