by
Mervyn King
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[...] The pretence that the illiquid real assets of an economy--the factories, capital equipment, houses and offices--can suddenly be converted into money or liquidity is the essence of the alchemy of the present system. Banks and other financial intermediaries will always try to finance illiquid assets by issuing liquid liabilities because they make profits by paying less on the latter than they earn on the former. [...]
there's a great line in a different book (forget which, maybe Yaroufakis) about banks wanting true, instant liquidity ... and yet in reality they have to cope with the short-term/long-term disparity between lending/borrowing maturation rates (I forget the term for this)
[...] each type of asset is given a risk weight, agreed by international regulators, and this is used to calculate the overall amount of equity a bank must issue. Mortgage lending, for example, was thought on the basis of past experience to be relatively safe, and was given a low risk weight. Sovereign debt was believed to be so safe that it was given a zero risk weight, meaning that banks did not have to raise any equity finance in respect of such investments and so had no additional capacity to absorb losses on them. [...]
again, this all stems from the truly stupid idea that this shit is rigorously quantifiable and not just make-believe
[...] Someone buying a meal in a restaurant might use a card, as now, but the result would not be a transfer from their bank account to that of the restaurant; instead there would be a sale of shares from the diner's portfolio and the acquisition of different shares, or other assets, to the same value by the restaurant. [...] There would be no unique role for something called money in order to buy 'stuff'.
this passage kinda boggles the mind (I say so now, but I think I felt similarly when I first read this) cus how can you imagine such a strange concept (which is really functionally equivalent) but not then take the next step of asking why such a transfer is needed at all???? it's still money??? like that startup that tried to get people to do favours for each other in exchange for virtual currency (which they called karma I believe). why is it necessary to transfer wealth in order to support production or consumption??? DRIFT i'm telling you
[...] If the government boosts spending to bring unemployment below its natural rate, then the increased demand for labour will push wages up. But to restore firms' profits, prices will also rise, and real wages will fall back to their original level. [...]
my original notes are "unless you also change policy to discourage profit-seeking ... this has real implications for the minimum wage debate" which, tbh, feels surprisingly woke for the me of 2016
[...] One is convinced that the market will rise; the other that it will fall [...] The first person is so convinced that the markets will rise that he bets $1 million that it will be higher a year from now. Sure that he will be much richer in a year's time, he starts to spend now. The second person [...] also starts to spend now. The bookmaker covers his bets.
[...] Financial markets thrive on differences of opinion--they make the horse race. They also create 'mistakes' in perceptions of wealth or spending power. [...]
my margin notes: "the money shot" which I assume refers to me feeling vindicated about my own theories on financialisation (great)
[...] debt was a consequence, not a cause of the problems that led to the crisis. Debt did not descend like manna from the heavens but was a conscious response by borrowers to the situation they faced. [...]
I mean if you want to take a more Marxist approach, debt was a result of rentiers (wages being suppressed, housing being too expensive, etc)
This form of policing is based on a mindset that people of color commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police tactics. Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided. They lack the political power to obtain real services and support to make their communities safer and healthier. The reality is that middle-class and wealthy white communities would put a stop to the constant harassment and humiliation meted out by police in communities of color, no matter the crime rate.
The emergence of this theory in 1982 is tied to a larger arc of urban neoconservative thinking going back to the 1960s. Wilson’s former mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, a close associate of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, parented many of the ideas that came to make up the new conservative consensus on cities. In his seminal 1970 work The Unheavenly City, Banfield argues that the poor are trapped in a culture of poverty that makes them largely immune to government assistance:
Although he has more “leisure” than almost anyone, the indifference (“apathy” if one prefers) of the lower-class person is such that he seldom makes even the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in. He is not troubled by dirt or dilapidation and he does not mind the inadequacy of public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals, and libraries; indeed, where such things exist he may destroy them by carelessness or even by vandalism.
???
Broken-windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence. As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power and authority at the expense of human and civil rights.
By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality. By calling for colorblind “law and order” they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage and contributes to their deep social and legal estrangement. At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.