Category: rePosts

You hear it in the news, and people repeat it to either sound smart or at least informed. To me it is just noise. There is probably a correlation to the confidence of a people versus the performance of its economy, it may even well be causal, but Whenever I hear anyone sprouting something like “We are not that affected by the global financial crisis”, or even worse the people who sound so matter of factly “We are immune to this crisis” then points out the activity in malls etc, I don’t know what to think anymore. We aren’t like franklin richards (son of Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Force) we cannot will reality. We nudge it, coerce and push maybe but that is what we do. willing it is just part of it, we create reality through will and action, none is good without the other. The way I talk betrays my need for accuracy when making sweeping statements or even statements, more so for things that are not too easily grasped, with little study or even extensive study. We must not speak to the crowds but always try to push the debate forward.

This asymmetric character of the global crisis – the fact that the shocks were even bigger on the periphery than at the epicentre – had its disadvantages for the US, to be sure. Any hope that America could depreciate its way out from under its external debt burden faded as 10-year yields and the dollar held firm. Nor did American manufacturers get a second wind from reviving exports, as they would have done had the dollar sagged. The Fed’s achievement was to keep inflation in positive territory – just. Those who had feared galloping inflation and the end of the dollar as a reserve currency were confounded.
Niall Ferguson – An imaginary retrospective of 2009.