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ed not always be i ve argued in previous articles that the industrial age is in some sense the ultimate speculative bubble a three century long binge driven by the fantasy of infinite economic growth on a finite planet with even more finite supplies of cheap abundant energy still i am coming to think that this megabubble has spawned a second bubble on nearly the same scale the vehicle for this secondary megabubble is money meaning here the entire contents of what i ve called the tertiary economy the profusion of abstract representations of wealth that dominate our economic life and have all but smothered the real economy of goods and services to say nothing of the primary economy of natural systems that keeps all of us alive speculative bubbles are defined in various ways but classic examples the 1929 stock binge say or the late housing bubble have certain standard features in common first the value of whatever item is at the center of the bubble shows a sustained rise in price not justified by changes in the wider economy or in any concrete value the item might have a speculative bubble in money functions a bit differently than other bubbles because the speculative vehicle is also the measure of value instead of one dollar increasing in value until it s worth two one dollar becomes two where stocks or tract houses go zooming up in price when a bubble focuses on them then what climbs in a money bubble is the total amount of paper wealth in circulation that s certainly happened in recent decades a second standard feature of speculative bubbles is that they absorb most of the fictive value they create rather than spilling it back into the rest of the economy in a stock bubble for example a majority of the money that comes from stock sales goes right back into the market without this feedback loop a bubble can t sustain itself for long in a money bubble this same rule holds good most of the paper earnings generated by the bubble end up being reinvested in some other form of paper wealth here again this has certainly happened the only reason we haven t see thousand percent inflation as a result of the vast manufacture of paper wealth in recent decades is that most of it has been used solely to buy even more newly manufactured paper wealth a third standard feature of speculative bubbles is that the number of people involved in them climbs steadily as the bubble proceeds in 1929 the stock market was deluged by amateur investors who had never before bought a share of anything in 2006 hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of people who previously thought of houses only as something to live in came to think of them as a ticket to overnight wealth and sank their net worth in real estate as a result the metastasis of the money economy discussed in previous posts here is another example of the same process at work finally of course bubbles always pop when that happens the speculative vehicle du jour comes crashing back to earth losing the great majority of its assumed value and the mass of amateur investors having lost anything they made and usually a great deal more trickle away from the market this has not yet happened to the current money bubble it might be a good idea to start thinking about what might happen if it does so the effects of a money panic would be focused uncomfortably close to home i suspect because the bulk of the hyperexpansion of money in recent decades has focused on a single currency the us dollar that bomb might have been defused if last year s collapse of the housing bubble had been allowed to run its course because this would have eliminated no small amount of the dollar denominated abstractions generated by the excesses of recent years unfortunately the us government chose instead to try to reinflate the bubble economy by spending money it doesn t have through an orgy of borrowing and some very dubious fiscal gimmickry a great many foreign governments are accordingly becoming reluctant to lend the us more money and at least one rising power china has been quietly cashing in its dollar reserves for commodities and other forms of far less abstract wealth up until now it has been in the best interests of other industrial nations to prop up the united states with a steady stream of credit so that it can bankrupt itself filling its self imposed role as global policeman it s been a very comfortable arrangement since other nations haven t had to shoulder more than a tiny fraction of the costs of dealing with rogue states keeping the middle east divided against itself or maintaining economic hegemony over an increasingly restive third world while receiving the benefits of all these policies the end of the age of cheap fossil fuel however has thrown a wild card into the game as world petroleum production falters it must have occurred to the leaders of other nations that if the united states no longer consumed roughly a quarter of the world s fossil fuel supply there would be a great deal more for everyone else to share out the possibility that other nations might decide that this potential gain outweighs the advantages of keeping the united states solvent may make the next decade or so interesting in the sense of the famous chinese curse over the longer term on the other hand it s safe to assume that the vast majority of paper assets now in circulation whatever the currency in which they re denominated will lose essentially all their value this might happen quickly or it might unfold over decades but the world s supply of abstract representations of wealth is so much vaster than its supply of concrete wealth that something has to give sooner or later future economic growth won t make up the difference the end of the age of cheap fossil fuel makes growth in the real economy of goods and services a thing of the past outside of rare and self limiting situations as the limits to growth tighten and become first barriers to growth and then drivers of contraction shrinkage in the real economy will become the rule heightening the mismatch between money and wealth and increasing the pressure toward depreciation of the real value of paper assets once again though all this has happened before just as increasing economic abstraction is a common feature of the history of complex societies the unraveling of that abstraction is a common feature of their decline and fall the desperate expedients now being pursued to expand the american money supply in a rapidly contracting economy have exact equivalents in say the equally desperate measures taken by the roman empire in its last years to expand its own money supply by debasing its coinage the roman economy achieved very high levels of complexity and an international reach its moneylenders we would call them financiers today were a major economic force and credit played a sizeable role in everyday economic life in the decline and fall of the empire all this went away the farmers who pastured their sheep in the ruins of rome s forum during the dark ages lived in an economy of barter and feudal custom in which coins were rare items more often used as jewelry than as a medium of exchange a similar trajectory almost certainly waits in the future of our own economic system though what use the shepherds who pasture their flocks on the mall in the ruins of a future washington dc will find for vast stacks of treasury bills is not exactly clear how the trajectory will unfold is anyone s guess but