The Year of Living Dangerously

I finally succumbed to the blog trend. Actually, this is my second time around. I started a blog under a pseudonym about four years ago and started posting comments on the relationship between cultural and economic processes, with lots of references to post-modernism and post-structuralism, but then I started wondering who would possibly be reading such meanderings and stopped. Why start again? Just giving in to cultural pressure? Probably. In any event, I'm in the end game of a long suffering text and finding a diversion from such a process is a common malady of writers, a-b-d grad students, and profs reaching "middle age." What will I talk about --- go to satya.us and you can get a pretty good impression of what I'm interested in. Economic development and comparative economic systems, corporate finance, Marxian theory, etc. These are all the same to me, although not to my profession. So I'll talk about it. And I'll talk about topical issues, just like all the other bloggers. This is really grassroots cultural democracy, after all. It is the only forum (with widescale reach, at least in theory) that isn't controlled by conservatives or neo-conservatives (fascists?).

Why the title of this inaugural blog? Because I think this is the year of living dangerously. The U.S. economy is poised for a fall (as is the stock market(s)). The U.S. dollar has finally stopped levitating against economic gravity. The tech sector has a new (although more modest) bubble. Does anyone really believe that Google generates sufficient value to justify its current price per share? (Love the company, hate the price.) The Chinese real estate bubble is poised to burst. The folks in the red states may finally start to figure out that their jobs are being shipped overseas and Iraqi oil is not going to flood into the country and bring 10 cent a gallon gasoline, and they just might slow down on buying Dodge Magnums, Ford Excursions, and Chevy pickup trucks (I'm surprised there's no commercial version of the Bradley fighting vehicle). Speaking of Iraq, the transition from colony to neocolony is perilous, but you don't need an economist to tell you that. Most of you know it just as well as any of the experts. And, although terrorism may be good for the Republican Party, it represents an increased risk for U.S. firms operating overseas (especially those operating overseas) and neocolonialism (and the violence it requires) has a way of spawning more, not less, of this particular form of opposition. The economy, financial and real estate market bubbles, Iraq . . . that's just for starters. I had to start somewhere. So I did.