Not only is such a huge auction unparalleled, but it is also occurring when rich folks and wealthy institutions and our national patrons are pissed off about really low interest and yield, and governments everywhere, seeking to stimulate, are inevitably going to proffer competing opportunities that can only mean forcing the Fed to offer higher rates. According to Blumberg, this in turn can only mean an unknowably high risk of unknowably large inflation. While the Fed can build in 'inflation adjustments' to sweeten the deal, this, and the raised rates, mean even higher costs to finance our way out of mayhem.
As Blumberg puts the case,
with the printing presses already running, all the cash flooding into the system is another worry weighing on bond investors' minds as it could lead to rampant inflation and weaken the dollar. That would be another disincentive for foreign investors, who hold more than half of the over $5 trillion in U.S. government debt outstanding.
Clearly, even though she does not pose the question, her analysis implies an interrogatory of precipitous portent: 'What if the buyers pass?'
Once again, however, nothing about the lives of working class people merits attention here. Nothing appears about the slowdown in demand that inheres in a situation in which wage-earners are taking home less and less. And it goes without saying that no voice pipes up from the ranks of unions or community groups or regular folk, as the problems of the already capitalized are on display.
Paul Krugman is not chipper about our prospects, not surprising in such environs. More than most commentators, he 'tells it like it is.'
The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren't lending; businesses and consumers aren't spending. Let's not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.
Furthermore, he is more forthright about the political underpinnings of our situation than almost any other regular columnist. He is near the top, in other words, in the parade of pundits. He notes that Congress, especially the Republican Senate, could so delay or weaken anything that President Obama might request that the downward spiral will be unstoppable for the foreseeable future.
He also points out that the administrators of the economy have until recently contended that what we are experiencing would be impossible.
We weren't supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades."
This sense of the 'end of history' has bitten us before, but we keep thinking we've finessed reality.
Krugman goes on to point out the anti-Keynsian mentality that still seems to hold sway among the likes of Friedman and Bernanke, even if they have recently acted like chided children in the face of a seemingly bottomless dive into doom. What Krugman doesn't do, however, even as he acknowledges that our calculations and comprehension are mysteriously askew, is to ponder the potential for the collapse of Keynsian theory itself, which would mean, obviously, that we need a deeper delving of what the crisis means and a more radical vision for how to extricate ourselves from it. Nor, for all of his great-heartedness and honest liberalism, does Krugman consistently call for a fully participatory decision-making process. Thus, while he is one of the handful of economists who notice that decreased purchasing capacity and reduced rights on the part of working people are part of the roots of this collapse, he has yet to call for a truly democratic dialog to find our way through this thorny thicket.
I certainly don't have answers. To an extent, even though this essay has taken me away from my citizen-science series, it brings up similar issues about the sorts of things that we need to know and how we can struggle to understand the world and why we owe it to the future to do so. Joe Nocera quoted one of my chief sources for discerning the meaning and manifestation of math in history.
'The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.'
— FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO AGAINST THE GODS: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF RISK, BY PETER L. BERNSTEIN
While this tension is palpable since the beginning of intellectual and social history, since we invented writing and came to see the world with our minds more clearly, an approach different from this duality is plausible to develop and follow. It asks for input from the outside. It asks for a more inclusive policy framework. The scheme that I pose at the beginning of this essay certainly suggests some questions that might lead in that direction. And my predilection is to involve more regular people in the dialog, to insist that wage-earners' rights and responsibilities form the core of any process of reform. How can we resolve a paradox when only one half of the contradiction is in play? Maybe a 'Workers of the world unite' viewpoint is the only thing that can salvage capitalism.
Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson bring a more down-to-earth thought process to bear in their article. It speaks passionately about farming, one of the human activities that lacks a cohesive voice, unlike corporate agriculture, from which the authors distinguish if. They speak reverently of the earth from which our labor elicits food, pointing out
