In turbulent times, we get an increase in prophets, astrologers, clairvoyants, magicians and mountebanks. Perhaps we can place more reliance on the significance of their appearing, than on the things they have to say.
"Deepcaster", who I think of as the Nostradamus of finance, often refers to a shadowy clique he calls The Cartel; if only one could identify them - or him! But there is some basis for the paranoid - for example, who owns the Federal Reserve does indeed seem to be a secret; though I doubt the chairman strokes a white cat. Here are some of Deepcaster's tips for economic survivalism:
Keep a significant portion of your wealth in tangible assets including Precious Monetary Metals (in amounts subject to timing considerations) and Strategic (e.g. Crude Oil) and select agricultural commodities which the public needs and regularly uses...
Attempt to make, although it may be very difficult, an evaluation of counterparty strength. Regarding options, for example, are they clearing house guaranteed? And how strong is the clearing house?
“Go local” in banking, and commercial, and essential goods supply relationships. “Self reliance” and “local reliance” are key goals...
Develop an investing and trading regime for certain key tangible assets markets to minimize or avoid the impact of Cartel-initiated takedowns...
Stay informed...
Since we're going back to the Seventies, here's Al Stewart's 1973 cult Nostradamus lyric (from Past, Present and Future). There's always a little frisson in old mortality. Speaking of which, Jeffrey Nyquist returns to his Cassandran theme of America as ancient Athens on the brink of the Peloponnesian catastrophe.
I shouldn't laugh too much at all this. The vibrations of the First World War were, I think, felt in the art and music of the years before it; and the millennarian gloom of Eliot's Waste Land (1922) was also only a few years ahead of economic, social and military turmoil. The current flock of seers and chanters may be like the restless sheep before the earthquake.
4 comments:
I went to two exhibitions last week:
Breaking the Rules at the British Library, and then War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication, at the Imperial War Museum.
The first informs the eye for the second. They bear out absolutely your last para. Go if you are in London. But your post seems to suggest there should be an imaginative portrayal of future turmoil, which there was then, as these exhibitions show, at the overturn of all the norms. But there isn't. The art fair at Bologna last month was notable for the poverty of ideas, reference and communication, not to speak of technique, of this century. Until the 1980s there was wonderful work; post the mid-nineties (everything is for sale at the Bologna) Mr HG began to breathe more easily as I am on a 'spend the cash as it won't be worth the paper it's written on soon' bender.
Why is there so little cultural reaction to the rearrangement that is going on?
Thank you for your most interesting and, as usual, informative and enlightening response.
Re your question, I can only think that people are bamboozled by the superficial dullness and remoteness of the structural alterations. The peasants are being robbed of their birthright by highfalutin', paralysingly boring legalese.
There is also the way in which the news media have effectively been suborned (so many journalists seem to think they are as grand as the subjects of their attentions), and distracted by celebrity.
Then there is the art world, which if Hirst and Emin are anything to go by has become morbid, self-obsessed, gross, trivial and crassly, sensationalistically commercial.
Oh, and many of the young are in despair, and are destroying themselves with drink and drugs.
Tescos have an offer on baked beans at the moment. And we've got a dandy new ladder so that we can get into the attic easily. Next stop: sardines.
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