Wow. I didn't think this could happen. You just knew they were going to work out a deal; they had to. There's plenty to dislike about Paulson's plan - and Paulson himself seems like an absolute twat - but the compromise position had the overwhelming merit of being
something, and not too terrible. And they had to do something...
Even this morning's Herald had more-or-less blithely assumed that a deal had been done. Say what you like about the American free-market Rupublicans, but they're not hypocrites. They believe in a free market, by god. That ideology overrules any other consideration, apparently.
Now I believe in free markets, too. I think once you start learning about economics, you become a believer in free markets. In my student days I read
No Logo and formed a hazy understanding that globalism was bad and capitalism was bad, and "free markets" were a Right-seeming thing that I ought to oppose. Over time I began to realise that we couldn't sustain the world's population in eco-communes and kibbutzes, and that if the world was going to save itself, it had to be through the mechanics of capitalism. Then I learned more about economics, and came to what is more-or-less the default position of mainstream economics, which is this:
A free market is an efficient means of finding the correct prices for things, it reduces friction in the economy, and provides the cheapest prices for the consumer. However, while free markets are good, they are vulnerable to
market failures, and the government has a role in regulation to prevent these. Examples of market failures are externalities - such as where the cost is transferred onto the environment (this is what makes carbon trading such a good idea), monopolies, collusion, and unequal or inadequate information (see mortgage backed securities).
This is an utterly mainstream position. But American free-marketeers seem to believe something else. To them, the "free market" takes no account of externalities or any other market failure. It can boom or bust, and is to be left alone either way, apart from being given helpful nudges through low interest rates. People can do whatever they want, and be left to rot - along with the whole economy, if need be - if they screw up. It's a frighteningly pure view of capitalism that seems to somehow entwine with the American notion of "freedom", which in this context seems to mean "every man for himself". It's a very Darwinian view of capitalism.
Consider the free-market Republicans'
alternative proposal:
Hoping to pick up enough GOP votes for the next try, Republicans floated several ideas. One would double the $100,000 ceiling on federal deposit insurance. Another would end rules that require companies to devalue assets on their books to reflect the price they could get in the market.
The doubling of the deposit insurance is fine and would help to maintain public confidence in banks, although ridiculously inadequate on its own. Their second idea here is to end the practice of "mark-to-market" accounting. Basically this means that companies would be able to say, "Screw the market, which says our dodgy financial instruments are worth X. We think they will one day be worth Y. We'll put the future profits on our balance sheet now. See - we're doing fine!" (See
Enron).
I don't know what to say. You hope they'll fix this and still assume that they must. But I have no confidence anymore in the US's ability to manage the world economy. America increasingly seems to live in this dreamworld of wealth-on-credit, Darwinian economics, global posturing, and fundamentalist religion. I can't help but believe we're seeing the start of its decline as the dominant world power. The United States business-model isn't working anymore.
The
'nappers are on the loose. Just recently in NSW there has been a
spate of attempted child abductions. (Worrying things, spates.) All over our state dangerous strangers are trying to lure children into their vehicles with a variety of ham-fisted strategies.
The warnings first started a little more than a week ago; by last week, there were new reports every day of fresh attempted nappings. There seemed to be little connection between the attacks, which were carried out by a variety of creepy looking men: the
man in black, the
bug-eyed Asian. Some stories were
exposed as rubbish, but still each day brought fresh stories of adults with malign intent trying to lure or force children into cars.
To accept this we must believe that across NSW, as if by some co-ordinated plan, a bunch of latent child-kidnappers decided in unison to put their evil fantasies into action. Fortunately for public safety, all the nappers are completely useless. Despite their twenty or so efforts over the past week and a half, not one has been able to actually
kidnap a child. Not to be put off by their failures, nor by the subsequent massive media attention, they've kept on with their attempted nappings, along with their hapless lack of success.
Previously, a child being abducted by a stranger was a rare and unfathomable thing, so unusual that when it did happen, it was always a news story. Now, suddenly, it's a fashion. It's happening on every street.
The other possibility - more likely, perhaps - is that we are experiencing a
moral panic. It seems to fit all the criteria (from Wikipedia):
Moral Panics have several distinct features: - Concern - There must be awareness that the behaviour of the group or category in question is likely to have a negative impact on society.
