Palestinian Agency

The English are the most intelligent commentators of world politics. They lament the disappearance of the Palestinian cause from the Arab consciousness and the failure of the Boycott Israel movement that could not grow out from a minor issue in American campuses. The Palestinian Liberation Movement is reduced to clan rivalries and local politics: the Palestinians have no agency. The Brits are feeding the Apartheid accusation, trying to destroy us just as they did to Rhodesia and South Africa. The internet allows me to hear them in podcasts and lectures, and I confess that am in love with the language, civilized tone and subtle humor. But they are dangerous, they appear impossibly unaware that they are striving to destroy and rule.   

Marxist interpretation of social reality

From a Marxist point of view, of class-war dialectics,  zero interest rate has the effect of increasing the worth of non-reproducible goods such as real estate, stocks, commodities, etc. Since only 5-10% of the population owns these goodies in any significant quantity, they are the sole beneficiaries. That is, zero interest rate policy increases the gap between  the owner and the proletarian classes. Parallelly, the outsourcing of the mean of production, of factories, of industries, weakens the working class and empowers the propertied class. Dr Faber goes one step further saying that democracy, one vote for each, means that the votes of the 5-10% (the owners class) has no influence in the results of the elections, so for these class, democracy is unjust and unfair. Since they are cheated of any voting power, they feel that manipulations and faking are justified and even they are imperative.  

Are negative interest rates good for bankers?

 The case for negative rates.

I am a banker and my only real product is debt.
Who can I load up with my debt products?
You’ll do.

How many of the banker’s debt products can an economy take?
Let’s find out.

At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
Economies fill up with the banker’s debt products until you get a financial crisis.
1929 – US
1991 – Japan
2008 – US, UK and Euro-zone
The PBoC saw the Chinese Minsky Moment coming and you can too by looking at the chart above.

Lower interest rates and you can squeeze a few more of the banker’s debt products into your economy.
The bankers have reached market saturation globally.
No one can take any more of their debt products.

“Go negative” the bankers
That’s why we need negative rates so we can squeeze more of the banker’s debt products into our economies.

Stolen from Sound of the Suburbs    The photo shows Joseph Safra. He was a successful banker. 

P.S.: I know what low interest rate does to people like me. It tempts to enter risky investments. Money is free and abundant, what can happen? Risk means that the investment carries a high probability of failure, and failed investments end in bankruptcy. Enough failed investments and we are dealing with a recession. Ergo, negative interest rate may lead to a temporary flareup and lasting depression.   

Unfriendly Architecture

People in Buenos Aires were filling the spaces under the bridges with homes built with waste materials like wooden boxes, carton and so. Later they built permanent  walls and installed shops under the bridge. The  Authorities gave them formal names, like Villa 514. See pic below. 

Architectural creativity solved the problem. See pic above. It also helps to avoid crossing lanes under the bridge. This is the Argentine version of Brutalist Architecture. 

 

ORFEO - Beautiful Nonsense

 This last wasted Corona epidemic year forced me to spend time on Youtube and so learned to appreciate baroque music and theater. Music was an elite entertainment, elegant and graceful, abstract and unrelated to the daily misery of our lives. Look how the girls dance! I started to love opera, like my father z"l. The small Jewish community of Jaszbereny produced several famous opera singers - baritone and bass - and we had their opera albums and vinyl long plays. As a child, I was amazed at their exaggerated makeup, and their "operetta hero" fantasy dresses.

 In his times good music was a precious resource, they had to travel 60 kilometers to Budapest to go to the opera. Free music like this youtube was a luxury unimaginable. Only in the High Holidays one of the opera singers performed in the synagogue, his powerful bass reciting the sacred texts, and that was memorable event to comment for months ahead. I must be turning senile.

El Dinero No Vale

Globes says that American investors are buying up Tel Aviv (pic) apartments, driving prices to crazy levels. Biden's trillion something stimulus will create much liquidity in the USA, which will lift the NASDAQ (valuations there are already lunatic) and in Israel (we are at post-corona time). Conclusion: Now is the time to buy real estate here. If governments are able to create money from thin air,  then money is worthless or so. 

No equilibrium anywhere

 George Soros in The Alchemy of Finance says that there is no equilibrium in the markets, and there is no tendency toward a stable state. The market is always flowing. And the market is an imperfect allocative mechanism. (But other systems are even worse). On the same token, I say that there is no equilibrium in evolution, there is always some development and change. The universe itself is not in equilibrium, it is expanding and progressing toward some unimaginable state.