the strong usd

[vt]

Re: the strong usd

Plus 99.9% of southern families never owned slaves and were dirt poor.

Back then and well after there was racial prejudice in the North.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.b06a45a7ef77

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...-square-garden

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/20...n-bund/529185/

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.pre...fear-1.5443021

[vt]

Re: the strong usd

Thank you.I fully agree with you that prejudice must be eliminated. And so does everyone else here.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

So jk, I guess the answer is "no".
We can't go back to talking about the US dollar and it's strength relative to other currencies.
It'll be all hysterical politics now.

it's hard but i think i learned my lesson in 2016. i'm not going to get caught up in the moralizing and name calling, and i'm not going to be diverted by a tweet from thinking about what i consider basic and important.

i think we are living at a crossroads in the development of global civilization. at times like these, like the 1930's, populism and radicalism become prominent as a reaction to a crescendo of economic conflicts. old arrangements are breaking apart, and the new has not yet formed.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


i think it was lenin who said there were decades when nothing happened and there are weeks when decades happen. things are not moving quite THAT fast but the "american century" is coming to an end, and something different is emerging. i really recommend dalio's short piece, which is not quite on that grand historical level. and even more strongly i recommend gavekals' "clash of empires," which really sets out the forces driving an ending to the usd global reserve system, and thus too the role of the u.s. as global hegemon.

and although i think, e.g. abortion and immigration are real and important issues, i think they are being used to distract and divide us, so we don't think about the economic and financial structures that underpin the world as currently constituted. we're being played by the man.

[shiny!]

Re: the strong usd

it's hard but i think i learned my lesson in 2016. i'm not going to get caught up in the moralizing and name calling, and i'm not going to be diverted by a tweet from thinking about what i consider basic and important.

i think we are living at a crossroads in the development of global civilization. at times like these, like the 1930's, populism and radicalism become prominent as a reaction to a crescendo of economic conflicts. old arrangements are breaking apart, and the new has not yet formed.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


i think it was lenin who said there were decades when nothing happened and there are weeks when decades happen. things are not moving quite THAT fast but the "american century" is coming to an end, and something different is emerging. i really recommend dalio's short piece, which is not quite on that grand historical level. and even more strongly i recommend gavekals' "clash of empires," which really sets out the forces driving an ending to the usd global reserve system, and thus too the role of the u.s. as global hegemon.

and although i think, e.g. abortion and immigration are real and important issues, i think they are being used to distract and divide us, so we don't think about the economic and financial structures that underpin the world as currently constituted. we're being played by the man.

Thank you, jk. I look at the world (or as much of it as I can see from my limited little corner) and feel much the same as you.

[kbird]

Re: the strong usd

i really recommend dalio's short piece, which is not quite on that grand historical level. and even more strongly i recommend gavekals' "clash of empires," which really sets out the forces driving an ending to the usd global reserve system, and thus too the role of the u.s. as global hegemon.

JK, I've read both and strongly echo your recommendations. Both pieces support the idea that we are headed to some sort of a new regime and that the investment strategies of the past ten years are not necessarily going to continue working during the next ten years. The reversal of globalization, the inability to lower interest rates, and the coming of some serious U.S. fiscal deficits are just some of the reasons for that regime shift.

Dcarrig offered several compelling reasons why wages cannot and will not rise, but I sure hope he's wrong. If the country is to survive this populist wave and reduce its financial obligations, policy makers had better figure out a way to make it happen or it's going to get ugly.

[vt]

Re: the strong usd

Dangerous decisions ahead:

https://www.themacrotourist.com/img/...80427-rock.png

[dcarrigg]

Re: the strong usd

JK, I've read both and strongly echo your recommendations. Both pieces support the idea that we are headed to some sort of a new regime and that the investment strategies of the past ten years are not necessarily going to continue working during the next ten years. The reversal of globalization, the inability to lower interest rates, and the coming of some serious U.S. fiscal deficits are just some of the reasons for that regime shift.

Dcarrig offered several compelling reasons why wages cannot and will not rise, but I sure hope he's wrong. If the country is to survive this populist wave and reduce its financial obligations, policy makers had better figure out a way to make it happen or it's going to get ugly.

I think not just policymakers. But Meredith and Sam in HR and Tracey in the CFO's office are gonna have to sharply alter their 5-year-plan spreadsheets in which they list out every position in every department and cost sector, give it an FTE multiplier, and fringe lines for FICA and 401ks, and throw in a 1.5% adder to adjust for inflation. There's a tremendous and overwhelming amount of mundane work that goes into economic planning on the corporate side every day (same in government). It's largely designed to hold wages down. The only folks who get out of it are folks in positions higher than those offices because you short-circuit the mundane processes they use daily (non-compete forms, non-disclosure forms, standard below inflation raises, etc) and let the board and a search firm make the hire with a totally unique package. So CEO pay can rise just fine. But I think anyone who has to answer to HR is locked into a system more or less designed to hold wages down. Probably the only way to fight it is to either totally change the law around that and enforce it, or strike bad enough that the board and executives tell them to give up the ghost, at least for a minute, and offer something more substantial.

