I could not agree more, and since they don’t, I have done so myself. Check this text:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/is-it-written-in-the-stars

For some time now I have been researching the use of second-order cybernetic modeling techniques in the financial markets. An extraordinary artwork called Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium gave me the opportunity to formalize some of the conclusions of this research, which does not stop with the explication of complex financial instruments, but rather attempts to see what they do to the environment, particularly the built environment of cities and the labor environments within which people are compelled to earn their livings. So, for whatever it’s worth, someone out there is doing more or less what you call for.

cheers, Brian Holmes

“A market where various financial derivatives such as forwards, futures, options, and swaps are bought and sold”

I think I understand this. What brought the market down at first was that ACORN forced loans that they knew their clients couldn’t repay. When those loans all came due, it was about 3% of the total money that the banks had. So they needed then to call in other money. And none of it was there. It was all built on the confidence that someone else had the money. But no one had the money. They were all borrowing from a future that didn’t yet exist.

And so the thing collapsed.

Obama has now borrowed from a future (our grandchildren’s future) and put us into a trillion dollars of debt, borrowing also from the Red Chinese.

That has stopped the collapse for the nonce.

But we are now in hock to the Red Chinese, who sell us their unregulated junk lined with lead, and other crummy products while dumping billions of tons of mercury and other stuff into the ocean, while they make their products which we buy.

I don’t quite understand how this is supposed to be sustainable, but no one has time to think about the whole system, we just try to hope that our one little link of the vast chain won’t collapse to the point that we end up living beneath a bridge.

It would be excellent to have a real-money person in the White House. The last two have been disasters. I’m putting my money on Romney.

The banks lend money that they don’t have. It is used by people who cannot repay it.

And then at some point it’s called in, as it was in the Great Depression, or as it recently was in the Bank crisis of our own time. And it wasn’t there, and the credibility was gone, and the banks went under.

I think the problem is that banks even now only have to have on hand 10% of the money they are loaning out.

If they are suddenly asked to show 50% of the money, for instance, they go under.

Money is funny, but it has to be based on something real. That’s hard for Saussurians to get, because they try to separate reality and representation. That’s wrong.

I admit I didn’t understand your last paragraph, especially the last phrase about the cart being “literally” before the horse. If you could set up that imagery with something having gone before it, as a reference, it might be easier. I didn’t understand what the horse referred to, or the cart, especially after the mixed metaphor of the hand of God, and the actions of re-writing.

I also didn’t know what a “derivatives market” is. Shall google.

I think the whole system is built on money that people don’t really have, but if it’s all called in at once in a panic, the system obviously will collapse, as the collateral doesn’t exist except on paper.

Kvond: Pretty hilarious. The “economic crisis” as it has become known, is now because ACORN and “other groups” forced, literally forced banks to make riskier loans (and not also the desire to open up the red lined social strata to idealized market growth). “Charming” as some might say. Perhaps ACORN, that heinous group of no-gooders, also “forced” an unregulated multi, multi trillion dollar derivatives market.

Perhaps it is not a society without representation exchange, but a society without representation of representation of representation of representation, whereby “what” is being represented is no longer a corrective to exchange itself is a good idea. No… as Greenspan dreams, “fraud” is not “corrected” by the “market”.

I do think that the sum total of Capitalist criticism is logically pushed towards a logic against representation (I love the Pol Pot example). Really though, the problem is simple. When capitalist corporeal organizations grow strong enough to leverage a re-writting of the laws that govern their own actions (and the actions of governance in general, wars fought, tax policy), when political will is submitted to “market” processes as if the market were some kind of “hand of God” evolutionary beneficence, the cart quite literally is before the horse.

Lunatics like Althusser and Marx are so terrible.

Capitalism is a charming thing compared to the messes those guys have made of things.

I loved Pol Pot’s notion to get rid of money altogether — a bag of rice could not be traded for anything but the exact same bag of rice. There was to be NO TRADING.

That’s of course a bit extreme — and charming — to get rid of any kind of representation altogether.

But capitalism is marvelous. It is exactly like nature. It is the attempt to do something MArxist, or along the lines of a Social Gospel, that screws everything up.

Why on earth do you want to politicize money? It is like politicizing language. You just screw up the language when you introduce PC euphemisms.

Let the first amendment and the free market roll as Smith would have had it, and as Hayek valiantly attempted to protect it.

Shrink the government’s role to a watchdog instead of to producer of wealth, and the economy will get going again.

We need a smarter money person in the White House. Romney would be pretty good. The last thing we need is anybody like Althusser anywhere near the Treasury Department.

