From Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation.
Black Swans Everywhere
After a one-day reprieve from total meltdown in the financial markets, news media cheerleaders for the most reckless gang of bankers in world history declared the crisis over on Good Friday (with the markets safely closed). Whew, that’s a relief. Problem solved. And just in time for baseball season, too, so none of the Banker Boyz have to sell their sky box leases.
Commodities Drop, Rally in Dollar, Stocks Vindicate Bernanke
What is meant by “meltdown,” by the way, since the word is used so promiscuously by myself and others. I’d define it as the shock of recognition that many big institutions are worse than flat broke and are therefore powerless to conduct normal operations. By “worse than flat broke” I mean they are so deep in hock that all the accountants who ever lived, in the life of this universe and several others like it, using the fastest parallel processing computers ever built, could not keep up with their compounding accelerating losses (now approaching the speed of light).
The current vacation from reality on Wall Street may last a few more days, or even a couple weeks, but it seems as though a whole flock of black swan events is circling the sky over Financial-land and is about to blot out the sun. By black swan, I refer to the concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his recent book of that name, namely unexpected events of great power that tend to change the course of history.
For the moment, with the crisis “contained,” and the Boyz getting ready to air out their Hampton villas for the coming season, we are once again primed to be blindsided by potent random events that nobody saw coming. The trouble is, there are enough potent potential fiascos already visible on the horizon.
The mortgage fiasco is still just gathering steam as it moves from the non-payment stage to the default and repossession level on the grand scale. Even the political wish to bail out feckless mortgage holders will stumble on the mammoth clerical task of administrating the process, especially since we’ve barely begun to sort out who actually holds the mortgages after they’ve been minced into a fine mirepoix of securities off-loaded onto countless dupe “investors” ranging from municipal funds in obscure corners of foreign nations to countless public employee retirement plans.
No matter how the authorities try to “nationalize” the sucking chest wound of bad mortgages, the body of finance will flat-line — and the American public will get stuck with the bill from the intensive care unit. Those who, for some weird reason, continue to pay their way and meet their obligations, will be none too pleased to pay for misdeeds of the deadbeats and their banker-lenders. This portends a taxpayer rebellion, which may translate into a voter rebellion.
It’s too bad the current presidential candidates have been unable to address the unfolding economic nightmare. Their collective silence on the matter suggests that they don’t have a clue what to say about it. As the nightmare plays out and black swans flock in to blot out the sun, and the hedge funds come a’tumbling down, and more big banks blunder into black holes, and businesses big and small across the land shutter up their operations, and the unemployment rolls swell, and families are thrown out of their houses even when bailouts are supposed to be saving them (but the bureaucracy can’t get the paperwork done in time) — well now, they are going to be one pissed off bunch of people. What will they do at the conventions? Or outside the conventions?
Read all of it here.