[Woodsman]

Re: the strong usd

...i think we are living at a crossroads in the development of global civilization. at times like these, like the 1930's, populism and radicalism become prominent as a reaction to a crescendo of economic conflicts. old arrangements are breaking apart, and the new has not yet formed.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
...

It's almost axiomatic that when someone trots out Yeats' "The Second Coming" that they'll quote the first stanza and ignore the rest. It's similarly predictable that they aim the quote towards those whom they identify as the passionate worst. It's the tell that they've misread the text and Yeats' intent.

Yeats penned his most famous poem in 1919, in the days of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, when things truly were falling apart, European civilization chief among them. The title refers, of course, to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Christians who read the poem take Yeats to mean that the literal Second Coming of Christ is at hand. In fact, Yeats meant to covey the exact opposite idea.

The poem rejects the idea of the Christian Second Coming and affirms two decidedly non-Christian senses of a second coming. First, there is the metaphorical sense of the end of the present world and the revelation of something radically new. Second, there is the sense of a second coming not of Christ, but of a paganism displacing Christianity. Yeats is heralding the arrival of a pagan second coming.

The poem is an allegory of modern nihilism, and when you read the text with that in mind, quite a lot falls into place.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

Picture here a falcon flying in an ever-widening spiral, at whose center stands the falconer, the falcon’s master. As the gyre widens, there comes a point at which “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” No longer able to hear the falconer’s voice calling the bird back to his arm, the falcon pushes outwards at each turn.

Without the pull toward the center, which is constituted by the connection between the falcon and the falconer, the falcon’s path loses its spiral and the bird is left to determine his path on its own. Without that centrist pull, the falcon zigs and zags according the currents of the air and his passing desires. Save for the decaying echoes of the original spiral, the geometry soon loses any intelligible structure.

The falcon is, of course, we the postmodern man. The motive force of the falcon’s flight is man's desire, his pride, spiritedness, and Faustian striving. The widening gyre is the spiral structure of the flight and represents the moderation and moralization of human action imposed by the moral center of our civilization, who is the falconer, the falcon’s master, man's master.

A Christian reading of the text would no doubt consider the Godhead as the Master, but there is another interpretation more in tune with Yeats' vision and the era in which he penned the text. Not a Christian God, but the voice of god as represented by the highest values of man's culture - what we make and advance and justify as right and good. The tether that holds us to the center, the voice no longer discernible by the falcon and thus no longer able to impose its measure on the flight, is the claim of the values of our Christian and Western civilization upon us; the ability of that civilization’s values to move us.

We falcons have spiraled out too far to hear our master’s voice calling us back to the center, so we spiral onward, our flight growing progressively more eccentric and un-centered, our desires and actions progressively less measured. So "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold.” When the moral center of civilization no longer has a hold on us, things fall apart in at least two senses. Things - the dominant culture and the civilization it built - disintegrates. But things also fall away from each other because the gravity of their common center lacks sufficient pull. Here Yeats is referencing the breakdown of community and civilization, of the government of human desire by our common morality and our common allegiance to the laws and the lawgivers.

And so anarchy is set loose. Anarchy, what the Greeks called the lack of "arche" - origin, principle, and cause - and what Yeats metaphorically calls the lack of center. But what does Yeats mean by “mere anarchy?" Not mere because it is innocuous and nonthreatening, but anarchy in its unqualified sense, anarchy plain and simple for all to see. It is mere anarchy resulting from nihilism. And thus the blood-dimmed tide is set loose and innocence drowns because:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

But why does anarchy and nihilism make the best lack conviction and fill the worst with passionate intensity?

To understand, we must see the two sides of nihilism - an active and a passive. The passive nihilist identifies with the core values of his decaying culture and so experiences the devaluation of these values as an enervating loss of "all conviction" and the defeat of life. Whereas the active nihilist - experiencing the core values of his culture as insufferable constraints unjustly imposed on him as impediments to his Will to Power, his imagination, and the full expression of his desires - rejoices at the devaluation of those ancient values as a liberation, as the freedom to posit values of his own for himself and his confederates. It fills him with a passionately creative and necessarily destructive intensity, for there is a new civilization to be built and old to be torn down.

This is, of course, a metaphor for the present crisis; in Yeats' time, the destruction of European civilization and the rise of Bolshevism heralding not one, but two unprecedentedly destructive total wars. In our time, the struggle between Right and the Left and the war yet to manifest that will bring its resolution. The Right are tethered to Western values. But they lack all conviction, because they no longer believe in them. As such, they are fated to lose every time they face the passionate intensity of the Left, who experience nihilism as liberating and invigorating.