the possibility that we may soon see sharp declines in the value of the dollar and of dollar denominated paper assets probably should not be ignored and cashing in abstract representations of wealth for things of more enduring value might well belong high on the list of sensible preparations for the future image by herval courtesy of creative commons license leave a comment posted in magic politics uncategorized and tagged culture economics magic money politics religion spirituality thoughts bookmark the permalink the glamour of money posted on may 4 2010 by wudewasa an army of jacks to fight the power peter lamborn wilson in fairy tales humans can possess exterior souls things magically containing or embodying individual life force stone egg ring bird or animal etc if the thing is destroyed the human dies but while the thing persists the human enjoys a kind of immortality or at least invulnerability money could be seen as such an exteriorized soul humans created it in some sense in order to hide their souls in things that could be locked away in tower or cave and hidden so their bodies would acquire magical invulnerability wealth health the victoriousness of enjoyment power over enemies even over fate but these exterior souls need not be hidden away they can be divided almost indefinitely and circulated exchanged for desire passed on to heirs like an immortal virus or rather like a dead thing that magically contains life and begets itself endlessly in usury it constitutes humanity s one really totally successful experiment in magic no one calls the bluff and after 6000 years it seems like nature in fact an old chinese cosmogonic text claimed the two basic principles of the universe are water and money it s worth noting that in marchen folk tales the characters with external souls are often the villains clearly the practice must appear uncanny to any normal society in which magic call it collective consciousness in active mode is channeled through ritual and custom to the life of all not the aggrandizement of one against all black magic or witchcraft in the form of money the exterior soul shattered into fragments so to speak can be put into circulation but also stolen monopolized guarded by dragons so that some unlucky humans can be stripped of all soul while others gorge or hoard up soul bits of ancestors and victims in their goulish caves or banks etc the beloved in the tale may also have an exterior soul it falls into the grasp of the evil sorcerer or dragon and must be rescued in other words desire which is alienated in the form of a symbolic object reified fetishized can only be restored to its true fate love by re appropriation from the expropriator stealing it back from the wizard the task falls to jack the third and youngest sometimes an orphan or disinherited possibly a fool a peasant with more heart than any prince generous bold and lucky exactly the same story can be seen acted out in every honest ethnographic report on the introduction of money into some pre monetary tribal economy even without the usual means of force terror oppression colonialist imperialism or missionary zeal money alone destroys every normal culture it touches cargo cults and ghost dances interestingly in nearly every case some sort of messianic movement cargo cult or ghost dance type resistance movement springs up within a generation or two after first alien contact these cults invariably make appeal to spirits or even demons when circumstances really begin to deteriorate for the power to overcome money to provide good things without recourse to the black magic of money the vampirization of other peoples external souls the malignancy of wealth that is not shared this is a major trope in all the tales jack gives away part of his last loaf precisely to the power animal or shaman or old lady with the very gift he ll need in his quest but he gives unwittingly not in expectation of exchange jack always stands for what polanyi and mauss call the economy of the gift a great many fairy tales must have originated in folk memories of earlier non hierarchal social structures embodied in narrative myth and ritual and given focus during the period when this ancient polity was threatened and finally overcome by later or alien systems particularly by money by the coins that always appear in these tales proudhon believed that money had originally been invented by the people as a means to pry loose and force into circulation the hoarded wealth of the dragon the oppressor class this idea has interesting resonances it points to the fact that for the people money in hand represents not oppression but pleasure gratified desire money may not be the root of all evil but given the existence of money love of money is quite natural alchemy epitomizes this jouissance of money in the fairy tale concept of transmutation production of gold without labor as a free gift of nature to her lovers jove s body as shower of golden coins as the people in person jack wins the treasure but in doing so removes its curse its dragonish malignancy because in him the treasure finds its rightful end in happiness i e free distribution the gift hence the great feast that ends so many tales and the wedding between peasant lad and princess that levels distinctions and restores external souls to their bodies but proudhon s notion is contradicted by myth which attributes the invention of coins to a king not croesus of lydia who actually did invent coins 7th century bc but midas who choked on magical gold his externalized soul dionysus and silenus gave him his wish an then saved him by revoking it allowing him to vomit all the gold into the river pactolus in phrygia the historical midas lived in the 8th century bc and phrygia is not far from lydia where rivers also ran with gold and electrum and coins first appeared as temple tokens coins may seem to regain their innocence when they are spent rather than hoarded but but in fact just at this moment they betray us by leaving us and never returning in the end all coins end up in the usurer s vault money is already debt it says so on the us 1 bill that encyclopedia of hermetic imagery and secret doctrine of money jack never really wins jack s triumph lies not in the ever after but only in a moment that is forever remembered and invoked as lost obviously jack never really wins otherwise we wouldn t call these stories fairy tales and relegate them to the nursery the savage pre monetary world of mere childhood the idea that marchen contain esoteric teachings on economics will probably sound ridiculous but only to those who ve never really read them with polanyi s or mauss s economic anthropology in mind the old russian cycle jack ivan strikes me as particularly sensitive to this aspect of the material almost as if socialism had a subconscious pre echo in the great russian fairy tale collections of the early 1900s among the uniquely slavic motifs of this cycle everyone loves the tales of baba yaga the little house on great chicken legs that walks and moves wherever the wicked witch desires the image s power involves implications that baba yaga functions not only as the witch s house but also as external soul it is both shield and weapon space and motion cave and magic carpet i can t help thinking of it as a symbol of capital itself especially in its purely magical end phase in the global era the baba yaga might be an offshore bank ready to pull up stakes and flee to some freer market or a shoe factory on its way to ...