What's serious, what's funny, who is authoritative, who is a joke?

I have included this post in the 'Serious' section, because I was slightly 'stung' by your text remark that you thought that some sections of the 'RedBox' were 'very funny'.

I think it is a very serious point on who or what is authoritive.

This is a video that I am putting in the Sources section:




Which can be found at:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/RoleofFe

And this is the 'Funny Video' I put in one of my serious Posts:

What's the difference?

Well actually virtually nothing! Barring a few jokes virtually nothing. In fact the second video is ALMOST a TRANSCRIPT of first.

There are two obvious differences:

1. One is delivered by someone who until 2008 was a very highly respected economist (see below for David Malpass's CV).

2. The other is delivered by two animated 'sock puppets'

There are two other differences:

1. The C-Span interview with David Malpass was received 140 views
2. The 'sock puppets' on Youtube got 3.2 million hits

So why is it that someone who until recently would have been guaranteed a pretty wide audience if he had spoken, now seems to have to rely on his friends knocking up a 'Youtube' video with animated sock puppets, to get his message out?

Well, for that you probably have to have either studied 'Sociology', either in the highly intellectualised form my Mum did (esp. Gramsci on 'Hegemony') or the more diluted form my 19 daughter has just done through 'Media Studies'.

The fact is that 'the powers to be' are deliberately stifling this message, and replacing it with a new one.

You mentioned that you enjoyed reading Antole Kaletsky in the Times. We clearly have different views on Kaletsky. I personally think that he is a complete, Breshnev-era communist-trained and educated crackpot with no experience beyond being a 'hack journalist' and no fundamental understanding or sympathy at all with 'capitalist' economics (see below for Anatole's Kaletsky's  CV).

So why did Kaletsky get a column in 'The Times'?
A: Gordon Brown liked to surround himself with economic crackpots like this, trained in apparatik-style toadying . Murdoch obliged.

Why can't you read Kaletsky so easily anymore?
A: What has happened to Gordon Brown?

OK, so Kaletsky has good things to say, Malpass has soon good (& vice-versa) things to say. But be careful how you are being manipulated here, and how heavy is the manipulation.

AND REMEMBER OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SOCK PUPPETS....

Pete

____________________________________________________________________

Who's who:

David Malpass

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Malpass sits on the boards of the Economic Club of New York and the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
Co-author of a weekly column in Forbes


CV
Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary 1984-88,
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State 1989-93,
former Chief Economist of Bear Sterns,
former Senior Managing Director of Bear Sterns,

How authoritative is/was he? Well:

1. Malpass' team at Bearn Sterns ranked second in the Institutional Investor ranking of Wall Street economists in 2005, 2006, and 2007

2. In 2008 he was important enough to be a member of the US & Global Forum hosted by Jean-Claude Trichet President of the ECB,

3. This man was called to give testimony before a great many US Congressional Committees.


Antole Kaletsky

Mr Kaletsky was born in 1952 in Moscow, USSR and also spent his childhood in Poland and Australia.


He has lived in England and the US since 1966.


Mr Kaletsky was educated at King's College at the University of Cambridge where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Mathematics and at Harvard University, where he was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar and gained a master's degree in Economics.


CV


 1976-9       Journalist with The Economist, writing about business and finance.
 1979-90     Journalist  Financial Times, including New York Bureau Chief, Washington Correspondent,  International Economics Correspondent and Moscow Correspondent.


1990-1996   Economics Editor of The Times, responsible for all economic news and analysis,
1996 to date  Founded Consultancy Practice. The Times’s principal commentator on economic and financial affairs, Editor-at-Large writing for The Times Comment pages on Thursdays and for the Times Business section on alternate Mondays.

As noted on Wikipedia:

Many of his economic predictions have been proven wrong by subsequent events, and this tendency was noted by the satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.


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Note: My harsh judgement on Kaletsky comes from reading this article, which advocates policies that strongly echo those led to the in collapse of the Russian economy in the late 1990s...

...and shows zero understanding of the paramount importance of protecting savers within capitalism economics....

Punish savers and make them spend money

Near-zero interest rates and even a tax on bank deposits are necessary to force those with cash to use it productively

By Anatole Kaletsky
Which can be found here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article5469589.ece

January 8, 2009

Some reflections on a morning watching some Congressional Testimony

Discovered a great source today, which I'm currently writing up. Basically, I've just sat and watched a whole bunch of US Congressional testimony, some experts talking on QE and an extract from a recent US Federal Reserve conference on the US Housing Market and an hour of Warren Buffet chatting with Hank Paulson about his book 'On the Brink' (from last year) at the Omaha Chamber of Commerce.

The overwhelming impression is of a whole bunch of people who know that the whole US political process and financial system is, and has been, completely out of control for some time, but even worse they seem to stress that, having walked into a problem which a total mess, they really are all constrained because there is limited machinery to sort it out and operating against the background of a Congress that is, at the best of times, a squabbling irresponsible shambles.

The extent of the underlying problem was highlighted by a law Professor presenting to the Fed Reserve Conference. He pointed out that if house price drop another 10%, around half of all US homeowners will be lumbered with negative equity (20% already are), and much as the politicians would like to slow the rate of foreclosures, the level of 'out sourcing' and 'automation' of mortgage administration means that there are simply not the resources in terms of people, and people with experience, to renegotiate mortgage loans - so they are merely equipped to send out 'automated' foreclosure notices.

Another Fed expert concluded that the problem was less securitisation as such, simply that so many loans are bad loans. He said that mortgage foreclosures could not be expected to drop from 5.0-5.5million per year to say 3.5 million, but would continue at a rate of around at least 4.5 million a year for 'quite a few years'.

You can add in that a lot of the big banks/trustees/mortgage service companies just 'deleted' a lot of the legal titles in their automated processing, and have been caught out fabricating it when they foreclose. You can add in too, that people are exercising their 'put option' as it were in large numbers, and 18% of foreclosures are the result of people who could service their debt but would rather hand back the keys to their house and walk away from the mortgage obligation.

Both Paulson (in the discussion with Buffet) and Bernanke (in a lecture to college students) emphasised that the situation was completely out of control when they stepped in during 2008. Paulson stressed that Congress only appears to take any action at all when faced with extreme crisis, and stressed as bad as the out-turn was in 2008, it could have been even worse.

Given that the Conference on housing was introduced by an address by Bernanke and the most damning evidence of the dreadful state of the system came from his own experts, it is pretty clear he knows how bad the situation is, and the only course left to him is to do whatever it takes to attempt to stop a further slide in the housing market. If Paulson stressed that he took on a job no-one else would have wanted, and implies he 'held his nose' in talking on the job anyway, frankly Bernanke talks and looks like a 'dead man walking'. Clearly he sees QE as the only alternative in his limited arsenal to stop half of all American householders waking up to discover that they are effectively bankrupt....

Similarly, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee kicked off an August hearing by holding up a graph of projected government deficit falling in the next 5 years but rising again from a still high base therefore He followed this with a slide showing debt being projected to go 400% of GDP by 2054 on current deficit projections by the Central Budget Office, pointing out the next financial crisis would be likely to hit well before then, pointing out that Greece effectively defaulted at 100%. Given the Chairman was a Democrat, there doesn't seem much doubt no-one is fooling themselves on that front.

Reading between the lines anyone, talking about 'recovery' in this situation, tended to get a harsh look from anyone dealing with this problem...with a sort of 'keep taking the happy pills' sort of look...