Sometimes, the decision as to whether a particular instrument is one or the other will be a judgement call. But that does not mean that you cannot separate the two, any more than the existence of shades of grey mean that you cannot tell white from black.
It is indeed a matter of confidence. And the only people whose confidence matter are the ones operating the clearing system. That's why you want to protect the short-term secured commercial paper market.
But fuck the Dow, and fuck Wall Street. They are not system-critical.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Wall Street does not produce steel, it does not produce ball bearings, it does not build ships, it does not grow food, it does not manufacture chemicals, it does not mine copper, it does not smelt lead, and so on and so forth and etcetera.
Ergo, Wall Street is not the system that needs to be saved.
Now, Wall Street may hold hostage some part of the strategic infrastructure that we need in order to save the system. The solution to that problem is to shoot Wall Street in the back of the head, take the strategic infrastructure from its cold, dead hands and then dump it in a shallow grave.
And btw it's not a case of either Public = State or Private = Corporation. It's quite possible to bring both within a partnership framework. Glasgow now has four genuinely municipal partnerships with private sector partners. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
