remark#316
"What those ancient civilizations failed to comprehend was that true wealth was food, shelter, clothing and an environment that could sustain it. (...) Civilization destroyed the forests, and the land's ability to sustain life. (...) While Egyptians and Romans sent millions of people to death in the mines and arenas, they also made the world poorer. Carl Sauer remarked long ago on how our economic theories fail to account for what real wealth is, and how our 'progress' has destroyed the world's real wealth. Destroying ecosystems in the name of greed or short-lived agricultural prosperity is suicidal, but a relative few are able to lead lives of extravagance for a short time, while countless others suffer greatly, including non-human species. That is civilization in action. All civilizations have collapsed, if they were not destroyed through conquest, because they were hostile to life. Humanity is on the brink of a global environmental collapse, as the price of our current global civilization. The ancients confused the symbolic with the literal, thinking that a contrived symbol of wealth and prosperity was wealth and prosperity itself. Their ignorance, rapaciousness and foolishness doomed their civilizations."
Gondolatok a gazdaságról, civilizációnkról, Savings & Loan lufiról, az Enron csődjéről, a mostani gazdasági válságról. A leírtakkal nem feltétlenül értek mindig egyet, de a nagy részével igen. Ahogy a The Money Masters-t sem értékelted, ezt sem fogod, de ez már nem számít.
Azért érdemes elgondolkodni a leírtak igazságtartalmáról:
"In economics parlance, there is a concept known as risk-and-reward. The riskier a certain activity is, the higher the reward may be. A primary preoccupation of Wall Street's bright minds is concocting complex financial instruments/transactions that separate risk and reward, so that the clever people doing the inventing reap the reward while the 'suckers' shoulder the risk. The standard model in USA finance is a public subsidy of risk and a privatization of the profit. That is how the rich keep getting richer. All government interventions in the past year (all the emergency lending by the Federal Reserve, brokering the acquisition of Bear Stearns by J.P. Morgan, and now the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) have made the taxpayer responsible for the 'free market's' excesses.
Since the 1973 oil crisis, the USA's economy has increasingly moved from an industrial one to a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy. A FIRE economy does not produce much of anything, but mainly moves around money in the exchange aspect of economics. Instead of a business cycle, we are now seeing a serial bubble cycle, with this real estate collapse being the latest instance."