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Alt 16-05-2016, 17:09   #3
Benjamin
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David: Today we have debt and derivatives, financial products that add layers of complexity to bank finance, to household finance, and frankly, to systemic stability. These two elements of debt and derivatives have never been more system-critical, nor frankly, less understood, except by a select few specialists. Are these the kinds of complexities you might expect to contribute to collapse, or is bureaucracy, is liability mismanagement – are those the types that concern you most and that you are addressing, really?

Dr. Tainter: The new kinds of financial products, derivatives and so forth, certainly make us vulnerable to loss of confidence in investments and so forth. Whether those can cause a collapse depends on, and I’ll go back to this phrase that I used before, our reserve problem-solving capacity.
Now, when the 2008 financial crisis hit, we were able to counteract the financial downturn through heavy government spending which was financed very largely by borrowing, but we have borrowed so much money to meet that crisis, and we are continuing to borrow at very high rates to finance yearly deficits, that you have to ask, if a similar crisis came along next year, would we have the credit to be able to borrow again to counteract it? Or if a similar crisis came ten years from now, and if we were to continue government borrowing at the rate at which we are, would we be able to summon the fiscal resources to counteract it?

This is the sort of thing that I think makes us vulnerable to a collapse, not having some reserve capacity to solve problems. Again, also, this is something that I think I see in ancient societies. And this is what we need to be, I think, very concerned about, and we have to have a long-term perspective on how our society and our economy evolved and what kinds of problems we are likely to face in the future. But the politicians, the political leaders who guide the country generally do not have a long-term perspective. They tend to be concerned, primarily, about the next election. So we don’t prepare for the future. Basically, we lurch from crisis to crisis, trying to solve each as if there were something to isolate it, when in fact, all of these crises are interdependent and as we solve one, that simply sets the stage for the next one down the road.

David: This idea of reserve problem-solving capacity is absolutely perfect. You mentioned, in the context of Rome, that when the treasury was full, bad things could happen and you could absorb them, you could take them in stride, because you had the resources necessary to do so, and the real vulnerability came when the treasury was empty and the only course was the desperate course, whether it was inflation of the currency, or what have you. They didn’t do so much debt financing as we do today. In fact, today, we have a financial economy which is dependent on this sort of growth in debt. Bill Gross, just a few weeks ago, suggested that if our economy does not see an increase in debt by 2½ trillion dollars per year, that we can’t sustain our growth rates. That sounds kinds of backward, that debt is the source of growth in the economy, but it implies that consumers and businesses and governments have the capacity to continue to take on these liabilities. Maybe to the man in the street that sounds a bit ponzi-esque and we hope that the letter that just went out the door is not the last letter, as in a letter scheme. I guess that reserve problem-solving capacity is exactly what you got at, in terms of having a healthy treasury for Rome. And of course, there are other ways to solve the problem than spending money.

Another author, Albert Hirschman, wrote a book many years ago called Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and he considers the breakdown of organizations, both companies and societies, and he lists exit as one possible choice. Exit, as you describe it in your book, is an economic choice. “Not going to participate.” In today’s complex society, that seems nearly impossible. We have coercion, which is made easier by the control of transportation, money flow, and information flows. As you discussed earlier, we now have new complexity in terms of Transportation Safety Administration, Homeland Security, etc. It would seem that complexity has today reached a level where exit is not possible. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Tainter: You are absolutely right. We are trapped. We cannot simplify. We cannot withdraw from the way our system has evolved and the way we have set it up. We are at the point where we really are trapped in, I have to say, a downward spiral that we can’t get out of, or we will someday get out of it when a crisis occurs, but we can’t voluntarily withdraw from it because that would create too many other problems and politicians aren’t willing to create those kinds of problems.

Zitat aus dieser Quelle: October 1, 2014, http://mcalvanyweeklycommentary.com/...lex-societies/
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