Today it's mood C

I haven't really been absent from this blog. If you had sat at your computer and constantly reloaded this page for the last week you could have read a variety of odd posts that I put up for an hour or so, then deleted. I've been going through a period of blog angst that will not be unfamiliar to those who read the old version of this blog. NRSR mark 2 - the resolutely impersonal version - was supposed to avoid these problems!

My angst has had two causes. One is that I haven't been happy with my prose. I find it hard enough to write about politics and economics at all; trying to do so with style and elegance seems beyond my abilities. Clarity is all I can hope to achieve, and very often I know I don't achieve it.

The other problem has been that when I write about such things I focus inevitably on things that make me angry, which makes me feel like I come across far too negatively. So I'm going to try to note things I approve of, as well as things that send me demented.

So, the good: well, I like it that Obama seems to want to pick a "team of rivals" as his cabinet and advisors. I said in my Obama-critical post that I distrusted polititians who seemed to seriously believe in a Christian god; that I thought it showed a lack of intellectual rigour. By contrast, picking people with different views suggests the opposite. The Bush years have shown the folly of a president who surrounds himself with people of identical viewpoints.

Unlike most people, I thought the G20 communique was pretty good! I mean with Bush banging the drum for rampant free market capitalism, Sarkozy wanting to regulate pi to 3, and even Rudd holding typically resolute on populist issues such as executive compensation, I expected much worse (yeah, that's me being positive...). The final document supports free trade, asks for regulation to correct market failures and no more, commits its signatories to not erecting trade barriers, and reaffirms support for action on climate change and a recommitment to the Millennium Goals. Hey, that's all my ideology! Good one, G20ers!

On the bad side, I think Henry Paulson is the most dangerous man in the universe. One doesn't need to understand economics to read his explanation of his actions in the New York Times and conclude that this is a man way out of his depth. Particularly disturbing is this sentence: "The answer to the second question is that more access to lower-cost mortgage lending is the No. 1 thing we can do to slow the decline in the housing market and reduce the number of foreclosures." Wow! It's not so much that he's wrong as that he can say that without any sense of irony at all. Maybe he could bring in an exciting new system in which anybody can get a cheap home loan without even showing proof of income, and then to help manage the risk, they could bundle those loans together and sell them on the free market!

Today markets in the US and Australia have reached new records lows. I shouldn't try to offer explanations, really; nobody has the answer and I know less than most who comment on these things. Depending on my mood I drift between three explanations for what is going on now. Either a) it's not about mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, and excessive leverage anymore; people are just panicking. b) there's nothing to worry about - the world is just shedding a lot of "fictitious wealth" that was based not on economic fundamentals but on bubble economies. or c) we're heading for deflation, a liquidity trap, a run on US treasuries, and it's time to get a good seat on the breadline. Today I'm leaning towards explanation C.

Getting back to this blog, I'm sorry that so many of these posts are dull, particularly for people who aren't all that interested in the things I've been writing about. But I've realised that there is no point trying to do this in a completely impersonal way, so if you have some patience I might have some more interesting and personal stories to tell soon - assuming, that is, that something interesting and personal happens to me sometime soon. I am as always at the mercy of both my Muses and my moods.

ADDED: Thinking about it, one probably can't get a seat on a breadline. I suspect you have to stand.

posted by Nicholas @ 11:47 AM