How classist was the ideology driving the inflation of the debt bubble?

Not answerable beyond the simple affirmative, of course: "It was extraordinarily classist."  But still worth a comment.  The dominant, driving assumption (yes, assumption is drive, assumptions after all are assertive) was that the the species-being of humanity was a certain becoming-American and, distinctly, a becoming-European.  (The overarching becoming-Western doesn't work, as the mutual transatlantic contempt continues to alter these bourgeois territories enormously.)  It based the mechanism of this becoming on the continuing-to-be-American of British and American consumers specifically.  The desires of these particular joe-the-plumbers were to drive them to increase a debt-emburdenedness which they would, stupidly, honor.  This piggish consumption would cause the Chindians to engage in similar debt-based contractual obligations as they increased their consumption of meat, oil, and received opinions.  Instead, the Yanks defaulted and the Chinese saved.

No-recourse

This system broke down at so many points that it now appears with the arrogant, brutish naiveté of a medieval political theology.  You cannot secure against default and the withering of desire for tat; least of all by deploying a doctrine of human nature as deluded and constrained as that of original sin.

Yes, but will it succeed?

Feudalism, Hyper-capitalism, Socialism or Utopian Star Trekian paradise? Who knows.

In a move that could only possibly make sense for Britain (since it has an independent currency and Britain is the only country in Europe with no economy beyond banking and financial services), the ECB has declared economic war on the rest of the world's wealthy elite, and socialized the future bad investments of the wealthiest European elites by guaranteeing all interbank lending. If the coordinated move stokes inflation fears in Europe, fails to lower the TED spread, or even fails to boost the Euro in the near term, the dollar could go through the roof. Whether this will happen depends on several factors. If European banks start lending to each other, they will recapitalize themselves and each other by making bad insured investments - a backdoor recapitalization. In this case there could be a race between banks and countries within the Eurozone to make as many bad investments as possible. Sound familiar? Yes, because that's how we got here. If it works, inflation internally all around. But inflation of what? Commodities of every stripe have proved themselves too vulnerable to demand-contraction, housing is going to go into oversupply in the very near future - yes, even in Europe. At first, the tech profits look too hypothetical to re-bubble, but...Energy? Yeah probably. Energy: now there is some tech with material, non-hypothetical (and yet metaphorical) teeth behind its profits. And a sector that European xenophobes will love, because it can sustain a certain discourse of 'independence'. Or maybe they will just horde it all, and everyone will start fighting over benefits. We'll see.
If it doesn't work, and credit markets don't "unfreeze", the move is going to look both desperate and indestagflationary. The economy will look so bad in Europe, and everyone will assume that banks are so unstable, that money will flee to the dollar, especially if the economic news in the states continues to be bad, and if Paulson and friends opt not to inflate and socialize their way out of the crisis (the republican illiterati will almost certainly get their way with this).
All this in freak reaction to last week's markets: the worse the news in America, the worse the news in Europe, the better the dollar did against the Euro and the Pound. Gordon Brown and the ECB are trying to break this logic. Very risky considering how complete dollar hegemony is, and how deep the hatred for Europe is in an administration that is determined to have as much affect as possible while it remains in power.

Wither

If the withering of demand produces the withering of production, what produces the withering of demand?  Efficiency of production leads to the exhaustion of consumption.  Over time all production simply conquers demand. Some commodities never really recover from this.  Like parsnips and housing.  Other commodities, like prostitutes, energy and digital media storage, we have not yet had our fill of.

Most prominent among this later category is the commodity "service".  What is service?  Well, genealogically it can be nothing else than the entire terrain of the infantile, when we infants were being absolutely served, and when we were not being served, we were absolutely alone, and absolutely helpless.  This at any rate is the dominant experience dynamic of the terrorized, anxiously-attached, neglected modern infant.

So a technology that deflates service can only be therapy, and not just a cure for bougy neurotics, but one that makes them better parents....

Housing might never recover...thank God

There are signs that lenders are planning on never securitizing mortgages again, which would be in line with a general deflation of the sector a la media in the 16th and 21st century, food in the twentieth century, and textiles in 16th century.  UBS has given up on it entirely.  

Makes you wonder:  there was once a time when a text was tactile, was a  textile, literally.  And, of course, when the literal could be taken literally, as concrete and authoritative; and of course also a time or times when the author wielded authority, when he was a surety.  Surely these times are still now, and these things are still what they were, and not...but the materiality of their coding is not always understood...

How to force them to nationalize the rest...

I will be working mostly on finishing a philosophy project for the next two weeks, so I won't be posting that much...

But its worth reemphasizing how heterodox, how Maoist, and indeed even Hericlitean, the logic of this collapse is becoming.  The more money in, the more money out.  The greater the decoupling, the more hot coupling.  Inflation continually driving deflation, coordination leading to economic warfare between states.  The epistemic arrogance of economics is splintered and buried, based as it was on induction and non-contradiction.  

And to add more devilish, proletarian glee and suburban pride to the picture, here is more sunshiny news from the state that murdered capitalism.

Fragility of concept "europe": spectres of an era thought gone

The financial warfare taking place between European states at the moment (battling for foreign deposits, threatening snap independent bailouts and recapitalizations) has startling echoes of the trade disputes of previous centuries. Strategically, this could be important to Warschington if investors begin to perceive the Euro as a captainless ship. This would back the possibility of a scenario where we see a hyper-inflationary depression in Europe, and a deflationary collapse in the states. This becomes all the more likely, the longer Europe seems to trend down ahead of the US. Of course, the thought of recapitalizing the US banking system by printing dollars and then treating Europe like a gigantic corporate costco would be very appealing to certain elements, especially after the recent humiliations of the iraq war, etc. The ECB is somewhat hog-tied in its ability to respond, at least with inflation still looming. The Krug-monster is arguing that the virality of the crisis is essentially financial rather than commodity-trade-based. If he is right, it should be extraordinarily easy to write everything off on the US debt side and sabotage the Euro.

Money headed for energy, education, and tech areas of US

Shows us that the exceptions to economic demise look to be split between low-regulation "flatlands" like central texas, and highly skilled tech futropolises like SJ, ABQ, Denver, etc.  Also pickled northeastern brain vats like New Haven and Cambridge.  Also strong energy/processing zones like eastern texas.  Watching for a new bubble here will be interesting.  Everything contributes to the vague impression that what money there is is (I love using "is" twice to each other in a sentence) channeling itself toward a green, energy-bound messianism, while continuing to build exurban honkey-tonk sprawls where it is still cheap to do so (say, central tex).  Looking for both these trends to spread geographically as oil and commodities drop back out of the ether.