What brought him back to following Wall Street he said was the sub prime debacle, and the extent, as I reiterated recently here, that the big banks themselves had been what he calls the dumb money, and had lost their ass too, rather than taking someone else's ass for a profit, which they are accustomed to do (they do not, of course, really want to be bailed out, they want to make money.)
Western liberalism has been and continues to be the dumb money ideology, and this sad fact is only now really being brought home to the average person in the West.
There are so many reasons for this late awakening, analogously to the late awakening of big bank executives to the realities of the sub prime debacle.
For example, in 89 (1989), the West actually still thought they had 'won'.
Tragically, it symbolized a huge sign of a loss for the West in general, against the Rest, and not just for the West's Europhile Soviet elite.
Lewis is himself ironically, of course, one of the liberals who fail to see what is coming. He discusses the big problem, with LaGarde, inequality, rather in the fashion that Piketty addresses it, as the really big roadblock to further good globalization.
What he fails to see, apparently, and what Piketty certainly has seen but refuses to mention or discuss, is not inequality at all, which is not really a new thing as such (the so called problem of the top 1%), which will neither shake your windows nor rattle your walls.
The 800 pound gorilla in the room of economic globalization, oh the times they are a changin, is income and wealth convergence, converging average or median income of a world population, amid gathering environmental degradation and vanishing natural resources.
For relatively wealthy Westerners, it is rather like having a freight train bearing down on you in the dark with its lights off.
Lewis is himself ironically, of course, one of the liberals who fail to see what is coming. He discusses the big problem, with LaGarde, inequality, rather in the fashion that Piketty addresses it, as the really big roadblock to further good globalization.
What he fails to see, apparently, and what Piketty certainly has seen but refuses to mention or discuss, is not inequality at all, which is not really a new thing as such (the so called problem of the top 1%), which will neither shake your windows nor rattle your walls.
The 800 pound gorilla in the room of economic globalization, oh the times they are a changin, is income and wealth convergence, converging average or median income of a world population, amid gathering environmental degradation and vanishing natural resources.
For relatively wealthy Westerners, it is rather like having a freight train bearing down on you in the dark with its lights off.
No comments:
Post a Comment