The whole thing reeks of irony, Dr. Leskey suggests in her diplomatic way. Before the federal government went into its own hibernation, the bugs were at their busiest, “just walking down the hall,” of her laboratory station. Now, she said, “they’re in suspended animation.”
Author: Edouard Chazal
Physicists And The Financial Markets
Gene Stanley raises his fork, holds it out flat, a few inches above his plate of risotto. “The majority of traders still use Gaussian models and, when something outside the Gaussian happens, they have all these phrases, like ‘outliers’, but the main phrase is ‘shit happens’.”
We are Founders, and We are Afraid
Fear doesn’t go away, it simply evolves. And that’s okay, because it’s the fear that drives us—but it’s up to us to embrace that fear and channel it, rather than let it drown us. It’s up to us to recognize the fears and go after them. It’s the scary parts of our business (like talking to potential clients to make a sale, or firing a troubling employee) that play the most critical roles.
The Default Has Already Begun
The vaseline, in other words, already has sand in it. The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. The mechanism by which catastrophe would arise has already been set into motion. And as a result, economic growth in both the US and the rest of the world will be lower than it should be. Unemployment will be higher. Social unrest will be more destructive. These things aren’t as bad now as they would be if we actually got to a point of payment default. But even a payment default wouldn’t cause mass overnight failures: the catastrophe would be slower and nastier than that, less visible, less spectacular. We’re not talking the final scene of Fight Club, we’re talking more about another global credit crisis — where “credit” means “trust”, and “trust” means “trust in the US government as the one institution which cannot fail”.
The Life of a Newspaper
This is the last time you will be reading The International Herald Tribune; as of tomorrow, it is The International New York Times.
Abnormal Capitalist 