Back by Popular Demand - Foodie Friday

So I like curries, and I like noodles, and I like curry noodles like they serve at Thai joints, and I thought to myself yesterday, why couldn't you wed sweet-spicy Indian flavors with Western-style wheat-based noodles. On occasion it pays to court catastrophe in the kitchen, and the little experiment paid off.

Spicy Spiced Spaghetti

2 medium yellow onions, halved and sliced paper thin
5-6 cloves of garlic, smashed and diced
1 red bell pepper, brunoised
1 small yellow squash, brunoised
1 small tomato, chopped
several small, very spicy chiles, chopped
fresh thyme
olive oil
sea salt
whole cumin
whole fennel seed
whole allspice
whole clove
filtered water
1 lb. good dry spaghetti
high-quality plain organic yogurt

In a heavy-bottomed sauté pan, heat a splash of olive oil. When it is hot, add the sliced onion. Sauté until soft and clear, then reduced heat to low and caremalize until golden-brown--at least 1 hour.

To make the sauce, heat olive oil and diced garlic slowly in a heavy-bottomed pan. When the garlic begins to pop, add the squash, peppers, hot peppers, and tomato along with a generous pinch of sea salt. In a mortar and pestle, grind two generous pinches of cumin and fennel seed along with 5-6 allspice berries and one clove. Add to sauce along with 2 cups of filtered water. Add fresh thyme. Stir well, bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Cover and simmer 30 minutes to allow the spice oils to evenly distribute. After 15 minutes or so, add the caremalized onions and stir thoroughly. Continue to simmer, covered, but not too tightly. You want some evaporation so the sauce thickens.

Cook your pasta until a minute or so underdone. Drain and return to pot. Place over high heat and add the sauce. Cook together for another minute, coating the noodles well. Serve in shallow bowls with a light garnish of a tablespoon of yogurt (as you would use cheese on Italian pasta).

Neuromancer

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh. Ah. Hah! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Gladitorial Combat and Other Entertainments

The Dow Jones industrial average, which has had three days of swings of more than 400 points, is still down about 410 points for the week, although that was erased quickly as the market opened Friday.

“Nobody knows how sustainable this is, but the immediate reaction just to the rumors about the steps yesterday showed that this has the potential of being the beginning of the end,” said Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Company. “The problem has been negative psychology and the lack of liquidity and this move by the Fed and the Treasury may just be part of a solution to that. It’s been a crazy couple of days. In my entire career I haven’t seen anything as crazy as this.”

-Reported in The Times

The problem . . . negative psychology . . . couple of days . . . What?

400 point daily swings aren't indicative of, whadayacallit, a functioning market, but of a gang of panicked, headless chickens reacting to any bit of data with no holistic, synthetic, systemic analysis of just what the fuck is going on. Traders have absolutely no idea what they're doing, thus the wild gyrations. The notion that this is a "liquidity crisis" spurred on by sad-sack psychology, that the solution consists of a billion here, a trillion there in public-sector capital, is only that much more indicative that the geniuses running the store can't even read a balance sheet. I mean, the largest single financial entity in the world, which is the United States Federal Government is trying to rescue the so-called private economy by a.) absorbing trillions of dollars in debt obligations and b.) making multi-billion-dollar, off-the-books cash payouts from its own treasury. That ain't psychology; it's catastrophe.

I suppose this is all bad for my retirment account, but damned if I'm not enjoying it. Watching market apologists who believe that the storm is going to blow over and the ship right itself sometime in the next forty-odd days get swept overboard, food for crabs, is going to be even better. I caught a brief snippet of Kudlow the other day and thought to myself, Now there is a man with blood in his stool. At this point, these motherfuckers better hope the Large Hadron Collider swallows the fucking world. It's their only hope.

Credit Where Due

No love lost between me and Obamania, but this

John McCain can’t decide whether he’s Barry Goldwater or Dennis Kucinich

is a good line.

From Each According to His Liability, to Each According to His Greed

So I turned on NPR this morning and heard a story about tainted baby formula in China, but what struck me was the closing:

It's a question many others are asking here, where so many unscrupulous traders put profit before human lives.

