by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Listening to Gordon Brown’s speech today, Philip Stephens notes that “Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone”:
Though he set out the challenges Britain faces in a period of tumultuous global upheaval, Mr Brown did little to challenge his audience’s preconception that the present mess was all the fault of greedy capitalists.
Reading that brought to mind another Labour Conference speech in times of global upheaval: Tony Blair’s back in 2001. Remember this?
This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.
I re-read the whole thing this afternoon, and was struck by a) its brilliance, b) its insight, c) how it soars compared to Brown’s speech today and d) the extent to which – in retrospect, with all that’s happened since – it shines with an eerie messianic fervour. It’s well worth another look: full text below the jump.
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by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Global system, North America
Via Steve Clemons, this excerpt from a speech by Leo Hindery – an Obama economic adviser and Chair of the New America Foundation’s Smart Globalisation Initiative – which is due to be delivered later today at a conference organised by NAF:
As we all know, the Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in troubled mortgages, which would raise the statutory limit on the national debt to $11.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion. This $700 billion is over and above the $85 billion already committed to AIG, the $29 billion related to Bear Stearns, and the very conservative $25 billion associated with the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The solutions being proposed are the most expensive combined bailout in the nation’s history and will sharply curtail the ability of the next president to push for tax cuts or new spending. And yet I believe they are not nearly enough, since they do not adequately cover the exposure associated with leveraged loans and, especially, the credit-default swaps market which has ballooned to a nearly unimaginable $45.5 trillion, from $900 billion in 2001.
This credit-default swaps market, which was developed by financiers who hired the best lobbyists they could to keep regulators away, is essentially nothing more than insurance on debt, but because there are now many more credit-default swaps outstanding than there are bonds for them to cover, it could potentially be a black hole of distress at least as large as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Tens of trillions of dollars ago these swaps became nothing more than a way to gamble with almost no money down.
Alan Blinder suggested over the weekend that “the root cause of all of [our credit problems] is declining house prices”, and he is correct – but his observation ignores the fact that to this particular root ball were grafted a lot of other financial instruments which have together grown into one heck of a tree.
Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Richard Shelby of Alabama, and others, were more right than wrong when they said last week that more than likely “we’re talking about a trillion dollars.”
by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global system
Donald Mackenzie in the LRB back in May:
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.
Of course, the credit crisis has increased the risk of systemic economic failure. But the existence and rising price of the end-of-the-world trade indicate something beyond that. The crisis isn’t just about the bursting of the US housing bubble and dodgy sub-prime lending. Nor is it merely a reflection of the perennial cycle in which greed trumps fear to create a euphoric disregard of risk, only for fear to reassert itself as the risk becomes too great. What is revealed by the end-of-the-world trade is that the current crisis concerns the collapse of public fact.
by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
Via Small Precautions, a vintage video of Sarah Palin in her natural element:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1vPYbRB7k]
by Alex Evans | Sep 22, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Yet another ship was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia on Sunday, bringing the total of ships seized there to over 30 this year alone. The current tally is that up to 200 seafarers are being held hostage for ransom.
The US Navy has said bluntly that it can’t guarantee security and that “shipping companies must take measures to defend their vessels and their crews”; shipowners, for their part, are urging EU governments to “recognise the seriousness of the situation and to urgently deploy more warships to the Gulf of Aden and to the seas off the coast of Somalia with the required rules of engagement to enable direct action to be taken against the pirates”. But as US vice-admiral Bill Gortney notes, “this is a problem that starts ashore and requires an international solution. We made this clear at the outset — our efforts cannot guarantee safety in the region”.
In other words, failed states – right? Well, perhaps not entirely. After all, “failed” implies that some kind of effort was underway in the first place, whereas the reality is that for some at least, the absence of formal state control was always the design. Peter Lamborn Wilson notes that:
The sea-rovers and Corsairs of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life.
Lamborn Wilson is the creator of the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones, which are more or less what they say on the tin: places where, at least for a while, a zone outside of state control is created. Now while one permutation of TAZs sees them as bases for crime, terrorism and so forth, Lamborn – an anarchistically minded fellow – is as a rule positively enthusiastic about TAZs, as indeed are his libertarian followers (hence the popularity of the concept in rave culture, where free parties can be seen as TAZs).
But where the idea of TAZs really starts to get interesting is when you watch the counter-insurgency / 4GW crowd start to play with it.
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