ACORN among other groups was forcing lenders to give mortgages that they knew the clients couldn’t repay. When a bunch of them folded, so did the economy.

There should be better rules.

On the other end, there are too many big salaries for CEOs. Billions went into golden parachutes.

It’s going to take a while — but ACORN is now going out of business, and some caps on salaries will be introduced. I do think the monetary business can be managed better, and that it is comprehensible not as something in and of itself (staring at a dollar bill won’t help much), but working on the rules (the grammar) will make the thing comprehensible.

Also, you’re simplifying Hayek and turning him into a strawman. His thinking is a lot more complex than the way you misrepresent it here.

1. I see a convergence between your post on Levinas and your post on Hardt & Negri’s characterization of a new parasitic capitalist relationship in terms of neo-liberal economics (which, I think includes a specific protocol of ethics). If I’m not mistaken, you state that they misrecognize the parasite relationship as an emerging or empirically inducted or teleological relationship that unwittingly cultivates a class that will lead to its destruction. In terms of economic analysis, this appears analogously to be the “Medea Hypothesis” in opposition to the neoliberal “Gaia Hypothesis.” I just realized that.

I was going to comment that, you are saying that this parasitic relationship allows for the conditions of exchange, as Serres, I think argues, that noise is the precondition for communication; which could be read in line with Levinas, i.e. the noise of the Other is the precondition for self-enjoyment. However, this, of course, is not a parasitic relationship, it is a responsible relationship, where in it would have to seem like something happens where the self has to be responsible for the other because the other, as parasite or noise, has allowed the conditions of self-reflexivity and thus allowed the subject into its state of super-abundant existence (the super-abundant part I like) [This line of thought became too complicated to continue... but it doesn't, it's different from Zizek's identification with the master, because, in this case, the master is a parasite, which is supposed to be a radical involution-- this one is, actually, too hard right now]

The atomic dimension of your arguments toward not being skeptical towards pan-psychism but also towards being skeptical of self-organization bring into question a fidelity towards being or becoming. I only mention this because of the breadth of your analysis; I think what I’ve seen from you and Graham Harman’s work already resolves this. I think, Michel Serres would call this a “black box.”

2. The end. I hope it was helpful, and not too indulgent of me to reflect in one evening over a few months of your thinking on this blog.

thank you,

zach

…Of course, the bankers, the businessmen, and the economists were indeed taken by surprise. But they shouldn’t have been. If the world financial system hadn’t teetered on the edge of the abyss in September 2008, it would have done so at some other time. There is no way it could have avoided falling apart eventually.”

Kvond: Is this near metaphysical unknowability of the crisis necessary for your thesis? Is the fact that someone actually did know about it, and worked very hard to avoid it empirical evidence against your thesis? It would seem that the very image of markets as an boom/bust machine of some undecidable nature is exactly the image of a fatalism that you suggest is produced by Capitalism itself. What if SOMEONE knew what was going to happen?

Frontline: “In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.”

Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.”… [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.’”

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. “Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming,” Kirk says. “Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves.”

Interview: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/interviews/born.html

The show: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/

One can say that Capitalism follows a binge and purge logic, but indeed there are different kinds of binges and different kinds of purges, different degrees of each. It is not enough to simply absorb this as a fact of logic. Brooksley Born may indeed have succeeded in predicting and regulating parts of the problem that lead to “the” crisis, but it strikes me as wrong headed to simply dismiss her success or failure (those two possibilties) as inconsequential to an inevitable future of disasters.

The fact that some experts on economic studies insist in treating financial/economical issues only through the exact sciences perspectives, fullfiled with idealism, as if we were living in a smooth perfect world where everything is completelly under control, ignoring human behavior, ignoring environmental issues, ignoring the unpredictable, ignoring the forces of the chaos, ignoring the resistance,etc. had contributed a lot on this recent crisis, as in others.

I remember also that in July, in a chat with a friend who is a theoretical physics in Europe, he had mentioned that subjectivity shouldn’t be taken into consideration when he employs the mathematical models and abstractions of physics in an attempt to explain economic stuff. In fact he and his folks used to gain a lot of money making future maps on predictable financial/economical market.

In december he called me saying that he and his friends were losing their jobs because of the unpredictable aspects that came upon the table.

I remenber that I used to suggest him the studies of the nobel prize Kahneman & Tversky (among others), … in connection with Deleuze and Guattari (wow, what a strange connection!), Zizek, Negri, etc. and he used to say that thes guys and their ideas were not necessary.