Hey, I suppose a blog rounding-up various Facebook posts and miscellaneous discussions over the last month or so might be good. No guarantee I’ll keep this up “as a tradition”.

What does the crisis look-like to the bourgeois? I would posit that it looks like an avalanche of benefit with a few rough-spots. For example, the program of (Unite State’s) “state bankruptcy” provides a massive opportunity for speculative capital to profit from the further buffeting of US state’s bond prices.

The uncertainty of Greece’s situation was a cornucopia for the world’s hedge funds.

The state bankruptcy plan would double to the size of this casino while keeping the rules of the game about the same – ie, a game of “chicken” where the local government is ostensibly bullied into greater and greater austerity measures by speculative attacks.

I commented on The China Study Group’s blog concerning the various debates around the crisis. I think the debate is worth continuing and I look forward to any replies. One thing I’d say about using statistics to judge the crisis is that I’d rather use no statistics than a small sample of statistics that are probably wrong. This isn’t to say one should ignore statistics. A thorough read of Doug Noland’s Credit Bubble Bulletin can provide the reader a wide of range of statistics which are worth comparing against the single statistic Aufheben cite. But even this gives one just a “sense”. If some academic could do a detailed analysis accounting for all of capital’s mass, all the fake profits, all the hidden inflation and so-forth, it might show whether or not capital is really having a crisis of accumulation. Until then, it actually seems wiser to the judge the situation by capital’s behavior than by a simple look at the official figures.

Is crisis “good for us” or “bad for us”? Such a question means little. I believe it is something like a disease entering a terminal stage, where it must either be cured or kill the patient. What are the odds of one or the other? How could anyone expect anyone to know the answer.

More in a bit…