The Coriolis EconomyWhat he said... Posted by DaveH at May 11, 2012 12:01 PM
JP Morgan has announced $2 billion in losses in the last six weeks. I knew Jamie Dimon was a douche bag when Bill Pullman played him in Too Big To Fail.
Once again our populist purveyors of prevarication will blame this on capitalism run amok. But these Wall Street greedheads aren't capitalsits in the strict sense of the word. They are crony capitalists. They donate in extremely egregious amounts to Democrat politicians who in turn feather these cronies' nests with bailouts when their insane gambles invariably go tits up. Risk management was replaced by moral hazard decades ago, to be sure, and chickens don't roost in foxholes, but Wall Street didn't crash in 1987, it belched, shed its prototype versions of extreme risk like junk bonds, and grew again. Now it is merely a collection of miscreants who move in and out of government service in between stints on each others' boards, awarding each other tens and hundreds of millions in salaries and bonuses.
Who are the true capitalists? Main Street. The strip malls of America. Not the mega-malls with their pricey chain stores. The moms and pops, the crazy couple who quit their corporate jobs to open a Murphy bed store. The lady who has a $1200 a month rent nut selling fucking birdseed. I admit I cannot fathom the business models of many of these people, but I know and have known many of them, and they struggle, but they manage to pay their mortgages and rents, educate their children, and somehow save a little bit. They are insane heroes to me.
And they used to prosper at times, and hire, and provide jobs. This is all funneling down the toilet now, counter-clockwise I suppose. It is a Coriolis economy. If you work for a Fortune 500 now, enjoy it. I can see the target on your back from here. And I wouldn't put too much faith in your defined-contribution plan, either. There is not a major corporation now that isn't neck-fucked, and borderline criminal. When many of them implode, possibly as early as August, the last people left will be the human resources screwheads and the diversity counselors.
My advice? I don't have any. Other than stay out of the way when Wall Street and Main Street finally find themselves facing off in the octagon. Wall Street's only MMA move is to withhold credit. Main Street's only MMA move is to hide their money in a mattress. Learning a trade might be useful. I'd opt for plumbing, because hot's still on the left, and there will be a ton of shit flowing downhill very, very soon.