Financial Fun, Twice Removed

Morning coffee and paper reading time yielded the following reward:

"This money was entrusted to a few thousand traders who sloshed it around the world in search of the highest returns. These traders live in a high-tech version of Plato’s cave. They do not see reality directly. Instead they see the shadow of reality as it dances around in numbers on their computer screens. They form perceptions about other people’s perceptions of where the smart money is going next, so they’re three or four psychological levels removed from normal economic activity."

[This excerpt is from David Brooks NYT op/ed. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/opinion/07brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin]

Of course, as a fan of ancient philosophy (and as a bigger fan of Plato specifically) references to the Cave analogy always provide a warm fuzzy. And I think Mr. Brooks has got it right on this one. I've always been somewhat curious as to how this whole economic system works, especially considering that so little of it is tangible (especially since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in '71). All these financiers deal in abstractions of abstractions, which at the end of the day are backed up by currencies which are backed up by... nothing (except military force, maybe?). I guess in the Weberian sense we have the tradition of law and the iron cage of bureaucracy to provide some sort of rationalization for our behavior and belief, but that hardly seems like justification for faith in a global financial system. So we can keep digging for grounds, until we find that the foundation for our faith in markets is pegged to the continuation of a reified state(s) system - yet another conglomerate of intangible entities that persevere simply because we will it.

And now that some people have become skeptical of a system that lacks material substance, the great nebulous mass of diaphanous dinero has suddenly disintegrated. The irony: the real, material things of this world are somehow now intangible! People lose their cars and homes, jobs and businesses, etc. People cannot get (imaginary/abstract) credit to secure the real things that they need to exist. But those things (X) are at point (Y) at time (T1) now. The only thing stopping exchange is the abstraction that we created: currency, which isn't really real anyway. As in the Cave, it's just a semblance... airy stuff that removes us from the real.

Step out into the Sun, bitches! There's all sorts of goodness out there ready to be put to the service of human potential-actualization. We simply need a better way to make exchange possible.