The price of everything

Power Failure

“But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.”

• John Maynard Keynes, The Great Slump of 1930.

 

Metaphors are powerful. Powerful words and images matter, because they are a distillation of fundamental beliefs. Keynes spoke of the economy as a delicate machine, and the idea of the ‘economy as engine’ has long been popular with Keynesian and neo-Keynesian economists (i.e. unscienced morons). One of the great corrective insights of the classical economic school, however, is that the economy is not an engine and it cannot be modelled. It cannot be modelled because it is us – the economy comprises the all but infinite interactions of billions of people. So perhaps the most dangerous fallacy frames the very nature of our economic and financial system the wrong way. Garbage in; garbage out. The damage wrought by bureaucrats and their economic aides who believe that pulling this imaginary lever or flipping that imaginary switch can direct the path of something as tremendously complex as the economy is then compounded by the actions of those unelected bureaucrats as they transform the order of the free market into the chaos of a planned economy. Misguided actions have undesirable consequences.

Enter, stage left, coronavirus.

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Flu d’état

The great national debate that was ‘Brexit’ ended up lifting a giant rock that had been resting on our society, and to this day nobody can quite believe the kind of ugly pond life (a.k.a. “the Establishment”) that was revealed, scuttling evilly around underneath it. What ‘Brexit’ began, the rolling Coronavirus fiasco has continued. While explicit political interference and overreach have been all too visible, much of the Public Sector, behind the scenes, has quietly taken advantage of the lockdown and attendant chaos to implement an unofficial General Strike. Teachers won’t teach; general practitioners refuse to see their patients; the police use drones to eavesdrop on remote hill-walkers. The prospect of anything approaching a normal Christmas now hangs in the balance; the economy remains in an induced coma; the country is now a powder keg. As some wag on social media nicely put it, we are experiencing a Flu d’état.

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Tulips !

Amsterdam, September 1637 (Ruyters): The latest Dutch tulip harvest is in, and experts confidently predict another bumper year for tulip growers and tulip investors alike. Billionaire hedge farmer Jon Paulsen is rumoured to have added hyacinths to his multi-strategy offering and has just launched a fund denominated in daffodils. Visionary entrepreneur Elon Müsk has just unveiled his new tulip-powered car, the model T, and launched a dedicated electric tulip subsidiary, Tul-IPO. Tulip stocks climbed by a few millimetres, as they are prone to every day if they grow at their normal organic rate; Couleren bulbs rallied another 2 guilders in heavy Antwerp trading; Rosen and Violetten bulbs ended the trading session more or less unchanged, albeit a bit squashed, at record highs. The market has been further buoyed in recent weeks by a tide of manure issued by the leading tulip advocate Pol Kruygman from his op-ed column in the New Amsterdam Times, 'Witterings of a Tulip Fanatic'.

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Ghost Stories

M.R. James’ Casting the Runes also casts a long shadow. A short story written by one of the finest practitioners of the ghost story in English, it deals with a scientist (named Dunning in the original), investigating an occultist, Julian Karswell. Karswell’s book, The Truth of Alchemy, has been scathingly reviewed by one of Dunning’s colleagues, who dies in mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards. The scientist begins to suspect that Karswell’s powers might be real, and that he himself has become the victim of a curse. Once the victim is unwittingly passed some runic symbols by Karswell in person, it would appear that his days are numbered.. In addition to Tourneur’s (quite brilliant) 1957 film, Casting the Runes would also go on to be adapted several times for television and radio, and more recently it has inspired or influenced films including the Japanese (and US) horror franchise Ring and the 2014 horror film It Follows. It draws its fundamental strength from a slow and uncanny sense of psychological disintegration: is the world going mad, or is it just me ?

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UNIDOS HACIA EL FUTURO

“The markets are the product of 1999 & 2007 hooking up for a one night stand.”

• Tweet by Danielle DiMartino Booth (@DiMartinoBooth), 25^th August 2020.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to / Myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”

• Dante, Inferno.

“Zoom is now worth more than IBM.”

“I don’t know if that says more about Zoom or IBM.”

• Tweets by Morgan Housel (@morganhousel), 31^st August 2020.

By the mid 1970s, film director William Friedkin was on a roll. 1971’s The French Connection bagged him an Oscar and widespread critical acclaim; 1973’s The Exorcist became the highest grossing Warner Bros film of all time. How did Friedkin follow up on all this monstrous success ? He decided to adapt Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur), in which down-on-their-luck truck drivers in Latin America attempt to ferry nitroglycerine across a treacherous mountain range in order to extinguish an oil well fire. The resultant 1977 release was called Sorcerer. It sank more or less with all hands.

 

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