High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos

"The hyper-rich are facing something worse than death: becoming poor. Do you think they will go quietly? I think they will do whatever it takes and sell it to us in the name of 'saving the system.'"

David Malone, Debt Generation
David Malone writes a financial blog Golem XIV.

A number of people had been warning of a collapse including myself. The bubble in housing and dodgy credit was apparent to anyone who had eyes to see, the time and training to look, and a mind unclouded by conflicts of interest.

And that is perhaps the heart of what went wrong. Few were acting from conscience and principle, and most, as is so human, were guided by self-interest, ideology, rosy thinking, careerism, and the flawed models that supported inaction in the face of monstrous injustice and transfers of wealth from the relatively innocent and unsuspecting to the financial predators..

Author’s Note from Debt Generation By David Malone

"From the very start of this crisis what concerned me, above all else, was the almost total lack of any real and meaningful debate. Decisions have been made that will affect us for generations to come, but did we ever truly hear competing ideas, explanations and alternative solutions? I certainly didn’t. All I heard was a worrying unanimity. 

The more I read, the stronger my conviction grew that the mainstream media’s reporting of the crisis was alarmingly wrong. After three months of reading, I began to write. That was in early 2008. I had no intention of writing a book. I simply felt compelled to voice opposition to the deafening certainties being thrust at me from all sides. What I wrote, under the name GolemXIV, were comments on the Guardian newspaper’s website responding to financial news stories.

We had been denied, I argued, a meaningful discussion of the nature of this crisis and the futility of what was being done in the name of fixing it. As the crisis unfolded, I became more and more convinced that what was being done in the name of helping us would instead, whether by design or stupidity, turn us and our children into the Debt Generation: the generation whose principle use and fate would be to pay off other people’s debts. It made me angry. Angry at those engineering it, angry at those who justified it, and angry at those who told me there was no alternative.



......................................jessescrossroadscafe