A (profoundly dubious) teleological futurism...

It was only a matter of time until housing deflated (like textiles, tulips, food, and media, etc.), as a result of efficiency, modularity, and better cost-structures (think Home Depot in every town, developments in previously unimaginable places).  This deflation was bound to be precipitated by a bubblicious hyperinflation that drove the systemic innovation that eventually lead to a glut, high vacancy, etc.  This trend will only increase as technology makes more and more of the vast empty earth livable, and as modularity decreases the production costs of housing.  Housing is finished as the principle asset of the US economy.

Vacancy rates are soaring.  While they may go back down in the next two to three year, the armies of cheap labour will keep building until there are two houses for every man, woman and child.  The more we speculate, the more power reason gains to obliterate our greed...

Eurozone on the brink of fragmentation of central bank control?

The Telegraph says so:

"Mr Redeker said the latest alarming twist is a move by banks to deposit €28bn in funds at the European Central Bank in a panic flight to safety. This has jammed the mechanism used by the authorities to shore up the financial system in a crisis.

"The ECB is no longer able to inject liquidity because the money is just coming back to them again. This is extremely serious. If monetary policy is no longer working, there is a risk that the whole system will blow up in days," he said. "

If it becomes quite clear that the ECB cannot produce enough liquidity to protect even smaller banks, the larger "too-big-to-be-saved" banks (like Deutsche) will be in real trouble - since no single government is big enough to even attempt to rescue them, the ECB could itself become insolvent if it has absolutely no influence over the speed of the bank failures.  The question we must ask is where is this exposure to failing European and US MBS?  The answer is very probably "everywhere".  And the farther house prices drop, the more the trouble will spread to zones (again, like Germany) where there supposedly was no housing bubble.  The notion that housing couldn't possibly deflate any further in these zones is preposterous... just look at Detroit.  At some point in the near future, Asian economies will learn how to produce and export their own howling monstrosities and fascist-fetish mobiles.  Then?  Behold...the Michigan of East.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück admits that Marx was right!

Although he demonstrates only the most vulgar understanding of him.  He here gives us a dictum in response to Spiegel which should be deployed by anti- and post-capitalists as much as by the overlords themselves:

SPIEGEL: One cannot regulate morality.

Steinbrück: No, but that too is dialectics. The elites must understand that it is a matter of self-protection, of developing a sense of the right balance or allowing judgment to prevail.

Deflation will deploy itself as a waiting just like this:  a balanced futurity open even to the possibility of a strategic judgement, despite the obvious peril, the suspension of suspension, strategic essentialisms, decisions shot through with undecidability, etc.  

Phenomenological Economics

Two articles to be read together.  One locates a revolutionary "investerly" practice at the heart of the "real" economy, namely, a gigantic put option on housing being exercised by the poorest 70% of the American public.  The other argues in the opposite direction, saying that research  "has shown that the financial and non-financial sectors experience quite independent changes, especially over the short and medium term."  In short, that the depression will not be substantially felt by the vast majority of people who already have very little in the way of assets.  If these two analysis bare out over the next 18 months or so, we will be able to look back to the financial crisis as one of the great proletarian shifts in history.  

No bankruptcy reform? Horse-shit.

The bailout does not allow judges to re-write the terms of mortgages.  Without this provision, the danger of a resurgent feudalism triples.  If people's homes, broadly classified in capitalist logic as 'private property', are not protected from seizure by our wealthy overlords, we inch closer to a universal renter society.  

This may cause such immense agitation that it fundamentally alters thinking of construction and dwelling, but I think that the short-term consequences will be a very large stake in real estate for the duopoly of banks that survive nationalization.

My main lady from ohio takes up the issue with rhetorical flare we haven't seen in congress for generations.

The other unknown is the future of US builder confidence:  If the contractors get back to work with reduced overhead, and clear of crippling debt, and work-armies of cheap labour, before the housing supply contracts, then the deflation of housing will be so magnificently underway that no one will be able to stop it.  Increasing numbers of foreclosures and speculation can help this process by driving down sales prices.  Housing will finally be priced on a "parts + labour" model.

In the states, anyway.  Considerable difficulties face countries as disparate as, say, Britain and China, where high population density is constructed as a necessity.  In Britain in particular, this density is enforced by regulatory apparatai that not even the government itself can break through (a little like Northern California).  The government here has missed its building targets massively and repeatedly.  The unknown in this context is what effect the total collapse of financial services will have on accession-country immigration and the UK budget.  The trickle-through of high-end job loss to the cheap labour market, its impact on London-affordability, and the benefit system, will take several months to become apparent, and several years to finally sweep through.  From observation, its quite clear that the City Boys are being so rapidly replaced by Roma in East London that it might just be a decent place to live in a few years time. A deflated, flat-ass broke London is perhaps even more attractive to people who have already survived political and economic armageddons never dreamt of in Western Europe.  This at any rate seems to be true in California, where most immigrants are very far from leaving to go back home.

Glaze: De-coupling After-all: Watching deconstructs Gaze and Glance

It might seem as if like our indestagflation theory may not be equal to events in the midterm:  America and Britain are decoupling into defaltionary and inflationary collapse/ebullition, respectively, that is, apart.  The indestagflation phenomena is too non-dialectical for the moment, and, talking to a friend yesterday,  I am persuaded that the spaciality of Europe may favour a multidirection, neodiasporic euphoria that will crack any fears of right-wing resurgance.  