- Hostility - An increase in hostility towards the group in question and they become "folk devils". A clear division forms between "them" and "us".
- Consensus - Though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society. It is important at this stage that the "moral entrepreneurs" are vocal and the "folk devils" appear weak and disorganised.
- Disproportionality - The public is given statistics that are disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group.
- Volatility - Moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared due to a wane in public interest or news reports changing to another topic.
You have to be careful of this shit. This is how Nazi Germany started (sorry to drag the Nazis into it, but it really is - mass hysteria aimed at an imagined bogeyman.)
Normally the big pushers of moral panics are the watchdogs of public decency at Today Tonight, a show I get a real kick out of. Strangely, this week they didn't have much to say about the 'nappers. Instead last night they were getting-up their outrage against lawless teenage gangs, a perenial subject for moral panics.
If a moral panic is a sort of hysterical mass paranoia, then its opposite might be a mass hysterical enthusiasm. In economics, these cause bubbles. Here too, Today Tonight likes to get whipped up along with its audience. Incredibly, I thought, they chose the same day on which plans for a mammoth bail-out of the US financial system were discussed in Washington - a global panic stemming from the collapse of the US real estate bubble - to return to one of their favourite story-prototypes: housemums making millions investing in real estate. In what must surely be a piece of dark humour, they set the story to The Beatles: "It's Getting Better All the Time".
I really think that tabloid-television stories such as this, as well as those late-night "
Success from Scratch"-type infomercials, are a hidden cause of the housing market bubble, at least here, but possibly in the US as well (I just assume they had the same noxious stuff there, and probably far more than we do). These schemes push the idea that you can get wealthy very easily through investing in real estate. Anybody can do it. Their idea is to borrow against a house to buy another, and to keep doing this, with ever-increasing leverage, until you're worth millions. It's a great theory so long as housing prices continue to go up faster than interest rates. And if everybody just keeps believing the same thing, they do go up, at sometimes dizzying rates - for a while. Then it all collapses. This is what recently happened to the US property market (obviously, there were lots of reasons for the residential bubble - Greenspan's low interest rates, the rise of mortgage backed securities, etc - I don't mean to oversimplify or suggest it was all caused by people leveraging up on real estate).
The real estate market hasn't collapsed here, yet, and they're still showing that late-night infomercial. But consider: mortgage stress is a
real problem in Western Sydney, and it's the centre of Australia's (admittedly small) experiment with US-style no-doc home loans. The US economy is tanking, the world economy is in trouble, and housing in Australia is at historically and abnormally high levels as compared against average annual incomes.
So Today's Tonight is telling its core demographic - those Western Sydney battlers/"working familes" - that they should gear up and buy residential investment property - that it's "getting better all the time". That's some nihilistic Today Tonight producer's idea of dark satire.
I am wondering if anybody caught Malcolm Turnbull's one hour interview on Q&A last night? I would be curious to hear the reactions of others, to see if it played for others as it did for me.
The first word I would think of to describe it is loopy; the second, entertaining. At the start Malcolm seemed overwhelmed by the audience and the format - he gave what seemed to me to be imcomprehensibly empty answers. His demeanor was (as they say) like a deer stuck in headlights. He fell back on broad, sweeping populist rhetoric that jumbled together in confusing ways. I wish I could check the transcript, but it seems the ABC doesn't post them; I want to know if he really was as incomprehensible as he seemed.
Then he talked about his upbringing and his father, and suddenly he was completely sincere, and oddly riveting. Then it was as if a new person had arrived - he threw out the political-speak and started answering questions with an honesty Australian politicians
never show when interviewed.
The
marijuana quote got the headlines today. The way he said it was almost gleeful. "Yes, yes," before Tony Jones could finish the question. "Yes, I've smoked pot." (Bonus points from me for not referring to it as marijuana). He was remarkably honest about Peter Costello: ""[Costello] has always got a good word for me. Good old Peter... there is no love lost but I am just saying that he has always been very generous." And Kerry Packer: "So we did have a collision and it ended up with him being out of the transaction. That was a pity but the fact of the matter is, he started it."
