Couldn't sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it's the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.
Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my "feeds") telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook.....
"...Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]
Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2) Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new "glue" that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there's a way to measure the influence of a "virtual friend" or an "event" by holding one of them and seeing "who actually shows up".
As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been "let go", and even the uncertainty of anyone's financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it's time to sleep again ... my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday's New York Times.
In Paul Krugman's Widening Gyre there's the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it's taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined ..... but that is not to be ... because....
".....as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.
And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.
"....The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets â€" countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil."
And if that didn't finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in "Shoot the Horses?" that ....
"....a banker friend, and he told me the "unraveling" could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.
But, just to be sure, I asked him: "Unraveling of what?"
He paused, before saying, "Almost our way of life."
A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. "I told him, for heaven's sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary."
That got me thinking.
Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?"
Now, I'm really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:
".... It's really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.
Let's fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.
The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.
New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom â€" that's to say right now â€" a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.
The hedge fund industry is decimated â€" its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up â€" and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.
People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.
I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?"
To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it's own economy, and support it's people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:
"....To get China's consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits â€" including health insurance and pensions â€" so its citizens don't feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.
This is clearly in Beijing's interest, though China's leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.
China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities."
If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.
And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.
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