Egon Schiele - (Couldn't Find More Information About Painting)
Today, I felt preternaturally pissed off as I was working out at the gym watching CNBC cover the last hour of today’s market rally. I couldn’t figure out why I felt angry. It was interspersed with some happiness due to the knowledge that higher stock prices, at least in the short run. After some more thought on the way back from the gym, I started thinking about all of the economic news and analysis that I have gotten into the habit of ingesting lately and how it’s been making me feeling.
Doom-cheering is not terribly helpful to me. It does not add value to my day, but I feel a compulsion to obsess over it anyway. There is nothing that I can do to change the economy as a whole. I have no assets to protect aside from some clothes, a laptop and a Kindle. I’m thinking about a career that will involve finance, but the way that I consume information now will doubtlessly be different than the way that I do now.
I also feel uncertainty about the pronouncements of market gurus favored by libertarians – like Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Peter Schiff, Gary North – and the writers at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. I haven’t read much of the Austrian literature, but I have a sense that if its predictive powers were as powerful as its partisans make it out to be, it would be pulling in a lot more money than it is now, and its scholars would be poached quickly. I know that’s not an airtight argument against it – after all, conventional economics is largely gobbledygook, and it’s still taught world-wide.
I know that psychology is what drives both individuals and groups. Furthermore, I am not so willing to block out the unforeseeable effects that technological advancement might have. For example, the cost savings of cloud computing alone to businesses large and small could be massive.
As far as I can tell, the real crisis is centered on government finances. The “financial system” could have easily survived a few major firms being blown up. Markets work. I’m no longer so sure that the government is going to blow up. It has major fiscal problems, but perhaps with more pressure from major bond-holders, programs will be slashed and perhaps a recovery will take place. The alternatives are, as I mentioned in an old post, hyperinflation or default.
I know that the people running the government are, in some special cases, very smart, and they understand this. I doubt that they’ll let it happen
Then again, perhaps I will believe whatever Erin Burnett wants me to.
