Opening thoughts

I have been told that I should start a "blog" for my ravings. I resisted until now, both because of the temerity of the thing and because I had no wish to invite untold numbers of folks to comment. It's not that I don't want comments -- I wish to learn both of my mistakes and of the thoughts, on the subject, of others at least equally concerned and I hope better informed. But a friend has just told me that I can set up a blog within some sorts of parameters perhaps cutting down on replies by those who actually know little or nothing in this field. It seems that while none of us who are not EEs would venture to hold forth on that field, for example, yet almost everyone thinks he or she qualified to hold forth on economics and politics.... But the very reason for my blog, if I actually go through with this, is to try to help others avoid the misinformation and misimpressions created and spread over, especially, the last forty years approximately, in the field of "political economy." These misunderstandings have become the common coin of most of the populace. I hope specifically to help provide better insights into the "banking" crisis and the current Depression, and thus into what might be done to help contain the damage and, at least equally importantly, prevent recurrence.

So why do I think myself at all qualified to do so? Only that I have seen gaps in the understanding of even some of the most highly-regarded commentators from the beginnings of at least the public perception of the crisis, and I believe I can help fill those gaps. But this will necessarily be a work in progress, because I too continue reading what I can to help me understand better, as well. I am a retired attorney, whose career was spent entirely in securities regulation. I watched the "problem" as it developed, and, for example, I saw the derivatives mess point directly to the problems with the "banks," beginning no later than late 1999. There is for example an insight lurking there that seems to have escaped the attention of the writer of an extremely helpful (for all of us) new book on all this by the scholar who wrote the magnificent three-volume biography of Lord Keynes. Both that gentleman (deliberately -- and for a good reason, as I see it) and a recent commentator on a superb television panel program on the subject (out of ignorance) have underplayed, for example, the role of calculated fraud in the near-toppling of the American financial "industry." Intrigued? Stay tuned.

-- Bill