ANC Centenary - Celebrating 100 Years of Selfless Struggle

A ZAR 1 Million Luxury German Sedan
Owned by the Ruling ANC
Emblazoned with the Slogan
'100 Years of Selfless Struggle'

Alan Watts and the Trouble with Symbols

Alan Watts: "Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience."

Most civilized people today are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it, talk about it, and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other the whole system of symbols about this world that we have in our minds. They are all very, very useful symbols, all our civilization depends on it but like all good things they have their disadvantages And the principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality. Like we confuse money with actual wealth and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves with ourselves. Of course reality from the philosopher’s point of view is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me what do I mean by reality. Am I talking about the physical world of nature or am I talking about the spiritual world or what? And to that I have a very simple answer: When we talk about the material world it is actually a philosophical concept. And if I say that reality is spiritual it is also a philosophical concept.And reality itself is not a concept, reality is …

….and we won’t give it a name.

Marc Faber June 2009 - Bloomberg

YouTube Link

Bloomberg interviews Marc Faber in June 2009, with Faber's calls on the coming period being on point.

Marc all this is predicated on the fact that you see the US in a hyperinflationary state. I mean you compared us to Zimbabwe in July 2008.  Do you really think its going to be that bad, i mean really, on a scale of 1 - 10, you actually have zero confidence in the US ability to exit ?

Yes, [of] that I have zero confidence, absolutely zero.  There is no political will, to reduce the deficits, and to keep money tight.  And if you read all the articles that are published in the United States, and if you read the statements by mister Bernanke, they all point towards essentially keeping interest rates artificially low and at all cost to generate some inflation.  Now the problem with inflation is that you can't just generate 3 or 6 % inflation, inflation is a dynamic process, and I can assure you, all of the viewers of Bloomberg, that they will this year be hit by higher contributions to the government, and higher insurance premiums for their insurance policies, and so forth, and so on... higher transportation costs.  I don't know that deflation is what prices they are living by, but my prices in life, they go up.

The Slope - Trading Horizon @ 3 October 2011

The major US indices are down, with the S&P500 index being around 1105, down 2.3% on the day.

This is inline with the recent trend of the last 5 straight days.

Reuters:

[ The Good Ship Dexia Beaches near the Shores of Normandy ] Banks slumped after a 10 percent fall in shares of Franco-Belgian financial group Dexia. The company is highly exposed to Greek loans and it highlighted concerns about the extent to which a default in Athens would damage already fragile European banks.

[ Some story about a Bunch of Honest Cretans ] Greece admitted it will miss its deficit targets this year, which could make the country unable to receive more international aid and run out of cash. 

 [ Meanwhile, back in the fatherland, Bank Of America and Morgan Stanley are about to require some expensive life support if they are to survive the Greek default (Note of thanks to the desk at Goldman Sachs which planted the derivative timebomb in the basement of the less-than-dextrous aforementioned European bank, within the circle of the European monetary union) ] U.S. banks including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have all seen their credit default swap costs jump as other banks hedge their counterparty exposures and speculative traders bet on the situation worsening.

[ Margin Stanley ] Morgan Stanley has been the most volatile name in recent weeks, with the cost of insuring its debt rising to levels not seen since November 2008, according to Markit data. [ may be being circled by hedge fund vultures ] "Everyone is looking at the Morgan Stanleys of the world, looking at their CDS gapping up here," said David Lutz, managing director of trading, Stifel Nicolaus Capital Markets in Baltimore.

US Economic Events Calendar

EconoDay Calendar of Economic Events

Recommended Reading/Books

RISK
- Benoit Mandelbrot : The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb : The Black Swan
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Fooled by Randomness
- Peter L Bernstein : Against the Odds - The Remarkable Story of Risk

INVESTMENT STRATEGY
- Benjamin Graham : The Intelligent Investor

GENERAL HISTORY
- Al Alletzhauser : The House of Nomura
- Niall Ferguson : The Ascent of Money - A Financial History of the World

2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS
- Michael Lewis : The Big Short

OIL & COMMODITIES
- Leah McGrath Goodman : The Asylum - The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
- Daniel Amman : The King of Oil - The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

BIOGRAPHIES
- John Perkins : Confessions of an Economic Hitman
- Jordan Belfort : The Wolf of Wall Street - How Money Destroyed a Wall Street Superman
- Daniel Amman : The King of Oil - The Secret Lives of Marc Rich
- Victor Niederhoffer : The Education of a Speculator

ORGANISED CRIME
- Misha Glenny : McMafia - Seriously Organised Crime
- James S Henry : The Blood Bankers - Tales from the Underground Economy

DERIVATIVES
- Satyajit Das : Traders, Guns & Money

Keynes on Inflation - The Economic Consequences of the Peace

A must-read, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace' by John Maynard Keynes:

Available free online from Project Gutenberg.

Wikipedia Entry.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers,", who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.