The end of capitalism

Fresh from its successful bailouts of GM (bankrupt), Fannie Mae (-$16.3 billion in Q1), and Freddie Mac (-$6.7 billion in Q1), the Federal Reserve is joining the ECB, the BoC, the BoE, and the SNB in an attempt to preserve the European Union:

European policy makers unveiled an unprecedented loan package worth almost $1 trillion and a program of bond purchases as they spearheaded a global drive to stop a sovereign-debt crisis that threatened to shatter confidence in the euro….

The Federal Reserve is going to reopen a program set up during the financial crisis, to make sure foreign banks have the dollars they need, the European Central Bank announced late Sunday. The Fed will ship dollars overseas through the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the ECB and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Japan will be considering similar measures soon, the ECB said. The facilities are designed to help improve liquidity conditions in U.S. dollar funding markets and to prevent the spread of strains to other markets and other financial centers, the ECB said in a statement on its web site.

This isn’t about economics or the euro. This is about preventing the banks that hold sovereign debt from going under and maintaining the geopolitical order that presently sustains the global financial system. And, of course, it’s not going to work. It cannot since it is literally designed to do nothing more than soothe those problematic animal spirits when the core problem is the magnitude of the debt. The problem has always been rooted in debt. And now that genuine capitalists have no interest in purchasing Greek debt at any price and are increasingly unwilling to purchase Portuguese debt, that leaves the money planners to step in and attempt to fill in the gap with their ability to create money by “expanding the balance sheet”.

Once this belated band-aid fails in a few months, the next pitch will be to replace the various currencies with the global currency that the Economist once described as “the Phoenix”. This is an appropriate title because there should be no shortage of ashes from which the phoenix can rise.

By the way, don’t get too excited about the big, but short-term Wall Street rally that is certain to commence. No market goes straight down or straight up. And big up days are indicative of bear markets, not bull markets. This is just the reactive wave and is an artifact of the massive government intervention.

WND column

The revoluciónary is right

Throughout history, when an occupying power has wanted to destabilize and destroy a nation, it has settled a foreign people in its midst. The seeds of the Balkan conflict were sown when the Turks planted Albanian Muslims in Kosovo to uproot the Christian Serbs who had long defended the borders of medieval Christendom and had more than once turned back the tide of an expanding Ottoman empire. The Soviet Union under Stalin methodically encouraged Russian emigration into the occupied Baltic states in a campaign of long-term Russification, to such an extent that nearly 30 percent of the populations of Latvia and Estonia were Russian.

Despite this, Americans did not worry about the massive migration of Mexicans and other third-world immigrants for many years due to their belief in equality and the idea of the American melting pot. Unfortunately, both concepts are complete myths, devoid of any support from logic, history or science. Despite the best efforts of the academic thought police and pop literary fantasists, such as Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell, various scientific disciplines have quietly, but inexorably been demolishing the equalitarian hypothesis with regard to race, culture and sex.

Modemakers

A last call to the modemakers. If you have any mode layouts in mind, you need to get them in now if you want them to go out in the initial release. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet template. Send them in tomorrow, please.
I’d particularly like layouts for AutoCAD, 3D Studio Max, the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and the latest version of Opera since I don’t use any of those applications.

La Raza and the Northern Front

If you’re dumb enough to let tens of millions of Mexicans in, you can hardly be shocked when they decide they want independence. And, by the way, the speaker is apparently a school teacher in LA.

Contagion

It looks like Portugal is coming to the plate, with Spain on deck:

Portugal
2-Year: 797 basis point spread over US Treasury
5-Year: 427
10-Year: 363

Spain
2-Year: 260
5-Year: 187
10-Year: 118

By way of comparison, the UK/US spread is 29.2 on the 2yr. The Greek/US spread is around 1840.

Mailvox: Hollywood Game

Mr BAD had nothing better to do: I’ve decided to discuss movie characters according to the Vox Day Game chart.

Star Wars series
Luke Skywalker: Delta-Gamma. At no point in the films is he ever a leader personality. Even when he is giving orders he does so in more of a whine rather as a command. In Empire and Return of the Jedi, Han sounds surprised that Vader is after Luke, and that Luke is the one who is rescuing him.

