"What do you do when flood waters threaten the dam? If you're the Federal
Reserve, you close the floodgates and let the water rise.
Metaphors have an uncanny ability to capture the essence of complex situations. Here is one dam metaphor that distills and explains the entire global financial system in 2012. The way to visualize the current situation is to imagine a dam holding back rising storm waters.
The dam is the regulatory system, the rule of law, trust in the transparency and fairness of the system and the machinery of perception management. All of these work to keep risk, fraud and excesses of speculation and leverage from unleashing a destructive wave of financial instability on the real economy below.
As legitimate regulation and transparency have been replaced with simulacra and manipulated data, the dam's internal strength has been seriously weakened.
Depending on how you date various rivers of financialization, water has been piling up behind the dam since either 1982, 1992 or 2000. In this metaphor, the water is comprised of multiple sources of destabilization: rising money supply, debt, speculation, leverage, fraud, shadow banking and lax regulation.
Common sense suggests that water rising to dangerous levels would trigger an official response of opening the floodgates to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately for the real economy, common sense has nothing to do with the official response of central governments and banks. Their entire raison d'etre (reason to be) is self-preservation and the preservation of the financial Elites that set the context and policy of the State and central bank..."
at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-one-dam-metaphor-2012-global-financial-system
Metaphors have an uncanny ability to capture the essence of complex situations. Here is one dam metaphor that distills and explains the entire global financial system in 2012. The way to visualize the current situation is to imagine a dam holding back rising storm waters.
The dam is the regulatory system, the rule of law, trust in the transparency and fairness of the system and the machinery of perception management. All of these work to keep risk, fraud and excesses of speculation and leverage from unleashing a destructive wave of financial instability on the real economy below.
As legitimate regulation and transparency have been replaced with simulacra and manipulated data, the dam's internal strength has been seriously weakened.
Depending on how you date various rivers of financialization, water has been piling up behind the dam since either 1982, 1992 or 2000. In this metaphor, the water is comprised of multiple sources of destabilization: rising money supply, debt, speculation, leverage, fraud, shadow banking and lax regulation.
Common sense suggests that water rising to dangerous levels would trigger an official response of opening the floodgates to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately for the real economy, common sense has nothing to do with the official response of central governments and banks. Their entire raison d'etre (reason to be) is self-preservation and the preservation of the financial Elites that set the context and policy of the State and central bank..."
at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-one-dam-metaphor-2012-global-financial-system
