The Financial Crisis


Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis



With the US raising their debt ceiling, are we in a global bail-out bubble that will eventually burst? This doc offers a fresh insight into the greatest economic crisis of our age: the one still awaiting us.

The financial storm that has rocked the world began brewing in the US when congress pushed the idea of home ownership for all, propping up those who couldn't make the down payments. When it all went wrong the government promised the biggest financial stimulus packages in history and gargantuan bailouts. But what crazed logic is that: propping up debt with more debt? "They're giving alcohol to a drunk: it just sets him up for a bigger hangover." 

July 2010





From UnwelcomeGuest, thanks to Robin Upton

Debt, The First 5000 Years

by David Graeber (2011)

Read by Robin Upton from episode 576 to episode 629.   List of Episodes
* Whole text online
David Graeber takes an anthropologist's view of money and debt, looking at evidence outside the purview of economists such as Vedic texts, and anthropologists' accounts. He finds some foundations of economics to unsupported by evidence, and goes so far as to reflect on economists' predilections for particular interpretations - making this book a veritable slaughterhouse of economists' sacred cows.

Graeber shows, for example, that not only has there never been any evidence that money evolved from barter, but that for over a century, there has been a lot of evidence that it didn't. Disregarding such conventional wisdom, he describes a very different picture of the world's economic history, one in which money and debt are not impartial, amoral facts of economic life, but go hand in hand with state sponsored imperial violence and exploitation.

His exposure of the false dichotomy between states and markets reveals centuries of economic discussions to be vain. Graeber cites a mass of historical evidence that 'the market' is not a quasi-natural phenomenon that emerges in spite of government, but has frequently required careful manipulation by governments firstly to bring it about at all (usually first in connection with soldiers) and then to maintain it. He mixes insights from psychology, anthropology and history to paint an unconventional but compelling picture of the impact of money, one that differs sharply from the flattering fables spun by highly paid economists and economic historians. Indeed, he suggests we think hard about the very idea of considering 'the economy' to be separate from other facets of life.

Several themes recur throughout the 5 millennia of history which make up the book, such as the oscillation between credit systems that rely on a degree of social affinity and neighborliness and the use of precious metals and cash which do not. Another main theme with a particular of relevance to the modern reader is the perpetually recurring debt crises in which a huge proportion of the population had been reduced to debt slaves or one form or another. It has favorably reviewed, one reviewer calling it "a work of immense erudition"[1].


Contents:
  1. On The Experience of Moral Confusion 576
  2. The Myth of Barter 577
  3. Primordial Debts 578, 579
  4. Cruelty and Redemption 580
  5. A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations 581, 582
  6. Games with Sex and Death 582, 583
  7. Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization 584, 585, 587, 589, 591, 593, 594, 597
  8. Credit Versus Bullion, And the Cycles of History 597, 606
  9. The Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) 606, 607
  10. The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD) 610, 611, 612
  11. Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450-1971) 612, 614, 615
  12. The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined (1971-...) 617, 619, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 629
  1. ↑ http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/07/04/in-rousseaus-footsteps-david-graeber-and-the-anthropology-of-unequal-society-2/



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