Unlike here in the Socialist Worker's Paradise of the United States. Good Dog, remember when it was a big deal that Hugo Chavez nationalized Venezualen petroindustry? Physician, heal thyself!

Even John McCain's been catching up on his dialectical materialism, or whatever.

We’re going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street.

Yeah! Down with the capitalist vultures! Arise ye workers from your slumbers! At last ends the age of cant!

People, particularly those who write and yabble about economics in the media, seem desperately confused about what, precisely, led to the "crisis in the market." In fact, the line from A-to-Z is straight and easy to follow. The complexity of the various investment vehicles and insurance schemes that are now collapsing like so many card houses, their oft-lamented opacity, and the labyrinthine undertakings of the failing financial institutions are all baroque detail, fancy scrolling, and gold leaf on the stolid edifice of our failures. American "capitalism" abandoned capital for debt. I mean, rather than investing money, it invested obligation. I mean, it "collateralized debt." It paid its IOUs with IOUs.

At its most essential, our economy rested not on a foundation of production, but of consumption. Remember. The Consumer Economy. But an economy built on consumption, producing nothing of value, has no means or mechanism to drive up general wages. Wages in the United States have stagnated for three decades, at least. Since this would naturally lead to a situation where consumption would likewise stagnate, some alternative means of producing spendable income had to be created. The United States government and the Federal reserve embarked upon a deliberate project to remove restraints on home-ownership (such as being able to afford to buy a home) and then to allow--to encourage--these new "homeowners" to collateralize their own mortgage obligations in the form of loans, which they would use to buy TVs and new bathrooms and Hummers and brand-name purses and so on and so forth. No one worried that this constituted a liability backed by a liability, because Home Prices Were Going to Go Up Forever! Of course, what drove rising home prices was not an increase in quality, nor an increase in actual personal wealth, but rather the fact that buyers on the housing market were afforded increasingly large mortgages with decreasing obligations to make down payments or to, you know, pay the fuckers back.

The financial institutions then took these mountains of liability and treated them as assets. On the proposition that one ah dese days folks would pay back what they owed, which on the scale of rationality is right up there with The Rapture, they leveraged money which they in fact had already spent purchasing houses for America's vast herd of impecunious private citizens into investment capital. Needless to say, it's all going to hell.

Fortunately, Who Is IOZ? is Too Big to Fail, and we shall continue our color commentary from the sidelines until the plebs set fire to the stadium.

Missed Connection

I think I saw you wave. You wore a skirt.
Write back if this is you (and tell me what
I wore so that I know you’re not a random flirt
who's trolling craigslist like a little slut.)
Your eyes are very green (or maybe blue).
I’ve seen you wearing something like a dress.
We’ve never really spoken, but it’s true
that I’ve jerked off to dreams of your caress.
It's true that in my longing I have dreamt
of your long hair (unless it’s short) and thought
of how our mutual interest's been exempt
from all the usual rites. Oh fuck, you’re hot!
Please instant message me, or drop a line,
and make this worth the wasted company time.

The Tractonomy

Although most of the uninitiated liberal arts graduates may not know this, and a lot of businessmen are confused by it, finance and accounting are separate disciplines. Finance is really about taking and hedging risk; accounting is about counting. One looks at what can be, the other at what is. Helluva difference. For a long time, the Fed has been in the hands of the financiers, excited by things like the Laffer Curve and Ayn Rand. Both equally ridiculous. The basic function underlying banking is counting and double entry bookkeeping. If the numbers don't add up, the numbers don't add up. If they do, they do. No matter how hard you try, assets have to equal liabilities and retained value. If not, you're screwed.

-Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes

I remember the first time I worked on a big financial settlement. Big for the non-corporate world anyway. 'Bout a million bucks in total revenue. Three-way partnership, with one partner picking up most of the expenses, two partners splitting a set of commissions on particular revenue streams plus agency commissions for marketing work we did internally, and the first partner retaining what was left over to pay its own internal expenses and take profit. I'd been training for several months and had done a few of these things under direct guidance and tutelage, but it was my first time solo, my first spin on the spreadsheet, so to speak, and I recall being sort of pleasantly astounded when, after a bit of wrangling, a few corrections here and there, an error identified, a mistranscription of figures discovered, we all balanced out to within a penny. It was like, Holy shit, this stuff actually works! It's real! Like, objective, man. As revelations go, it was not unlike getting my first blow job. Wow! This is cool!

