=
×

Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Head To Head
Log In
Register
U-Know! Forum »
The financial system - it's completely fucked, isn't it?
Log In to post a reply
31 messages
Topic View: Flat | Threaded
stray
stray
2057 posts

Edited Feb 24, 2009, 19:09
Re: The financial system - it's completely fucked, isn't it?
Feb 24, 2009, 19:01
Thanks for the link. I was worried that I had gone insane, missed something, or both, in my own OMFG WHAT!? response to the idea of 'Quantitive easing'. Its very reassuring to see the same concerns I have about it being spoken by someone who definitely knows whats going on.

I've just finished reading Paul Virilio's collection of essays 'The Information Bomb', a lot of what he says is well, silly, and mostly undereducated in the matters that he's addressing, but he does seem to predict this crisis ten years prior to it. Well, he doesn't directly predict it, in fact he argues that changes made to 'program trading' (trading being performed by systems automatically. I was at some of them meetings btw) were required to short circuit the system in order to stop it running into global chaos once a crash happened. Erm.. nope, this situation was not a result of automatic trading, you could argue a lack of such procedures made it more likely. 20/20 Hindsight, etc. No, what he correctly identifies, which is responsible for this situation, is an increasing dislocation between the real physical world, with it's geographical and time space constraints, and the virtual world which has no such constraints. The world market now inhabits this virtual world completely. I don't see any possibility of rationalising our virtual space world, in how it functions, to prevent this mutual destruction from happening.

The more I think about it, the more I see that this crisis is the natural conclusion of the wholesale virtualisation of the world economy. That's what globalisation actually is, it is the destruction of the real. So in a virtual environment, which is a truly no-limit environment, its only a matter of time before it bangs up against the real environment and its limits. So, I'm sticking with my original idea of solving things, creating many smaller secondary markets that function in a wholly independent sense to the massively fucked market, and in some ways also independent of each other. The small, geographically localised, credit union model for one.

The economy is nothing more now than an idea, a virtual representation that is more important (in fact it disregards in order to function efficiently, as in function at the same light speed of its medium) than any reality it claims to be a representation of. We need the limitations of geography and time back please. We really, really don't want to be working in a no limit environment that has become so arbitrary we can recreate the intrinsic value of things based on whims and the personal agendas of a few.

Edit : Oh, and can every trader please stop running to buy Gold, it isn't helping.
In reply to:
Re: The financial system - it's completely fucked, isn't it? (TheBear)		 Replies:
Re: The financial system - it's completely fucked, isn't it? (Moon Cat)
Topic Outline:
U-Know! Forum Index