Inherent Instability (when BerBanke got it wrong)

[alice wellintown]

Or a drunk holding on to the lamp post. There...see Jimm'ys old man, a
bundle of the lad's favorite books wedged betwixt the bicep of his
free arm and his breast, the other waving to counter the oscilating
head adds emphasis to his sermon on the count nouns ..."Warriner's
Grandma wah a gooood un...tauhgt me by Sishter Joe..."

The random walking the garden path he spits out a plug and spews vomit
all down the gutter. Jimmy, there, like a Master Harold minus a good
Black man to carry the drunk in, scribbles in his mental notebook, a
scene of ignominious maturation.


On 7/19/13, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> History is a Step-Function.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jul 19, 2013, at 8:24 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> In the world today, he says in “Antifragile,” “Black Swan effects are
>> necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence
>> between parts, globalization and the beastly thing called ‘efficiency’
>> that makes people now sail too close to the wind.” So how to deal with
>> the dangers posed by this proliferation of uncertainty and volatility?
>>
>> Mr. Taleb contends that we must learn how to make our public and
>> private lives (our political systems, our social policies, our
>> finances, etc.) not merely less vulnerable to randomness and chaos,
>> but actually “antifragile” — poised to benefit or take advantage of
>> stress, errors and change, the way, say, the mythological Hydra
>> generated two new heads, each time one was cut off.
>>
>> In Mr. Taleb’s view, “We have been fragilizing the economy, our
>> health, political life, education, almost everything” by “suppressing
>> randomness and volatility,” much the way that “systematically
>> preventing forest fires from taking place ‘to be safe’ makes the big
>> one much worse.” In fact, he says, top-down efforts to eliminate
>> volatility (whether in the form of “neurotically overprotective
>> parents” or the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s trying to smooth
>> out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system)
>> end up making things more fragile, not less. Overtreatment of illness
>> or physical problems, he suggests, can lead to medical error, much the
>> way that American support of dictatorial regimes “for the sake of
>> stability” abroad can lead to “chaos after a revolution.”
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/books/antifragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
>>
>>
>> On 7/18/13, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Another inherent vice.......
>>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 4:46 PM
>>> Subject: Inherent Instability (when BerBanke got it wrong)
>>>
>>>
>>> Mr. Bernanke wrote, “argued for the inherent instability of the
>>> financial system but in doing so have had to depart from the
>>> assumption of rational economic behavior.” In a footnote, he added, “I
>>> do not deny the possible importance of irrationality in economic life;
>>> however it seems that the best research strategy is to push the
>>> rationality postulate as far as it will go.”
>>>
>>> It seems to me that he had both Minsky and Kindleberger wrong. Their
>>> insight was that behavior that seems perfectly rational at the time
>>> can turn out to be destructive.
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/business/economy/when-bernanke-got-it-wrong.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
>