Han Solo: Sigma. Han has everything it takes to be a great leader but would rather not have to deal with the problems that come with it. He does as he pleases, doesnt take crap, and no one can forget how Harrison Ford became an instant sex symbol when he returned Leia”s “I love you” with “I know”. He even has a Betta in Chewie following him around.

Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker: Gamma- Alpha. In the films Vader/anakin is a total Gamma. As a young Anakin he is whinny, and self important. I think this is mostly from the actor Hayden, but nevertheless Anakin is a Gamma. He wins over Padme by puppydog eyes and begging. I think if it hadnt been for her witnessing his badboy streak in killing the Sanpeople village, she never would have agreed to mary him. As a Jedi Knight he is still whiny and sefl important, although he has gained confidence, he is still no leader. As Vader he rules with fear rather than respect that comes from real leadership. As a Sith he is still bellow Mof Tarkin in Imperial rank. Only in the Clone Wars cartoon is Anakin portrayed as the dashing war hero described by ObiWon in A New Hope. In the Cartoon Anakin is a confident charismatic Alpha with a dark hidden wrath streak.

Obi Won Kenobi: Beta. Obi Won is confident, strong and capable but takes all his cues from his superiors. I dont know why ObiWon doesnt get more credit as being a powerful Jedi. He killed Darth Mual quickly, and the Jedi Killing Machine Grevious, battles a dark side powered Vader to victory, and held Vader to a stand still in his late 60’s.

Yoda: Alpha. yeah, he never had to convince anybody who was incharge. they just knew when he enetered the room.

Darth Sidious/Palpatine: Alpha. . He was able to lead boh sides against eachother until everything was weak enough for him to sieze total power. As a ruler/leader he does so because people are confident in his ability to lead and his choices.

The Matrix trilogy

Neo. Sigma. Through the whole series he coulnt seem more interested in making other people happy, he just does what he does. He always seems to want to be doing somthing else besides being the Messiah figure.

Mopheous. Alpha. Morpheous is the guy who leads by the power of his prescence and personality.

Agent Smith. Gamma. self important, goes psycho because he cant accept not having his way.

Conan the Barbarian. Alpha.

Rocky. Delta-Gamma. from the beginning to the end of the series Rocky is a loser who refuses to give up.

Fill in the blank Clint Eastwood role. Sigma

Lunch and the female vote

Dr. Helen linked to one of Amy Alkon’s readers asking her about the observed phenomenon of the different approaches to paying for a group bill utilized by the opposite sexes:

I am writing to see if you have insight or an educated guess on one of these oh-so-true stereotypes. If a group of men comes in to have lunch and maybe a beer, odds are pretty good that one of those men will pick up the tab. But, (ask any ten servers and this will be confirmed) if a group of women comes in, they will almost always ask for separate checks. It’s always cause for comment among the waitstaff if a group of women doesn’t ask for separate checks.

This is a phenomenon I have often observed myself. I haven’t read the long string of comments yet, but based on past experience of this sort of discussion, I guarantee you will find the following. 1) Several commenters of both sexes challenging whether the observation is correct due to the way in which they personally claim to behave and their failure to understand that there are always exceptions to the norm. 2) Several female commenters accepting the observation but claiming that the male behavior, which is obviously perceived as preferable by the waiters, is only exhibited due to some negative male quality such as the desire to score the waitress. 3) Several nonsensical defenses of the female behavior by female commenters. 4) Several comments by male commenters expressing excessive disdain, bordering on hostility, for the female practice. 5) And finally, it wouldn’t be proper discussion of sex/race differences without at least one cretin arguing that the observation must be untrue because everyone is the same and always behaves in the same manner everywhere.

