Category Archives: Economics

Can’t Get Good Goons These Days

Some thoughts on the upcoming ignominious end to Occupy Wall Street:

…the value of the sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it falls. Obama told Wall Street that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. That scared them into line for a while. But now Wall Street’s sick of him, and doesn’t care. They’re not playing ball like they used to.

So he unleashed the pitchforks and what we got was the #occupy movement, a pathetic, and totally non-scary, embarrassment for the Democrats. Republicans are now hoping they’ll stay in place until November of 2012.

That Alinsky stuff just doesn’t work like it used to.

[Update a couple minutes later]

When rage becomes the machine.

The European Identity Crisis

The real problem isn’t financial:

A disciplined Teutonic economic order does not suit the French way of life; orderly, inflation-fighting Prussian capitalism is only slightly less horrible than the Anglo-Saxon law of the jungle from a French point of view. At the end of the day, France may simply be incapable of adjusting to the rigors of a German economic style; if so, the question of the nature of the monetary union turns into an irreconcilable contest between two fundamentally different approaches to political economy. Either France (and the rest of the Latins and Greeks) must live under German rules, or the Germans (and the other thrifty and orderly northern countries) must become more like Zorba the Greek.

The inability to square this circle is the real reason it is taking Europe so long to figure out how to deal with the euro crisis. Europe is having an identity crisis — and this is not something that can be settled in a weekend.

Or perhaps ever. At least not peacefully.