The business that I'm in is blessedly free of "vehicles" and double-secret probation and credit-swap whatsits and so on and so forth. Insofar as our rapidly devaluing legal tender represents redeemable, liquid wealth, we deal only in real money. People pay us for shit, and we pay for labor and shit, and thus we go, day in and out. The problem with big-finance accounting is the problem with observational physics in the quantum age. Just looking at it fucks up the model. Everything is probabalistic. Nothing is real. Remember that great Denise Levertov poem, "Everything that Acts Is Actual"? Well, alas, no it ain't.

Unlike physicists and their brethren, however, Accountancy did not devise new models and mathematics to understand the elaborate, intricate inner pseudoworkings of the objects of its observation, but instead contented itself to become a sort of dorm-room-Theosophical Society to the financiers, taking the old, "Well, it is what it is what it isn't" approach, because, after all, do you know how much money Arthur Anderson et al. got paid? Everyone got stoned and agreed that our solar system is just an atom in the pinky toe of some vast cosmic being, and so, like, who cares, dude? What are you talking about? Pass the chips.

This, ladies and gents, dudes and dudettes, was the American Economy. The only thing of somewhat durable value that we actually manufactured domestically was housing, and even that, well . . . have you seen the houses we build these days? Tapped on their 4" walls? Examined the caulking in the bathrooms?

We Ain't Got the Money for the Mortgage on the Cow

Though Americans like to talk about "winning" and "losing" the war in Afghanistan, on the ground it's clear that those categories aren't relevant. Of course we can "win": The real question is whether we are willing to pay the high cost of victory.

-Anne "Seriously?" Applebaum

Pay the high cost with . . . what money?

I don't go in for economic populism, but to the degree that the maintenance of public infrastructure may be the one function of government (or ideal function of government) that I have the least objection to, I have some sympathy for the Obaman line that we're spending ten quintillion dollars a second building fire stations and paintint schools in Iraq, while here in America . . . On Sunday night there was a moderately severe wind storm in Pittsburgh, and my power is still out, and expected to remain so for at least another 24 hours. Roads crumble. Bridges are closed, or ought to be, all over town. Rail service is a joke. Compared to Europe and East Asia, fuck dial-up, we might as well replace the internet with a system of semaphore. Meanwhile, the funny-money pump-n-dump full-facial economy is spiraling faster than a turd down a toilet. On NPR this morning, Bob Lenzer of Forbes actually pondered what this said about the competence and intelligence of the captains of finance:

It is absolutely extraordinary that a man of his intelligence would have not looked deelpy into the assets that were on his balance sheet. It raises serious questions about the people who have been running these major institutions. Questions about their intelligence, and their greed. Questions about how little these Masters of the Universe understood about what was going on in their own institutions.

But this is disingenuous. The questions were long-ago raised. The current round of the unravelling debacle provides answers.

Terminalology

Well, to be fair, although I agree that SP's got as much practical knowledge of foreign policy as Popeye of seamanship, I think that this whole "Bush Doctrine" episode has highlighted the fact that "doctrine" is a woefully inappropriate term, and I propose the faggier and more accurate sensibility as an alternative. We can thus bring to an end all this petty nit-mongering about the precise doxologies of the fever dream and instead understand it as an array of largely aesthetic commitments, which also nods properly to the underlying fascism of Forever-War State-Capitalism. The Bush Sensibility--with sibilant, lishping Esses.

The Unravelling

"The big question here is, have we seen all the bad news or are there other skeletons in the closet?" said Moh Siong Sim, an Asia regional economist with Citibank in Singapore.

-Reported in The Times

Dear Sir,



Orthopedically,
IOZ

If Wall Street Collapses, Pizza's on Me

The thing to bear in mind about the "melt-down" of all these investment institutions is that the mainstream narrative, that great amounts of "wealth" are being "destroyed", is a false one. The wealth never really existed.