discipline posted:
you should read that paper I posted about making finance productive it might help clear some of that up

i don't have access and couldn't find it somewhere else. it looked interesting though because this:

A principal forum for the ‘making’ of finance sector productiveness, it shows, has been the tradition of national accounting and its reporting of key economic metrics such as gross domestic product. By placing different activities on different sides of a pivotal ‘production boundary’, national income statisticians effectively dictate what counts as productive – as adding value to the economy – and what does not.

is something i've been fascinated with and a Big Deal in general imo. those statistics actually got created in the 30's in an attempt to figure out wtf was going on, but they have long since become highly "politicized" (such as the switch from GNP to GDP in the 1990's)

e: which the paper probably mentions

Joint Chiefs chair Gen Martin Dempsey said Friday he was “extraordinarily concerned” about the euro’s viability due to the potential for civil unrest and the breakup of the EU. He told reporters:

The eurozone is at great risk. It is unclear whether measures taken so far will be the glue that holds it together. We are extraordinarily concerned by the health and viability of the euro because in some ways we’re exposed literally to contracts but also because of the potential of civil unrest and breakup of the union that has been forged over there.

His comments came as EU leaders banded together to back tighter budget enforcement with 26 of the 27 members signaling their willingness to join a “new fiscal compact” to resolve the crisis. But a Franco-German drive to enshrine new budget rules in a modified EU treaty failed, when non-euro Britain refused to go along. The US military is revising its strategy to adapt to budgetary cuts designed to reduce the ballooning US deficit. Dempsey spoke about his concerns for the euro as he discussed the strategic risks posed in different parts of the world. In a study published Thursday, the CFR ranked the eurozone among the main threats facing the US. It pointed to a risk of “intensification of the European sovereign debt crisis that leads to the collapse of the euro, triggering a double-dip US recession and further limiting budgetary resources.” Other countries identified as priorities for US national interests included China, Iran, North Korea, Mexico, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/summit-finance-us.e1w

dm posted:
we are presently experiencing a crisis of the crisis.

this must be my thesis. in part i'm inspired by mcnally here because i do think his depiction of a general "global slump" is accurate. at the same time, i also recognize the process of its self-development as important in its own right. the truth can only be reached with a unity of form and content so that the slump may know itself as crises and the crises as slump.

as a beginning, what happened in 2008 was necessarily a false form of its appearance and was easily refuted as such with the emergence of the recovery. at the same time, it already contained elements of the next crisis (the present one), just as the present crisis contains the last one as a vanishing element within itself.

discipline posted:

discipline posted:
Making Finance Productive, B. Christophers (2011)

it was really good for a number of reasons, but i partially disagree on his conclusion. i am proudly in the second category of people who are "mistaken" about the argument. while it is important to acknowledge the discursive power that the national accounts provide, we shouldn't reify them in the process. this does not preclude paying more attention to the "how" of the alleged productiveness.

even forced into a narrow "productive/unproductive" scope of discussion, one can say--anus firmly clenched--that the negation of an affirmation is not the same as a denial. we're left with three assertions:

1) finance is productive
2) it is not the case that finance is productive
3) finance is unproductive

the negation of 2 (such as citing the national accounts) means that 1 is true, but says nothing about 3. the negation of 3 is just saying that finance is not unproductive. but the national accounts don't record anything as unproductive and cannot say anything either way about such claims. hence while finance may have been made "productive", it was never made "not unproductive", which would require a theory of value to back the national accounts

the fact that there is no such theory of value to back them is, i think, a relevant part of the history to be addressed:

http://marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch16.htm

I sympathise, therefore, with the pre-classical doctrine that everything is produced by labour, aided by what used to be called art and is now called technique, by natural resources which are free or cost a rent according to their scarcity or abundance, and by the results of past labour, embodied in assets, which also command a price according to their scarcity or abundance. It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This partly explains why we have been able to take the unit of labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.

