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Originally Posted by roachboy
fistf: i think it's at that point in thinking about this situation that you have to start looking for more structural explanations. the bromides about "greed" don't let you think about what enabled any particular sequence of actions; the assumption about market actors as "rational" doesn't let you say anything about why a particular set of actions could have unfolded that would have lead to irrational or self-destructive outcomes.
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Sometimes the root cause of major problems are pretty simple.
Analogy alert...
Analogy alert...
Fannie Mae is like the guy who picks apples from his neighbor's apple trees. At first he picks the good ones, packages them up, sells them for a nice profit. Then the good ones get harder to get, so occupationally he puts a few rotten ones in the package, he is still making a profit. Then more and more of the packages contain rotten apples. Instead of not using the rotten apples and reducing profits he keeps using them. Eventually his greed causes his business to come to an end, because eventually the customers stop buying rotten apples.
Analogy concluded
...Analogy concluded
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this is all of a piece with a characteristic of neoliberalism that makes it so abberant and destructive: it is predicated on dissocation: of the present from the past, of markets from the rest of the social; of economic activity from politics on and on and on. these gaps, which are created through the application of a priori beliefs, are filled back in again with metaphysics.
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What?
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at the limit, you get stuff like the economy can be understood as a fictional boxer.
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How about Jason in those Halloween movies? Is that better, when you think he is dead and the water is calm....
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anthropomorphism isn't that big a leaf is you believe in stuff like the famous "invisible hand"--which (stealing a line from somewhere or another) has certainly given us a lesson in the modalities of invisibility in this particular situation. something that invisible, all the time, might not exist. just saying. or maybe it's god that the invisible hand is attached to.
if she existed, i wonder what she would have been doing with that invisible hand these past months.
i'd like to think that she'd have gone bowling.
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Usually people won't let her do her work. Sometimes you have to let greedy people fail. That is a part of the cleansing process.