As said, most who pull the first stanza to amplify their point, inevitably ignore the second. In doing so, they remove the core meaning and message of the text and so demonstrate an incomplete understanding of Yeats' intent. Because that second stanza points to the core values the have been devalued and hints at what will supersede them. The apocalyptic anxiety of the first stanza leads one to think that monumental changes are ahead. Perhaps the Christian Apocalypse, the Second Coming, is at hand:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

But pay attention to the exclamation that follows:

The Second Coming!

One can almost hear the bemused incredulity in Yeats' voice at such naivete. “The Second Coming? Ha! Quite the opposite.” And then Yeats reveals to us what he means as the text ends. Not the Apocalypse heralding the return of Christ, but the return of the pagan World Spirit - "Spiritus Mundi"

Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
A darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Here Yeats conjoins two images. The first is the shape with the body of a lion, the head of a man, and a blank, pitiless stare. This describes an Egyptian sphinx, the Great Sphinx at Giza and its lesser manifestations scattered over Egypt. The second is the nativity, the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem where God made man and then commanded the holy family's "flight to Egypt" to escape King Herod’s massacre of the innocents. A rendering of this metaphor portraying a night in those “twenty centuries of stony sleep" hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts - the famous “Rest on the Flight into Eqypt” by Luc Olivier Merson.

There's no evidence to say decisively that Yeats was thinking about this picture when he penned the lines. But he was thinking about the flight into Egypt. And in them, he indicates a reversal of that flight and a reversal of the birth of Christ. Was it Mary, resting on the flight into Egypt, by rocking Jesus cradled between the paws of a sphinx, who vexed the stony beast to nightmare? Did it stir from its troubled sleep, its womb heavy with the prophet of a new age, and begun its slouch towards its place to give birth?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What better place than Bethlehem for such a rough beast to be born. Not to repeat the birth of Christ, but to reverse it and inaugurate a post-Christian, postmodern, post-Western age of mere anarchy. And there Yeats ends the text. But does it end on a note of horror or of hope? It depends on how one receives this second coming - with passionate intensity or without all conviction.

For there are three distinct stages to Yeats’ vision. The first is the age of unchallenged Christian values at the core of Western civilization, its most vital and flourishing period now come to its end. The second stage is nihilism, both the intense and the convinctionless - active and passive - occasioned by the loss of core Western values and civilization observed by Yeats in his day and ourselves today.

The third stage follows the birth of the “rough beast” whose mother only now experiences the first pangs of labor. As the first coming in the birth of Jesus Christ inaugurated the birth of Christian civilization, so too will the birth of this rough beast herald a new, pagan civilization whose core values could not be more different than those which it will replace.

So does it end in horror or hope? If one places ultimate value in Western Civilization - Christendom, in a word - then surely horrors await. But if the new pagan values fills one with passionate anticipation of the reign of nihilism and the emergence of a novel and vital civilization based on those pagan values, it is a message of hope.

[kbird]

Re: the strong usd

Beautifully written, Woodsman. Thank you.

And now I need a drink.

[vt]

Re: the strong usd

Wonderful post Woodsman.

[shiny!]

Re: the strong usd

I was not expecting a poetry lesson today. Beautifully written, indeed. Thank you, Woodsman.
After pondering this I wish I could join kbird in that drink but unfortunately I must face life painfully sober.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

frankly i am hoping we can avoid the rough beast, which is why i stopped my quote where i did.

[Chomsky]

Re: the strong usd

frankly i am hoping we can avoid the rough beast, which is why i stopped my quote where i did.

Yeah I don't know, after doing a deep dive reading Jeffrey Snider's work (thanks for that), not sure that's possible.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

Yeah I don't know, after doing a deep dive reading Jeffrey Snider's work (thanks for that), not sure that's possible.

it's interesting to me that snider doesn't even speculate about what's causing the phenomena he describes. it's "the landmine." something happened to trigger the 4 contactionary waves in the euro$ market. maybe the cause doesn't matter. whatever triggers the avalanche or the earthquake isn't as important as the damage reports.


[and btw, woodsman, i think the best lacking all conviction is at least as important as the passions of the worst. makes you wonder what makes them the best.]

[Chomsky]

Re: the strong usd

it's interesting to me that snider doesn't even speculate about what's causing the phenomena he describes. it's "the landmine." something happened to trigger the 4 contactionary waves in the euro$ market. maybe the cause doesn't matter. whatever triggers the avalanche or the earthquake isn't as important as the damage reports.

Agreed. Just a little, Snider does suggest that it could be Deutsche Bank, but he doesn't get bogged down in those details.