So what will it mean, after all prices have been discovered as some form of "zero" and after all the write-downs are done with, if it is revealed that Far Western Europe (so excluding Germany) has an economy (and we can only use this word as a sarcophagus now) with money and "no" materiality, no thinginesses?  (This is of course where it has been for perhaps fifty years, as becomes more and more clear.) I would argue that, in order to answer such a question (which is nothing less than the question of what a general deflation of services, on par with the general collapse of the industrial complex in the previous era, will look like), we had better watch rather than gaze or glance our way into a discussion of the artifacts at hand.  Moreover, since it is precisley artifacts which will begin to show their lack so much more flirtatiously, even the notion of a process, irrupted as an evental subtraction, should be observed in play.  Such watching gains a certain handy futurity at the loss of the specificity of memory, but, since the deflation of such an economy of loss is precisley what is at issue, we should not simply be anxious about this, even in Europe where the right haunts and animates so many "progressive" consciences.  Everyone watch in any case, and even America watchs.  For such observations, action, reaction, event, and becoming are as feckless as value, clarity, and nihilism.

Market>Commodity>Dollar

Its finally universally understood that money fleeing the market dives into oil and other commodities before hiding in the dollar.  For months some of the more charming popular economists maintained a mystical veneer around their denials that speculation could have anything to do with surging oil prices.  The point wasn't well-argued on either side.

In this third round of deflation we should see a small spike in commodities before a steep drop and then a somewhat stronger rise in the dollar as other economies eat shit - depending of course on how many trillions of dollars the Treasury prints this week.  We'll see.

It will take years for that cash to come back out and play, and by the time it does, a "techmoddity" economy may well have replaced financial services, where vehicles will have to be as efficiently modular as the concepts in which they invest.

(Technological) Increases in Efficiency are Drops in Aggregate Demand

In psycho-philosophical terms, the chief difference between Keynsians and Neo-Austrians has always been, respectively, drive vs. organization.  For Keynes, monetary policy had a semi-mystical well of power over our experience of materiality as long as aggregate demand stayed high, as long as the economy was subject to its own drives, to expansivity.  For Austrian and Neo-Austrian economists, the anxiety of a closed syteme prevails.  Where the organon looses functionality, or fails to coordinate with other components, the larger organon of the economy is in danger of malfunction.  The difference here between these perspectives can clearly be oversimplified as vitalistic over and against the machinic.  

Both fail to see the looming predominance, phenomenologically obvious to non-economists, of energies and powers beyond the disciplinary discretion of economics which feed against the procedures of metaphoric and metonymic exchange upon which all economic analysis is based.  Taking the "technological" as an example of such an energy, a much more "aleatory" exchange takes place as it haunts zones like trading and commerce.  Instead of simply "facilitating" such economic activities, it drives them into a universality in which they are proliferated beyond irrelevance and into non-entity.  As Marx observed and Sohn-Rethel, Adorno/Horkheimer and Heidegger reiterated, exchange and value had become part of the tapestry of alienation, and reason (as a techne) had put them there.  But technology had already pushed much further than this, and had already participated in so many self-violations, so many debasements of the property and propriety it had helped establish, that it had in turn, been ascribed an auto-immune, revolutionary essence.  Now, it seems, again, there is play absences:  A vanishing of aggregate demand corresponding precisely to the steep upside curve of market efficiency.

The Promise of Star Trek TNG

I grew up wondering how I would provide the house, the video games,
the car, pay the bills; I arrive at adulthood knowing that I can
build a house, and a windmill, grow my own food and steal a life's
worth of culture off the internet. I wondered how I would get famous
- now only a very few marginal politicians and porn stars are famous
in the way we once thought of it. So many sundered anxieties have
been wrecked on the shores of the general deflation since the 15th
century, the anarchiving ocean of the multitude, that one almost no
longer fears swarms.
It actually feels quite a bit like star trek, but with more art and
violence...
It almost seems as if property and the proprietary have revealed
themselves as a type of penetration, a having-in, that was bound to
violate the sovereignty of certainty and arrogance much more than
abet them...

Dis-traction I

Now that what has previously been so clear has become simply and concretely true, it is much more difficult.  And, since the least likely messianism is the one which we do expect, we must be patient with ourselves amidst its offensive obviating.  Flinging her nipple-tassels, the slow deflationary collapse of Capitalism is giganticised in a withering tango with Capital itself.  Last week saw the demon-masks of potentas fall off even the most plausible bandits (Bernanke, Paulson, Boosh), revealing looks of joyous terror and the glow of Rapture.  More important even than wishing open aleas on our destinies, or measuring the wrecked machinery, we should look again at what libido will mean, what it has already long meant.

Elsewhere, and especially in my Kant lectures soon to be published on BEP, I have tried to analyze a certain traditional causal economy in terms of the diode contradiction - non-contradiction.  Likewise, I have tried to reencounter metaphysics as a discrete termporalizing according to the stylistic principles of something called non-contradictarianism. To the extent that non-contradictarianism was the repression of an indiscrete temporality which knew nothing of causal, inductive proprieties, it was ever an economy of displacement, of wounded attachments.  To the extent that it most manifestly was not this, i.e. to the extent that it represented a healthy and intensely modular (adaptable) abandonment of attachments, it seemed at times to be precisley the moving-into-futurity one would require to live anything like a post-economy.  

It is this second, high-functioning aspect I wish to focus on for a minute.  If we are to see a turn, an event which moving along the line of its circularity both arrives and departs, we shall be tempted to say that it does all this "at the same time."  This moment of Revolution being what it is in the dry-eyed cynicism of almost everyone, we should be careful to reiterate our operative uncertainty about how such a futurity, rooted everywhere as a history, defying the life-death discretionary economies, makes of libido itself a messianic force.  This deflationary play must be reckoned against (in the most positive way) all the control apperatai that seem this week to have preceded it, as well as against the post-contradictarian observer (super-ego).