doom | Barataria - The work of Erik Hare

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
– Pablo Picasso

Long ago, artists were called on to, more or less, represent the world around them in some form that ennobled the subject at hand. In the Baroque Era, paintings usually depicted either the ruling class or the saints in ways that made mythologies of power real. Music was used to provide dignity to a setting or to magnify the glory of God himself to every heart that pounded along with the moment. Not today.

An artist today is supposed to be someone who pushes the boundaries of our world by creating a new understanding of what it means to be human. The mythology is something otherwise dormant within us. That makes the statement by Picasso, a creator and master practitioner of this view of art, even more troublesome.

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What’s a few more billion dollars a month in today’s money? On Thursday, the Federal Reserve announced that they were going to purchase $40B more mortgage backed securities every month, a total of $85B, with money they more or less print themselves. It’s the third round of Quantitative Easing, or QE3, but this time they left the dollar amount open ended. We can guess that by the time they stop the total amount printed will be around $2T. That’s more like the insane numbers we’ve gotten used to the last four years.

They are doing this because unemployment remains stubbornly high in a weak economy. Why they picked mortgages and what affect it will really have is another long story, but the bottom line is that election year or not the Fed is on the case and doing whatever it can. But is it too much? And what comes after all this money is printed? There are a lot of questions. Let’s work our way through them.

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