What would we do without Cab TV? This segment was followed by a "Loopt" informaton.
I just finished John Kenneth Galbraith's account of the 1929 stock market crash and I was amused to read the following passage, which really flies in the face of conventional wisdom nowadays:
The crash was also effective in bringing to an end the foreign lending by which the international accounts had been balanced. Now the accounts had, in the main, to be balanced by reduced exports. This put prompt and heavy pressure on export markets for wheat, cotton, and tobacco. Perhaps the foreign loans had only delayed an adjustment to the balance which had one day to come. The stock market crash served nonetheless to precipitate the adjustment with great suddenness at a most unpropitious time.
At the time the US was running a current account surplus, which meant that it had no choice but to act as a creditor to countries who desired to buy US exports. This was seen as a risk to the economic health of the US--exactly the opposite sentiment as is commonly expressed today. I'm not trying to suggest that our current account deficit is desirable or without risk, but I think it's helpful to think about the supposed threat from China in light of Galbraith's analysis. China has no choice but to finance its customers if it intends to prolong economic growth.
This passage was also very amusing:
There was also the bogey of "going off" the gold standard and, most surprisingly, of risking inflation. Until 1932 the United States added formidably to its gold reserves, and instead of inflation the country was experiencing the most violent deflation in the nation's history. Yet every sober adviser saw dangers here, including the danger of runaway price increases...The fear of inflation reinforced the demand for the balanced budget...The rejection of both fiscal (tax and expenditure) and monetary policy amounted precisely to a rejection of affirmative government economic policy. The economic advisers of the day had both unanimity and the authority to force the leaders of both parties to disavow all the available steps to check deflation and depression. In its own way this was a marked achievement--a triumph of dogma over thought. The consequences were profound.
It has been widely reported that Ben Bernanke is scholar of the Great Depression. In light of the above analysis, it's easy to see why the Fed is now divided between inflation hawks on one side and Bernanke on the other.
So,I've been meaning to post about this book for awhile, but the Fourth of July seems like the perfect opportunity to finally go for it, given the central commentary Little Brother makes about our country's conflicting obsessions with freedom and security. I don't say this lightly, but this is a book that everyone should pick up and read as a primer on current technologies, considerations of the predicted evolutions of "The War on Terror", and just as an entertaining story to boot.
In near-future San Francisco, Marcus Yallow and some of his friends get hauled in by the Department of Homeland Security for being at the wrong place and the wrong time when a terrorist attack destroys a bridge. Though not guilty of the terrorist attack, Marcus's interest in technology and cryptography makes him a primary suspect, which leads to harsh "questioning" by his captors. After he his finally released, he decides to turn the tables on the paranoid police state crackdown of his hometown by creating a stealth network, which ultimately propels the plot to an inevitable confrontation between the forces of security and the forces of privacy.
This is Orwell's 1984 for the next generation (as is obvious by the allusion in the title). Like its predecessor, Little Brother raises troubling questions about a government gone too far, which ultimately feels familiar to any modern American. If you're looking to do something really patriotic this Independence Day, it might be worth putting down the sparkler for a moment and picking up a copy of this book, even if only for future insight into the complicated times in which we all live now.
