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Economics and commerce, all built from scratch.

A New Beginning

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Barataria stands as a blog with a purpose.  Most of the time, that purpose is to tell the stories lost in the jargon of economics and finance that have come to define our recent lives far more than most people are comfortable with.

If we can’t grab what is happening around us and make it our own, how can we call ourselves a free and democratic society?  Barataria does what it can to offer a different way of looking at what is happening and relate it in story form, free of unexplained jargon.  Hopefully, this will help to make a more real and useful politics.

After a few months of big events and heavy articles, it’s time to summarize the Baratarian view on the big economic picture in one polemic and invite your comments.

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Global Currency

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Imagine a single currency, all around the world.  No more converting between Dollars and Euros and Pounds, the money in your wallet is your ticket to ride anywhere.

Sound like a fantasy?  Throughout history it’s been more or less the standard.  The coins from one era might come from Rome or Madrid or London or Beijing, but one accepted unit of exchange was the norm until very recently.  In many ways, the standard now comes from twelve Federal Reserve banks in paper form, printed with green ink.

But we’re a global society now, with total worldwide trade taking up nearly $8T of the global product of $52T.  Is it time for a new global currency that isn’t subject to the needs and politics of one nation?  More and more, the answer is “yes”.  But getting there, as with anything international, is the hard part.

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Resiliency

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Long ago, most Americans lived as Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled in the “Little House” series.  Pa Ingalls and family were out in the wilderness, surviving with the rhythm of the land and putting away what they could to survive long winters and perhaps beyond.  The family’s net worth was what they had around them – nearly all put toward surviving on their own.

That life has been replaced with interdependence based on a dollar value assigned to absolutely everything.  We all get by with any extra scratch, should there be some, not stored up to get through the winter but properly invested in convertible assets.  This means that everyone is subject to the values of the Free Market™, which determines the value of all assets including experience, talent, and work.

The real lessons from successful financial companies like Bain Capital are the demonstration of what these values of interdependence are – and how our world far beyond Pa Ingalls has become as hostile as any winter on the Great Plains.

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Scurry from the Light?

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When the lights are flipped on, tradition has it that the cockroaches that feast on the night quickly scurry for the darkness.  Those of us from more Caribbean climates know that the really big Palmetto bugs often keep going on about their roachy business as if light and dark mean nothing to them.  But you have to expect that in languid, humid air better suited for piracy and general disregard for “authority”.

Exactly what climate does the financial world operate in?  We may soon find out.  But there are many reasons to believe JP Morgan, the investment bank, already operates more like Captain Morgan, the pirate.  And they are apparently far from alone.

Just as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is working to flip the switch, a survey has come out suggesting that it may well not make much immediate difference.  Then again, it does help to know that what you have are, in fact, roaches.

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Jubilee

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Terrible news piles up in the financial world.  The famous JP Morgan inexplicable $2B derivatives loss may be as much as $9B, making everyone wonder who is in charge.  The obscurely infamous shifts in the London Interbank Overnight Rate (LIBOR) that signaled the start of the major financial collapse included a lot of manipulation and other illegal activity that’s only now coming to light.  And China is experiencing a slowdown in manufacturing that is only deepening.

It all seems unrelated, and yet it all ties together in this thang called “Globalism” – what happens in one part of the world affects everyone.  Yet there are few agreements and organizations that really have this tied together in a way that seems appropriate, at least making sure that corruption and disease in one place does not bring down the whole world.  And this points to what will have to happen to get us all to start over again – something I have taken to calling “Jubilee”.

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