Post-bubble is a way of life

[imomus]

As anyone who even glances at newspapers will have seen this past week or so, we're in the middle of a "correction" -- big money is being wiped off share values. It's said to have started with rumours that the Chinese government were planning to make a tougher business environment in order to slow down the country's overheated, bubble-style growth

Comments

finances and flowers

[anonymous]

Back in 2001 I visited my pal in the bluegrass state Kentucky. One day on the front porch of his house he showed me two pages of the Louisville gazette. On it, in small characters were listed the names of those louisvillians who had one million dollar or more

Re: finances and flowers

[imomus]

Hello Rinus! Glad to see you've survived the crash too!

Re: finances and flowers

[risk1911]

but what's money? seems the federal reserve can't even define it.

Alan Greenspan: "We have a problem trying to define exactly what money is. the current definition of money is not sufficient to give us a good means for controlling the money supply."

Congressman Paul asked "Well, if you can't define money, how can you
control the monetary system?"

Greenspan replied "That's the problem."

Re: finances and flowers

[anonymous]

Bring back arguing how many sheep are worth a cow? Capitalism is the glorious mechanism to overcome the tiresome burden of haggle and interaction - for ayone wishing to live on more than seeds! Enjoy the rollercoaster, brothers and sisters, the market gets paranoid so you don't have to be. Wheeeeeee.

[imomus]

Human economic behaviour is capitalist behaviour

Now, this is just not the case. Capitalist behaviour is human economic behaviour, but just a small subset of it. Think of communist five year plans, or barter systems.

[imomus]

I really meant that a lot of share profit is never expressed as anything more than numbers in a computer. It's neither used for the personal benefit of the person said to own it, nor invested in real world projects which provide employment. It sits as numbers in a bank account, or tied up in other shares, and rises and falls in (notional) value as those shares rise and fall.

Much of the value wiped off shares this week will have been of this type. Purely speculative "money" which never finds expression except as numbers in electronic space, and whose disappearance won't really be tragic.

I'm ganna get what I want

[charleshatcher]

Re: I'm ganna get what I want

[imomus]

Yes, only if the crash meant that some of us could no longer embed YouTube clips would real suffering occur.

Re: I'm ganna get what I want

[charleshatcher]

Oh, by the way, batch, a YouTube embed is worth, like, a googol words.

[eustaceplimsoll]

Brecht's opinion of Kafka is interesting insofar as it reveals nothing more than his own limited worldview.

[fireflesh]

My recent vacation to Berlin was exactly what convinced me to ditch my day job at an emerging markets financial consultancy in Manhattan. Looks like my timing couldn't have been better. Now the Georgetown crowd (Johnny-Come-Lately Sinophilia) sweats under subdued blue suits.