Now, I tend to think the practice of calculating shares of a group bill is cheap and petty myself, but it’s of zero concern to me how or why other people prefer to pay as they do. If it happens to take six women 30 minutes on a Cray supercomputer to work out who pays how much, that’s perfectly fine with me. What’s of much more interest to me is to consider if this approach to group payment might be indicative of a similar mentality at work on a political level and if that mentality can reasonably be connected to a shift in the political economy since women were granted the right to vote. We know that the female vote has shifted the politics of the USA and other countries leftward, but is it possible that the shift is as much based on non-ideological, instinctive factors as open ideological differences?

If one considers the group check division mentality writ large, it tends to look not terribly unlike the taxing and spending approach of a modern democratic government. There is virtually no attention paid to the national budget as a whole, but attention is focused instead upon each individual interest group area as if it has no connection to the others. Note that I’m not saying that there is anything there, and democratic lobbying groups precede women’s suffrage, (although not by as long as you might think), it’s just an interesting thought to contemplate.

“A landmark project for the new decade”

It may not have hit #1 like Aaron Klein’s new book, but recent events appear to be on the verge of proving the case made in RGD to be correct. You’ve probably noticed that no one is insisting that debt isn’t a big deal anymore.* Anyhhow, I somehow managed to miss this review of RGD, which appeared back in February courtesy of Jim Fletcher:

Vox Day, the Mensa-soaked columnist for WorldNetDaily, is one of those rare individuals who tells it like it is even when we don’t want to hear it. And once the pain subsides, we realize he might just have saved our lives.

His new book, “The Return of the Great Depression,” is that important.

Look, you can listen to MSNBC or read the dream weavers at the New York Times, who still worship the first non-American American president, but going to a place of fantasy in our minds is not going to help us fight our way to whatever economic recovery is possible.

For those who want to pretend that the Chinese don’t hold our debt in their hands … don’t read this book. If you still believe that entitlement programs – even those now for banks – is the way to go, read Oprah’s latest spiritual guru. Maybe that will make you feel better….

If I were an economics professor anywhere, I would make “The Return of the Great Depression” the capstone of my semester’s reading list. Vox Day has managed to make a real-life horror movie an absorbing page-turner. If you have been urged to read this book – and that’s exactly what I’m urging – and you don’t do it, you have only yourself to blame.

I fully expect this book to be a landmark project for the new decade.

And, of course, it’s like $2 on Kindle at Amazon…. By the way, the Dow just dropped nearly 900 points on word that European lending had frozen up.

*It may amuse some of you to note that I wrote this post about 90 minutes before the markets tanked.

UPDATE – I should have a better idea what’s going on tomorrow morning. As I wrote in RGD, the real problems are in Spain, Ireland, and the UK. Greece is small enough that it doesn’t matter except as the first domino.

UPDATE II – Our favorite Doommonger sees unmistakable signs of the Eschaton in all of this: “I doubt anyone’s enjoying the sound of ice cracking beneath our feet, but some of us are less surprised than others. We fans of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, and Vox Day are just sitting at our desks nodding glumly and saying: Yep. Yep. … From Vox’s wonderful suicide-inducing new book, chapter title “What Can Be Done,” just the headlines:”

Capital controls

The EU has abandoned Europe’s Christian tradition and appears likely to drop its capitalist tradition as well:

This document is sitting in a drawer at the Directorate of Economic and Monetary Affairs in Brussels. It was written by a small cellule of EU officials in 2003 or 2004 (If I remember correctly) under prodding from Paris. It explores the legal basis for measures to stabilise the euro and EMU. After combing through the EU treaties and court judgments, it concluded that Brussels may impose “quantitative restrictions” on capital inflows. Free movement of capital in the EU is not an “absolute freedom” and could be limited in an emergency. “Should extremely disturbing capital movements endanger the operation of economic and monetary union, Article 59 EC (Maastricht) provides for the possibility to adopt restrictive measures for a period not exceeding six months,” it says.

It would be renewable every six months. Any decision would be taken by EU finance ministers under qualified majority voting, so no country could veto it.

So much for the oft-heard Europhile defense of the EU as a free market entity. This is why no government or bureaucracy should ever be permitted to have “emergency” powers. It’s rather like telling a rapist that as long as he cries “emergency” first, it isn’t rape, it’s just emergency sex.