on money in the abstract

[Mark Kohut]

Also in Against the Day, of course..


From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: on money in the abstract

Uh-huh. Seems collective gambling has usurped the primacy of
collective bargaining in contemporary economic struggles.

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Josepth Tracy writes: .
> The question is whether the financial sector has created the wealth which
> its piles of money are supposed to represent.
>
> Paul Krugman, nyt today:
> Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value
> created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director
> for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the
> crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne
> not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by
> taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he
> waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian
> roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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