The other thing I found interesting was the audience - every other Liberal politician to appear on the program has been greeted with hissing hostility from a variety of cliched left-wing types. Last night, the audience seemed to be won-over, and the applause at the end was very generous. Was it more heavily screened than usual, or was Turnbull that good?
I dunno. I sort of think this shit's gonna play, to borrow an expression from professional wrestling. On most of the issues that I care about, Turnbull's no further right than Rudd - climate change, social reform. He seems to be a classic small "l" liberal with some libertarian tendencies, a long way from the Howard conservative-evil model, and if he continues to answer questions honestly, I wonder if he might not start to leach votes from the left.
My vote? Probably not. I tend to be contrarian and when we get terrible Labor governments, such as the NSW state and increasingly the federal, I tend to flirt with directing my preferences away from the Labor party (I usually vote Greens at the top of the ticket). Usually, though, by the time an election comes around, the Liberal side of politics has declared for something monstrous, and I can't do it. But Rudd is pissing me off like crazy, and it's possible I might direct a vote away from him based solely on his crimes against the English language.
I thought Malcolm Turnbull was going to be dull as opposition leader, but so far, for somebody interested in politics, he's been a hoot. Anyway - did he work for you?
Tim recently wrote a post on his
blog, which he has since removed. It was a list of reasons why he sometimes found it difficult to write his blog. I thought it was a nice post, but I can guess why he removed it; no doubt some part of it seemed somehow too personal, too revealing. (For the record he says he simply wasn't happy with it, so I may have been over-interpreting there.)
Of course I can understand; I’ve complained about the same things myself. But here I am again regardless, and I suppose I should explain why. Why I’ve ressurected this blog; why
now, after 18 months of not doing it, and also why it’s News Rants Soliloquies Reveries, with a new domain, but still my name on it, and not an anonymous blogspot blog somewhere.
So, following on from Tim:
It’s because I found myself trying to cram blog entries into my Facebook status updates. I would only have room for a single pithy observation, and I'd feel frustrated. I wanted to explain, and I wanted to use all my other pithy observations. I had hundreds.
It’s because it’s spring after such a long cold winter, and suddenly I’m full of energy and sociability.
It’s because I became a news-junkie. How big a news junkie? I read the newspapers online at one in the morning, when the next day’s articles get posted. And I found I had interesting thoughts about different things, and wanted to write about them, and have people read what I wrote.
It’s because I finished my novel. I had to stop writing my blog while I did that, but afterwards I found I had nothing to write. And so I wrote nothing.
It’s because I got cybersquatted! My domain and hosting lapsed, and I didn’t bother to renew. I figured nobody else would want nicholascarvan.com, but I was wrong. A fuckhead Russian named Sergei snapped it up for its pagerank and inbound links, and also as a crude form of extortion. It now advertises rape porn and “real incest videos”. It shocks people who aren’t easily shocked. Sergei would like me to buy it back from him. Sergei can wait till hell freezes over. Hence the new domain.
It’s because I got sick of people saying to me, “Hey, I went to your blog to look at old article x, and now I want to burn out my eyeballs.”
It’s because I got sick of people saying to me, “Hey, do you have, um, a new business?”
It’s because I wanted to reclaim my name from pornographers.
It’s because I kept having ideas for blog entries.
It's because random net people were upset that they couldn't find my fonts anymore.
It's because random net people were upset that they couldn't find a certain article anymore.
It's because I found I was proud of some of the things that I had written on here, and thought they should still be available.
It’s because I went out doing parkour with Tim the other day. We were both hopeless, of course, but I did one thing that was kind of cool. And I fell on my ass a few times in idiotic fashion. And a part of me whispered “You could do this in a superhero costume. And film it. And then put it on the internet! Ahahahaha.”
A few administrative notes:
* I imagine that this blog will be now be more political and news-based than it has been in the past. Although there will probably still be the occasional personal story, it will not be the main focus.
* The archives are back up. Most of the photos are missing, and I can’t guarantee that there aren’t still some internal links that will take you to the porn site. I’m in the process of going back through the old entries, taking some down and fixing up problems, but it will take a while.
* I seem to have lost borzoi woman; meet the mermaid. I don’t know, it now seems a bit girlish? I may need a redesign.
* It feels good to be back?