shennong posted:
i've been talking with some other people about time banking for a while, and the great advantage is that you can evade taxation and state intervention because you're not using a market value system, but how do you hook that up to exchanges of goods? the challenge in transitioning away from the current exchange system to one that's still useful for dealing with, say, strangers from other communities, but is more in line with our values are difficult to wrap my head around

i've been banging on about time banks etc recently too, and people are starting to get on board.

i'll be meeting my local Occupy this week, as well as a few social centres to try and 'sell' them on timebanks.

exchanging goods (rather than just time) makes things more complicated but other time banks (both today and in the 1930s - mentioned here) hooked up with tool libraries to value tools in terms of time (eg a hammer = 15mins lawnmower = 1hr) that you get credited when you lend them out.

LETS also have some system that allows for exchange of goods but i'm not up to speed on them atm


for engaging with strangers/market exchange, i'm wondering if the timebanks can print their own currency (with a QR code tied into the system) that they can transfer to each other and friendly businesses.
any thoughts?

xipe posted:

shennong posted:
i've been talking with some other people about time banking for a while, and the great advantage is that you can evade taxation and state intervention because you're not using a market value system, but how do you hook that up to exchanges of goods? the challenge in transitioning away from the current exchange system to one that's still useful for dealing with, say, strangers from other communities, but is more in line with our values are difficult to wrap my head around

i've been banging on about time banks etc recently too, and people are starting to get on board.

i'll be meeting my local Occupy this week, as well as a few social centres to try and 'sell' them on timebanks.

exchanging goods (rather than just time) makes things more complicated but other time banks (both today and in the 1930s - mentioned here) hooked up with tool libraries to value tools in terms of time (eg a hammer = 15mins lawnmower = 1hr) that you get credited when you lend them out.

LETS also have some system that allows for exchange of goods but i'm not up to speed on them atm


for engaging with strangers/market exchange, i'm wondering if the timebanks can print their own currency (with a QR code tied into the system) that they can transfer to each other and friendly businesses.
any thoughts?

can you write a Time Banks 101 thread?

discipline posted:
dm can I email you or chat with you on aim about my dissertation idea?

yeah, i'd be glad to! feel free to e-mail me at the one i gave you. i tried to add the AIM sn in your profile but it didn't work. i added mine to my profile, but be aware that i'm not always very consistent about using it

What happens if the euro collapses? A euro area breakup, even a partial one involving the exit of one or more fiscally and competitively weak countries, would be chaotic. A full or comprehensive break-up, with the euro area splintering into a Greater Deutschmark zone and about 10 national currencies would create pandemonium. It would not be a planned, orderly, gradual unwinding of existing political, economic and legal commitments. Exit, partial or full, would likely be precipitated by disorderly sovereign defaults in the fiscally and competitively weak member states, whose currencies would weaken dramatically and whose banks would fail. If Spain and Italy were to exit, there would be a collapse of systemically important financial institutions throughout the European Union and North America and years of global depression.

so failing to do precisely what such a thing would require is what makes it so problematic. unless of course the financial institutions are ends in themselves

Consider the exit of a fiscally and competitively weak country, such as Greece – an event to which I assign a probability of about 20-25 per cent. Most contracts, including bank deposits, sovereign debt, pensions and wages would be redenominated in new Drachma and a sharp devaluation, say 65 per cent, of the new currency would follow. As soon as an exit was anticipated, depositors would flee Greek banks and all new lending governed by Greek law would effectively cease. Even before the exit, the sovereign and the banking system would fail because of a lack of funding. Following the exit, contracts and financial instruments written under foreign law would likely remain euro-denominated. Balance sheets would become unbalanced and widespread default, insolvency and bankruptcy would result. Greek output would collapse.

if you're going to re-denominate everything, why would you give a shit about either deposits or new loans denominated in euros? it's only those instruments written under foreign law that would run into trouble.

and now we get to the straight master-slave dialectic:

If Greece storms out of the eurozone there might be little fear other countries would follow suit.

