EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Crises expose the bones of reality, dispel the fog of political formulas and incantations. We usually spend the dramatic moments that have come into the public spotlight, separated from the real events in a fabricated version of the real facts. We, like lipsticked and sequined dolls, fight our ritual battles in front of the media cameras, the deep forces carry out their operations, explosions, lightning, boom boom… and in the end, you all live with the consequences. Some would say it's a stupid system, some would say it's not democratic, but hey, that's how things are.
Yes, everything is going according to plan, but the days of correction always come. Sooner or later, the values of stock markets, financial assets, fake startups, bubbles in everything, inflated by the drug-addicted policies of central banks, are corrected, burst and collapse. There is no way, socialist tricks are only temporary. Of course, when you have a healthy organism, you can always milk it more. The key is for the political formulas to work and eventually to have both a bonus and a bailout, but that's why there is still a whole Cathedral of experts, scientists, specialists, useful idiots, educational institutions, etc.
The Wachowski brothers showed us well in their brilliant three-part documentary that moments of great stress lead certain individuals to come close to being excluded from the Matrix, and sometimes even achieve it. In the animated sequel to the original film – The Animatrix – from 2003, we can enjoy the short segment World Record by Takeshi Koike. In it, a black champion athlete runs so hard that he manages to interrupt the normal functioning of the matrix code and see reality. Stress points, pressure on the system, can wake up sleeping cash cows. Sometimes to the point that a reboot is needed.
The effect is even stronger when the adjustments are in more systems and start to bleed quickly. Just a month ago, my fellow ruble-mongers and I were sitting under the spotlights of the TV studios and listening, sometimes reassuringly, sometimes with mockery, to the biggest think tankers, former ministers, top bankers, that we will enter the eurozone, the great minds in Frankfurt will gather for their ultra-Eurosolidarity secret meeting and we will wake up one Monday under the good protective power of the ECB.
Today, this beautiful expert dream of a world without exchange offices before the craft beer tasting trip to Amsterdam and joint responsibility with the bankrupt Italian banks is in ruins. Bulgarians want a referendum on the euro, our politicians are already finding it difficult to ignore them, Italy, Spain and Greece are stopping short selling, while Christine Lagarde assures that she will do everything necessary to prevent the eurozone from collapsing. Niki Vassilev will turn out to be almost right, the eurozone will collapse not in 2019, but in 2020.
The crack was also sharp in the expertise in public health. At the end of February and the beginning of March, we listened to endless explanations from the Bulgarian headquarters for dealing with COVID-19 that we were simply facing another flu. Valuable time, enough for a prepper to stock up on toilet paper before everyone else. At the same time, videos from China showed how Earth astronauts welded the doors of residential buildings and cities with a population of 2 Bulgaria demonstrated zero pedestrians on the streets. A legitimate position… if after less than two weeks they had not changed it to “an epidemic with unprecedented fury in human history”. Suddenly we were warned – “terrible times are coming, people, realize it”. The same titled and uniformed, dignified gentlemen who two weeks ago assured us that there were no problems. And more importantly, who had not thought to prepare.
Such a quick resolution is not good for the talking heads, they almost push themselves into a situation of proxy skin in the game. Not exactly like the real one, where they will suffer consequences for their talk. Which fan of the eurozone from that day will buy Italian debt today, right? Or actually even then. But it is still very soon, still not all of us look at bald generals so lovingly that we do not remember what they were talking about last week. The Internet works, there are screenshots, recordings. And some of us even remember how in the ancient past a few months ago some great specialists guaranteed that aha, Volkswagen is here, it came to Kremikovtsi.
We have only spat on our colleagues. Their blunders will not bring us even a squad of fast black men, they will not reboot the system at all. For this, more weight is needed on one point. The big correction has potential beyond the discrediting of the expert caste. Let's look from the small to the big.
How does a machine designed for robbery work when it has to fight a pandemic? If you can't think of an answer, look at the Bulgarian state. Krasen Stanchev aptly wrote, the native heroes are defeating the coronavirus with more policing.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Can we blame the people, their job is to milk the police with snot, now to think about how to react to a natural (or biotechnological, according to personal understandings) disaster is unrealistic. If we add to this a second line of expert philosophy (after the above-described amalgam of bruxelophilia and goranovophilia of the younger generation) known in educated circles as boomer statism, the picture is already more than clear. Martial law, the fight against speculation, strict control and mentoring babble from bald heads immediately materialize before our eyes. The results are also clear… let's hope this thing doesn't last 18 months.
Or should we be accelerationists and do it? Personally, I wouldn't, because of the human cost, but imagine it. Phoenixes rise from the ashes after all.
The big battle with the prosecutor's office will have taken place, which will now grab not only the businesses of the poor oligarchs with open fists. The fiefdoms in healthcare will have been cut and rearranged with fallen and ascended masters. Many will understand that going to (public) school is not education, but a pastime until mom and dad pay off the loan for the last family vacation. A creeping realization that there will be no pensions, and the demographic future, personally and collectively, is not just chewing gum, will keep the millennials awake. The April (boomer) generation will have sung its swan song. Some institutions of power and influence, exhausted by almost two years of struggle, will give way to those who have retained their positions and capacity. Municipalities will realize their power to govern more.
The new world order will not sleep either. Powerful processes of economic disintegration, disruption of trade ties and relocation of supply chains close to home (a great opportunity for Bulgaria), an unclear future for monetary regimes, closure of migration channels, reduction of travel even in peacetime. Deglobalization and localization in full swing and a real crisis for internationalism. Even more furious apocalyptic sects led by other Greta. A world of complete abandonment of the principles of personal responsibility with endless bailouts for everyone, captured by the future, but also the first seeds of a return to the traditions of a good life without subsidies and credit.
On the table will be questions that we haven't had time to seriously consider while planning the next trip, car, party, or other modern bourgeois pursuits. Personal and public.
Our Zulu tribe of track runners, running with the winds of change, having cast off their matrix cables, will have to show up here and then, having heard the Horn of Gondor. Such a correction will open eyes, will show what is behind the political formulas, because they simply will not work so well anymore. A rare moment of glitch in the Matrix, visible to all. Time to sow.
It sounds almost happy if we can do it. It's time. We were very confused.
Otherwise - the foreign words and the originality are too much for me. They simply suppress visionary thinking (the dream of the future) with their verbosity and references.
There are many examples in history of price controls and their results. One more will not change anything.
The majority are economic illiterates. And they have a problem with logical thinking.