“The most serious wave of commercial real estate difficulties is just now beginning”

FT Alphaville » “The most serious wave of commercial real estate difficulties is just now beginning”

What do you mean, "failure"?

Economist Michael Hudson:

"What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down. The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10 percent now own 85 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90 percent been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."

All debt is now bad

Michael Turner, commenting on a Krugman piece at Economist's View has an interesting insight:

Americans have just had a near-Depression experience, after a financial-system 9/11. The housing bubble wasn't an equity-financed boom, but a debt-financed boom, and that was Wall Street's source of cash as well. And it's debt that Americans have harrowing personal experience with. All debt is now bad. Including government debt that might in actuality save their asses.

The narrative that attaches to political and economic events is more important to the politics than the nature of the events. I suppose one could venture that the political nature of an event is determined by the narrative, and not the inherent particulars of the event, itself.

Propaganda is effective, without being informative or educational. How many ads has an American heard for analgesic pain relievers, like aspirin and Tylenol and Advil, without ever learning the differences?

Cool

Teens think blogging is about as cool as Rick Astley hits: "Blogging is falling out of favor among the young'uns these days as they move to quicker-moving social networking sites. At the same time, older adults are getting into blogging and teens still aren't hot on Twitter"

If you think Obama is an extremist . . .

"If you think Obama is an extremist, . . ."

Then, you've taken leave of consensus reality, and words cease to have accepted meanings, and everything you say is likely to seem crazy.

This last is the most troubling thing -- not that people disagree, but that they adopt conventional modes of expression that make it almost impossible to even discuss those disagreements.

You don't have to agree with or support Obama's agenda, but if you refuse to characterize that agenda in terms of common reference and meaning, than the discourse breaks down. Your concerns cannot be heard or respected, in the democratic process.

That's the essence of the Party of No: the insistence on a separate reality, a separate dictionary, and a bizarro-world narrative.

Bizarro-world narrative analysis might be good stagecraft at times, but it completely obstructs democratic dialogue, and erodes the power to reason together or to respect disagreement.

Witness

Paul Krugman: "What we’re witnessing is an awesome national failure."

A Winning Platform

The Party Of “Look, You Know, I Was, Uh, Yeah” - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

"right now the GOP literally has no ideas about how the nation should actually be governed.

And the scary thing is that lack of ideas seems to be a winning platform."