Missive #31

Erik walked much better yesterday while in the group class. He has been doing very well on our noon and afternoon walks but gets distracted while in the group. He also sat for extended periods of time when I left him; only breaking from the sit occasionally. Much better, there is hope for him yet.

It is still freezing in the mornings but we did get a high in the 60s yesterday. Maybe will even see one in the 70s within the next week or ten days.

The best known and most highly regarded book on financial crises

Financial crises and speculative excess can be traced back to the very beginning of trade and commerce. The author says there were more asset price bubbles between 1980 and 2000 than in any earlier period. Yet he devotes 80% of the book to prior periods. He also repeats what he has said many times which make the book at least a third longer than if he only said in one time. It would help you understand what he says if you were to have at least an undergraduate degree in economics. Therefore, be prepared to not understand all that he is saying. Since its introduction in 1978, this book has charted and followed this volatile world of financial markets. Charles Kindleberger’s brilliant, panoramic history revealed how financial crises follow a nature-like rhythm: they peak and purge, swell and storm. Now this newly revised and expanded Fourth Edition probes the most recent “natural disasters” of the markets—from the difficulties in East Asia and the repercussions of the Mexican crisis to the 1992 Sterling crisis. His sharply drawn history confronts a host of key questions. — Book promo @ goodread.com

Quotes from Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises

“When a man’s vision is fixed on one thing,” thought Ponzi, “he might as well be blind”. Or Bagehot on Malthus: “Scarcely any man who has evolved a striking and original conception ever gets rid of it.”

The current U.S. international financial position in some ways parallels that of Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina in the 1970s. These countries had unsustainably large current account def i cits and obtained the cash to pay the interest to their foreign creditors from the foreign creditors. The implication is that the U.S. external payments position is not sustainable.

When a man’s vision is f i xed on one thing,” thought Ponzi, “he might as well be blind”.’47Or Bagehot on Malthus: ‘Scarcely any man who has evolved a striking and original conception ever gets rid of it.’48

At the moment [published in 2005], how-ever, the world depends on U.S. leadership for lack of better; but the United States is holding back, preoccupied with its own political and economic difficulties, and reluctant to pay the cost of providing inter-national public goods. Regimes work well in quiet times, but something more decisive in the way of leadership is called for in crisis, and the likelihood of escaping economic and financial crises in the years ahead seems small.

“The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools.” — Herbert Spencer

[T]he global south has been gradually discovering that it has the resources, the technology and the wealth to have a real economy. And it doesn’t need the West for that. It is the West that cannot live without the global south, not the other way around. The global south has figured it out, and so has the US.

Seeing this, and watching the deplorable spectacle that is the constant confiscation of sovereign amounts deposited in dollars or euros, which the West, at the behest of the US, steals so much, today we are witnessing a movement away from the dollar…

In this, too, we have much despair, such as the process that led to the “installation” of a Guaido in Venezuela or the successive attempts at a “colored” revolution in Iran. In both cases, the two countries saw their reservations “frozen” in the G7/NATO/EU space. If this move by itself had already put many countries on their guard, since it was no longer only the “communist” Cuba and the People’s Republic of Korea, this time, the freezing and intended confiscation of Russian reserves clearly pushed the panic button. Any country, regardless of size, if it does not accept submission, is subject to confiscation of everything it has in currencies of the collective West. — Desperate actions by Hugo Dionísio for the Saker blog

An edited Meme that I liked.

I dropped an egg while making breakfast this morning. The State Farm rep said a claims adjuster will be out tomorrow.