(And the fiction that such a thing exists is part and parcel of the fiction that the economy is something other than a social subsystem.

Because the actual economy is a monetary production economy. To set up a model that emulates our economy, but where monetary aggregates do not matter in their own right, its necessary to have more information input from the future that we don't actually have, and to have synchronization between markets that we don't actually have, and for markets for goods and services and labor to be actual organized markets, and not just sets of transactions described as markets as a loose analogy.

Since you need a bunch of stuff that is not so, in order to remove the impact of aggregate monetary values in their own right, that means that in the real world, money is not neutral, and so in the real world, monetary institutions are part of the actual economy.

So there is no such thing as a "real" economy in the marginalist economist's sense of the term ... not among the monetary production economies of the world, at any rate.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

I hypothesise that if I choose not to believe in reality then absolutely none of this will effect me.

Ad astra per aspera

The sky is falling, but this current downturn isn't it. It's just another turn in the business cycle. Since the world has gone off the gold standard, there are no physical restrictions on what countries can do to correct financial imbalances. The only limit is the willingness of others to accept their money or credit.

The sky is commencing its fall IMHO but the problem does not lie in the US exchange rate. I agree with you that creditor nations share an unholy mutual interest in not seeing the dollar go entirely down the toilet.

That is not the problem.

The problem in the US is that the deficit-based monetary system is entirely - and probably permanently - fucked.

ie a pending shortage of money.

IMHO the only policies capable of avoiding the pending Depression are fiscal: a Green New Deal, for choice.

Unfortunately not one of the existing Presidential candidates shows any signs of applying any policies other than conventional monetary insanity.

Give it a few months, and lots of red lights will be showing....

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

yes it has, it was the sixties, and they've slept through the alarm.

oh yeah and jailed a quarter of the young black population, meanwhile, with imported crack and zero tolerance, guns as easy to score as a gram of mindfuck-rock.

they just built a tougher pressure cooker.

psst, that steam escaping from under the thingy in the lid, that's obama.

if it weren't for that...well, let's say it feels good to have the atlantic there.

it's kinda hilarious that the only tactic powerful enough to chill large crowds of unemployed, 'bitter' people, gathering for great sports events etc, might be to legalise puff.

less controversial than spraying them with 'anomie-gas' from helicopters or knocking them over with water cannon!

that's the last card they'll have to pull out of their ermine sleeves, lol.

go back home and, like good children, listen to your ipods, chill and dream up a better world, while we finish properly raping this one.

shurrup and watch the telly, basically...oh wait...

backs would really have to be up against the wall to make that happen, the pope would have to make it the eucharist in italy!

gonna fill those churches again though! what about it benedict?

do the math, you think waxen saints are going to pull them in for ever? why should the devil get all the best drugs?

grillo for pontiff!

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter