Welcoming the disaster

Two (among others) good links from Credit Writedowns:

"On April 17, 2007, famed short-seller Jim Chanos and other hedge fund managers met under tight security at the World Bank in Washington for the G-8 meeting. Chanos and Paul Singer briefed prominent policy officials about the growing financial instability. They gave irrefutable evidence that a catastrophe was building. They told officials that banks that were about to sink the global economy. They called for decisive action.

And they were ignored.

Gordon Brown was there..."

- New Deal 2.0

My comment: there's always a nice conspiratorial frisson when you think you can show They Knew All Along. Except there will have been other voices (like the 10 - 15,000 American economists who didn't foresee the credit crunch). And self-delusion. I don't think this nails the guilty parties.

Expect a major house-cleaning, a second American Revolution. We predicted the "Great Depression 2" around 2012. Well, we doubt taxpayers will passively sit one more time, like in the 1930s, in 2000, and the past few years. Next time voters will take a page from the history books about past revolutions in the American Colonies, France and Russia. A perfect storm will erupt in a massive global credit meltdown, bringing down Wall Street and the clandestine $670 trillion shadow central banking system.

- Paul Farrell

My comment: The appeal of revolution is to juvenile minds drunk on testosterone and misled by ignorant optimism. This is why the Communists have focussed on the young. I am reminded of how Rupert Brooke welcomed the onset of WWI:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

I don't think he would have agreed with his younger self by the end of the Great War. After a disaster comes the greater disaster: Romanticism.