However, if Greece is pushed out of the eurozone because other member states refuse to fund the Greek sovereign and the European Central Bank refuses to fund Greek banks, the markets could beam in on the next most likely country to go. This could prompt a run on that country’s banks and stop funding for its sovereign, financial institutions and companies. Fear might actually then force the departure of the afflicted country. Exit contagion might sweep right through the rest of the eurozone periphery – Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy – and then begin to infect the “soft core” of Belgium, Austria and France.

VIOLENCE

Exits by Germany and other fiscally and competitively strong countries could be even more disruptive. This might occur amid attempts to introduce a one-sided fiscal union with open-ended and uncapped euro-bonds or other transfers from the strong to the weak without a corresponding surrender of fiscal sovereignty to prevent future crises or if the ECB were to “go Weimar”. I consider this highly unlikely, with a probability of less than 3 per cent. Following such an exit, Germany and the other core eurozone member states (perhaps excluding France) would introduce a new Deutschmark. The sovereigns in the periphery would default. The new Deutschmark would appreciate sharply. Financial institutions in the new area would have to be bailed out because of losses from exposure to the old periphery and the soft core. As nothing would be holding the remaining eurozone countries together, the rump would split into perhaps 11 national currencies. The legal meaning and validity of all euro-denominated contracts and instruments would be up for grabs. Everyone, except lawyers specialising in the Lex Monetae, would become much poorer.

Even if a break-up of the eurozone does not destroy the EU completely and precipitate the kind of conflicts that disfigured the continent in the past, the case for keeping the show on the road seems rather robust.

dm posted:

an interesting place to look for ideas would probably be books on accounting (you can find some at library.nu), especially managerial and/or cost accounting. Michael Hudson has a funny anecdote related to that:

It took until the mid-19th century for economists to recognize depreciation as an element of value. Surprising as it may seem, it was Marx who first established it as a necessary charge in pricing commodities. In his critique of the French Physiocrats, he pointed out that when Francois Quesnay produced his national income account for France, the Tableau Économique, in 1759, he overlooked the need to replenish seed, inventory and capital stock.* In addition to covering their basic expenses, buying tools and raw materials and paying rent and taxes, cultivators need to set aside seed grain to plant the next season’s crop. This seed is not available to be sold.

Just as bondholders get paid back their principal as well as interest, investors are permitted to recoup their original capital outlay without it being taxed as income. The recoupment period is spread over the expected lifetime of machinery, patent rights or other assets. Failure to acknowledge the need for this replacement out of sales revenue would give an overly optimistic picture of how well the economy is operating. Not to renew seed and capital investment would result in asset stripping – paying out revenue without maintaining a viable capital stock.

....

*The Wall Street analyst Terence McCarthy observed that Marx’s analysis of the Economic Theory of Depreciation was so complete that, “if Capital has been called the bible of the working class, the History [he is referring to Theories of Surplus Value] might well be called the bible of the Society of Cost Accountants. ... Over the whole society, failure to provide adequate depreciation reserves is, Marx implies, to negate economic progress and to begin consumption of that portion of the value of the product which Marx believes belongs neither to the laborers in industry, nor to their employers, but to the economy itself, as something which must be ‘restored’ to it if the economic process is to continue.” Marx, A History of Economic Doctrines (New York 1952:xv). This was the first English language translation of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value.

he means national income accounts as in what was being discussed in that paper that khamsek linked. it really brings home the intellectual regression that modern economics represents. insofar as representation is the presentation of presentation, i think we have every reason to concern ourselves with what is presented by presentation rather than leaving the task to statisticians that have been taught complete garbage and limiting ourselves to disputing the presentation itself

check out this lecture that David Harvey gave, especially where he starts talking about corporations and Wal-Mart (about an hour in):



i am proudly somewhat ahead of the curve in unabashedly studying bourgeois accounting/financial practices in order to seize the means of production

can you talk more about this presentation stuff and clarify exactly what you mean by presentation,etc.`? Thanks

dm posted:
Papal infallibility at least needs an explicitly stated rationale, whereas the doctrine of market confidence does not.

hahaha DAMN *makes explosion noises, imitates fireworks w/ hands*