What’s on Charlie Rose:
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cd1897 01/30/2010 05:50 PM Report
Not one question about India?
REMant 01/12/2010 10:59 PM Report
Well, he's right, I think, we won't confront our profligacy, but it is because so much of our culture and identity is based on it, not really unlike India for ppl like Churchill in that respect. We patronize and bribe ppl. That's what we mean by mkt society or democracy. Just today it emerged that this is the course the admin will try to take in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq (and Vietnam). It is, as Ferguson remarked re Chi-merica, what Hume noticed about public debt two and one-half centuries ago, that holders are left no choice but to support it. Economically, in fact, we have never really been very productive, rather we mostly exploited this continent's natural resources in the first 100 yrs of our existence, and in recent years we have used our position to get others to support our indebtedness, all the while telling them how generous we are and how good it will be for them to go along with us. And that is in fact what globalization or imperialism has always been about. But he's wrong about monetarism, because we have been inflationists since the beginning as well, and that is indebtedness too, indeed even more so than our govt debt, and neither president, nor Congress have any control over the Fed. All that Bernanke is trying to do is to prime the pump of this two-century-old pyramid scheme. It doesn't seem to me, BTW, that the UK has resolved this issue yet, itself. Buffett is betting that in the long run we will have to rely increasingly on electricity for transport and that will mean, in some form, trains, and in the short term BNSF shares are "depressed." It is in line with his oft-touted prescription to look for value in monopoly, and railroads are a monopoly, as ppl found out in the 19th c. For the co it probably ensures a more reliable source of finance for big projects, and for Buffett a fit for his insurance business.