Krudd and Co are giving 2 million “consumer families” (targeted because they were seen as the least likely to save the money) a pre-Xmas bonus this week .

What does that tell you?.

Col Rouge, no one else seems to have answered the question so here goes.
It tells us that Rudd and Co are very naive and are not fit to run the country, that's what it tells us.

David

David,

Col asked me the question ... I answered: "Environmental, ecological and economic sustainability is difficult to achieve (as is now so patently obvious), especially for the “innovatively (sic) challenged”, like you say."

Was my answer that difficult to understand?

As to your answer, who do you think is fit to "run the country"?

Oh dear oh dear. The question is the fundamentals of capitalistic economic life in the context of the current global economic crisis and I see people arguing about their interpretation of economic theory including, would you believe, that of the archaic Mr Marx. I suggest there are two interesting but fundamental threads to be followed. (One) is who knew what and when. and (two) who exactly is exposed to debt and how much are they exposed..A sub set of (two) is how much was China exposed to debt because of its investment practices.

It is flattering to read the number of comments on my article but disappointing that they have little reference to what was actually written. Most responses quibble about the concept 'free market' or engage in a slanging match on Ayn Rand's ideas. (For what it is worth, I believe that Ayn Rand's literary world is a fictitious one inhabited by caricatures!)

I would like to read reactions to the references in the paper to the relative importance of 'countervailing power' and 'competition' in market functions and to the concept of 'The General Theory of Value'

Peter: to answer your query…

The explicit premises of your argument are that the financial crisis is because of “unregulated extreme-end” capitalism; and that the failure of unregulated markets shows that capitalism needs regulation. The implicit premise is that the task of economic theory is to suggest governmental interventions that bring markets closer in practice to a theoretical perfection, or at least to a better outcome.

You are spot-on that there is a need for economic theory to be subject to an epistemological review to test the validity of what it contains. However I respectfully suggest that your own argument does not withstand the necessary critical scrutiny of epistemology.

To begin with, your argument simply assumes as a given that the financial crisis arises spontaneously out of ‘unregulated markets’ and has nothing to do with governmental interventions, in particular governmental control of the central nervous system of a market society: the price mechanism of the money supply.

This is an economic question, and the first epistemological issue is: how do we know your assumption is correct as a given? At the very least, you should open the issue up to critical examination.

To even begin ignoring that task as you do, you would need to be able to point to an unregulated market. But certainly that does not describe the money supply, and therefore the financial markets, in the U.S.A. or any other of the western countries.
How are we to know whether government’s manipulation of the money supply of the entire economy, and compulsory imposition of permanent inflation of fiat money, might not have something to do with the financial and economic problem?

To assume one way or the other at the outset as you do, is to assume what is in issue, which is circular, which is fallacious, which is against epistemology; because our way of knowing must stand to reason.

Similarly, the method of proceeding by identifying the conditions for a “perfect” market, and then introducing regulations intended to make practice more closely comply with this theoretical perfection, is problematic for a number of reasons.

For those who missed it, a quote from one of dio's earlier toxic emissions: "The existence of the Federal Reserve alone disproves the entire thesis of these articles. The Federal Reserve is a government monopoly of the money supply".

So, if you missed it behind dio's postures and pretences to ideological perceptiveness, there it is in all its flatulence: the most conspicuous, basic error on this thread, claiming "the Fed monopolizes money supply", whereas myself and examinator (if not Col Rouge and ORAMZI too) already identified the inherently unregulated nature of speculation in the derivatives market. Remember: that derivatives market exploded its fake, multi-quadrillion-dollar money supply in PRIVATE contracts - many barely discovered - quite OUTSIDE the Fed!

Such basic facts are the reason why I urge dio to just shut up or go away, because some of OLO's onlookers may be unaware of the derivatives trade's causal significance in this systemic meltdown.

Therefore, at least since Bear Stearns sank lower than the Titanic, the derivatives market's gargantuan scale, centrality in debt-stimulation, and ultimate unpayability all most clearly signaled the basic dynamic underlying this disintegration of recent decades' unregulated, monetarist capitalism.

All of dio's syllables, feigned rhetorical style and other poses at theoretical sophistication amount to nothing, except perhaps to demonstrate that dio's toxic pomposity matches dio's ignorance. Such a Grand Canyon of ignorance is probably this thread's closest metaphor for the grand fraud and economic Black Hole of the derivatives market itself.

Wedgetail: it seems to me that you implied the causal problem of derivatives when alluding to the system's "unregulated" behavior. However, I maintain that the repeated insinuations of "environmentalist" economic concerns threaten a futile effort at filling the derivatives hole with an at least equally toxic monetarist fiction in ETS a.k.a. fart taxes.