On Roubini and the CEE menace, see this sub-thread in the currency crash diary.

While I was sceptical of Roubini's view on the scale of the problem, the issue is not untimely --here is the Euro/Hungarian Forint exchange rate from the October crisis to now:

(A less hectic but persistent devaluation since early January.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

you're onto something here, mr T. people are rebuffed by a name that smacks of nationalism, genetics, or finger-pointing.

but it's the best and truest so far, it's very difficult to name.

a simple 'sociopathy' doesn't have the same heft.

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..

Perhaps the Anglos don't like a term associated with Disease.

I have felt that this is a problem myself.  Not that I disagree with the diagnosis.  Far from it.  I have, after all, called the my country "a nation of dumb f---s!"  And I'm one of them, willingly or not. That is more pejorative and insulting than saying that we are carriers of "The Anglo Disease," even with all of the old STD connotations.  But the goal is to change the "climate of opinion" regarding the relationship between the polity and those who hold positions of power in the economy.

The truth of the matter is that most of the current "conventional wisdom" regarding the economy attained that status as a result of "think tanks" such as Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the  Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Heritage Foundation, etc., etc. which were endowed with private wealth by such worthies as Richard Mellon Sciaffe, who inherited the bulk of his fortune from his mother, and other such worthies of self-made or inherited wealth.  These institutes have promulgated a view of society and the economy that, not surprisingly, is highly self-serving for existing wealth but which has approximately the explanatory and predictive power of one of Kipling's "just so" stories, such as How the Tiger Got His Stripes."  The popular version turns Adam Smith's philosophy into a "Cult of the Invisible Hand" while ignoring everything Smith said about the need for government to insure the proper functioning of markets.  Through endless repetition from Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and a host of commentators in print and on TV this has been turned into the popular understanding, such as it is, of the economy in the USA.

The "Anglo Disease" is what has happened when US and British economic elites vigorously exploited the vulnerabilities that such a popular view created within US and British societies and economies by first gaining control of the governments, discrediting and neutering regulatory authorities and then using their newly won "flexibility" to inflate the financial sector and financial assets to outlandish proportions with respect to the entire economy as a means of providing short term prosperity and of soaking wealth from the middle and working class and delivering that wealth to  representatives of that elite through out-sized bonuses and profits from bogus financial schemes.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, "the long run" wasn't as long as they had hoped and we are not "all dead."  Instead we are stuck with massive amounts of counterfeit financial "assets," and the first depression of the 21s Century.

Many of those involved believed their own propaganda and are now stuck with assets that were purchased at absurd prices, said assets having meanwhile been used to create other financial instruments which now are liabilities.  They are at present succeeding in getting governments to use taxpayer monies and the "full faith and credit" of those governments to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own folly, while the taxpayers have no such insulation.  The surprising and hopeful development is that so many of those taxpayers are waking up and realizing that they have been had.  The challenge is to show them how they have been had.

Asking them to acknowledge that they are afflicted by the "Anglo Disease" is like telling them that, to get well, they have to smear feces on their faces!  We should be able to devise a label that is easier to sell if we want our patent medicine to fly off the shelves, even if ours has the virtue of actually working.


If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

And why does that only effect Russia? surely mountainous debt, and collapsing financial industries should do simmilar to the US and the UK?

I'm tired of this backslapping, aint humanity great BS, we're a virus with shoes Bill Hicks

As I said earlier: when will someone downrate credit rating agencies?

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.