Bitty Bunnies
Submitted by cfm on Sat, 2009-02-21 22:17.
"The financial crisis is first and foremost an ecological crisis.", Barnacle, Thule 2009-02-01.
Every day the stoatpack[1] grows. There are many young to feed. Such a big pack - the most powerful ever on the island and it grows daily, ever more powerful. The stoats gorge on the abundant, easy bunnies. They build up their energy and resources so they can catch more and more bunnies.[2]
| From the thrice-bent branch of an elm in my yard, Crow shadows me a daily widdershins swoop at the door. He'd flown over hot Three Mile Island well in advance of the Presidential helicopter. That during the reign of Jimmy Carter of Earth. A smoky moult and he refeathered like a sprung umbrella. He flew north to watch my farm. Crow hears the voices from the whispering winds and the offended leaves, from other crows spreading the news, from the chatter of his human enemies on the phones, on the radio, on the Internet ether. Voices. Meaning that infuriates him. He sinks his warped claws into my left shoulder and caws his neutron rage. He caws the infuriating voices into my ear, he caws them at me. Haywire cranky Crow - and I'm slow on the uptake. |
Boss Coon oversees the Bunny Exchange [BEX]. He contracts with independent boss rabbits all over the island for ever more fluffy bunnies. He doesn't raise bunnies himself; that would be inefficient and not a good use of his time. Competitive advantage - he's read Adam Smith. He's good at ferreting out the lowest cost bunny dealers in every far corner and reach of the island and collecting their bunnies for the stoats. Only a few bunnies stay with Christopher Robin and Pooh, out of system, out of reach.
The Toll Bros Badgers are straight out building stoat burrows and have been for years. The Plum Creek Pigs, largest owners of the timber and pasture where the wild bunnies have lived forever, are bulldozing the timber and pasture to make way for more stoat burrows. The Madoff, Goldman and Geithner Swine are lending money to everyone, each loan creating more stoat holes, each loan increasing the bunny trade; each loan creating more Gross Bunny Product [GBP]. More money and more debt. The ever increasing pace of expansion is so great they've been able to fabricate new ways to package the deals - clever new ways to conceal the contents from both bunnies and stoats - Moody's triple-A rated ways - ways fabricated to leave both bunnies and stoats unaware of the contents but still greedy for the financial return. Greedy to buy the repackaged loans to line their retirement holes and lay their nest eggs.
The pace of expansion multiplies faster than bunnies.
Crow caws "Unless we explicitly build ecological intelligence into the structure of our economic system, then not even technology can save us. Technology might actually make things worse by allowing us to build up an even larger ecological debt before the payment comes due - by leaving us more depleted, with less means to pay the debt."[3]
No matter. The stoats dance. The disco dance of tricksters and scoundrels.[4]
There is so much money for stoat burrows and bunnies - gobs of money, gazillions of dollars - that every stoat has a big room and two bunnies in every Calphalon dutch oven. Times are good. Bunny futures are up. The Piranhas start trading.
Money is only a claim on real physical resources and one day the money in the little island economy grows so large it exceeds the resources of the island.
"Money, no bunny, honey," shrieks Crow.
"What?" Big Stoat asks, "Why you no bring lots'a bunnies, Coon? And they's too bitty."
"Me supply lines reach ev'ry corner o' tha island an' thar be na as many bunnies ta be 'ad today. Ye've tak'n so many fer so long. All tha good bunny pass're an' tim'land 'as be'n built o'er - filled wit' stoat holes. All tha fa'ms be tapped out. We tried feedin' tha bunnies mel'mine ta boost tha growth rates. We tried puttin' 'em in smaller an' smaller hutches too. Some o' 'em dunnae ev'n haf hutches. Thayr gettin' sick. Tha farms need time ta restock an' regrow."
The price of bunnies climbs to $150 a barrel, crimping the stoat's style. Monsanto clones a few bunnies. They say future cloned bunnies will be even better and cheaper than the real thing. Monsanto promises new technologies - just around the corner - to build a better bunny and feed the world.
"Receding horizons." Crow caws. "They've been saying that for decades."
"Receding horizons," Crow caws, "where higher prices never generate profits because the prices are directly coupled to costs that rise just as rapidly as prices and eliminate any profits."
The Piranhas hold near term bunny futures, but short next year's contracts. They buy credit default swaps on the bunny futures, betting against Boss Coon and the bunny farmers. The bankers laugh; they are playing both sides of the game, financing the bunny farmers and the Piranhas - all with the bunnies' money. They win either way. They can't fail, they assume.
The banks lend to Boss Coon and the boss rabbits so they can increase bunny production. Everyone invests more and more money into alternative bunnies and bunny alternatives. The more money put into bunnies, the faster the stoats buy them, the fewer the bunnies get and the harder to find. Stoats are starting to go hungry.
There are so few bunnies.
///
"Take money," snaps the stoat. "Smartly, give me bunny."
Crow ratchets "This fundamental structural contradiction of our economic system, in which greater current resource consumption pretends to appear as if it will result in greater future security, needs to be fixed. Financial/monetary reform alone is not an adequate solution to this problem. We need to make the objective fact of mutual support manifest in the daily operation of our economic system."[5] Crow's eyes go glassy.
That's more "we" and less "me" - redefining progress by community standards, not by the sum total of individuals.... The unit for economic analysis should be the collectivity, not the individual.[6]" An infinity of greedy individuals can never make a healthy village. That we are collectives best served by our individual greed is a fallacy of composition - mere justification for greed.
There are so few bunnies. So much money, so few resources. The bankers look at their hands, at the credit default swaps they are holding. They stop lending. They know they will never be paid back if they keep lending. They know there are no resources to support continued growth and debt.
Crow caws "Financial stores of wealth do not correspond to physical caches of wealth in the same sense as a pen of bunnies." Crow's red eye pops, he freezes and spazes. He caws "If I retire and expect to live off of my 'savings', there are no warehouses under lock and key filled with bunnies dedicated to my exclusive future use. If I go on eating it is because boss coons and pigs and stoats get out every morning to work - part of which work they give to me."[c]
The Toll Bros go belly up. Stoats start losing their jobs. Some of them move back to moms and dads' burrows. There are far too many burrows.
Boss Coon is still delivering some bunnies, though fewer than he once did. The long term well-established, sustainable farmers keep producing. The price has fallen a lot - because no one has any money - so far that Monsanto has withdrawn its clones from the market and laid off its scientists, engineers and workers.
The Swine, the Badgers, Boss Coon are at a loss. What to do now? Stimulate the economy?
Crow rasps "We haven't seen anything yet. The bankruptcies and lay-offs have yet to start. Our governments will continue to make the exact wrong decisions, because their focus is on the rear-view mirror, on going back to where we were, on the return of the perpetual growth economy. It will never come back."[7]
The Piranhas close out their positions. Gaia laughs and calves off a huge ice sheet in Antarctica. And for good measure, a plague of locusts.
--
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWIW-MDZa_8
[3] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5004#comment-465595, paraphrased
[4] http://animalreviews.zelica.net/reviews/stoat.htm
[5] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=alJeSkFOeGXk&refer=home via http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-29-2009-con-firm-nation.html
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitai_Etzioni
[7] http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-24-2009-tragedy-only-resides-in.html
###
