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thanks jazz--very interesting stuff.
the traffic in holes (debt bundling) required a wholesale separation between the fees that could be made through the circulation of the devices and what the devices actually represented. it seems to me like the entire way of trading was not that different from juggling--so long as the elements within the system kept moving and folk were only thinking about quarterly returns, shareholder profits and commissions/bonuses things were *kinda* functional--but once the machinery started to come undone, suddenly there were enormous bags and firms left holding them and epic levels of debt, backed to the hilt by outfits like aig....it's lunacy if you look at it, but i don't think anyone was looking at it so long as the wheels inside the wheels kept moving---cowboy capitalism is not about rational planning or action if rational requires thinking in durations longer than a quarter. traders make heaps of cash, p&l looks good, everyone's fat and happy--that's as far as thinking went, as far as it had to go. add to that the fact that there was and still is no clearinghouse through which the traffick in these devices had to pass, so no transparency as to valuation and so no transparency as to meaning----this is an automated world of numbers, so abstractions.
it really was and is lunacy.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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