News That's Fit To Punt

Bail Out Happens

In the end the House voted on the bailout.

The bipartisan legislation reversed the House rejection earlier this week that sent global stock markets plunging. The measure authorizes the government to buy troubled assets from financial institutions reeling from record home foreclosures. The bill contains $US149 billion in tax breaks and affirms regulators' power to suspend asset-valuing rules that companies blame for fueling the crisis.

``These steps represent decisive action to ease the credit crunch that is now threatening our economy,'' Bush said at the White House.

The House approved the measure 263-171, four days after rejecting an earlier version. The bill's defeat on Sept. 29 caused a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, prompting dozens of lawmakers to switch their vote on the legislation, the government's largest intervention in the markets since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

``The issue is stopping the panic,'' said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``The plan's not perfect, but it's certainly better than doing nothing. Now Treasury has to be very aggressive about purchasing a wide range of assets very quickly.''

There are many discussions as to whether it is a bail out or a rescue package or good money after bad, but the bottom line is that without shoring up the US banks, the global role of the US economy is going to be greatly hampered.

Perhaps The American Century Is Coming To An End
Here's a great article in the SMH. I'm surprised there are still great reads in the Herald some times.

In Washington, George Bush and his top economic officer had spent hours in the White House persuading and cajoling the congressional leaders of both American political parties to endorse his rescue plan. With the burning smell of some of the biggest financial institutions in the world still fresh in their nostrils as their ruins smouldered in New York, Bush grew increasingly frustrated.

"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," he said of the US economy, marshalling the inimitable eloquence of the President who has given rise to a minor industry of books and wall calendars featuring the manglings known as Bushisms. All efforts failed.

"In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury Secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr, literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to blow it up by withdrawing her party's support for the package," The New York Times reported.

Pelosi leads the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Bush and Paulson are Republicans. Pelosi jibed: "I didn't know you were Catholic." And then, on the business at hand: "It's not me blowing this up; it's the Republicans." It was Bush's own party blocking the plan. Paulson reportedly sighed, "I know, I know."

It was on the same day, September 25, that China launched the Shenzhou 7 space mission, sending aloft three astronauts or, as the Chinese call them, taikonauts. Two days later, Colonel Zhai floated out of his module and "walked" in space for 20 minutes.

Zhai radioed back to his President and the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Jintao: "The space-walk mission has been accomplished smoothly. Please set your mind at ease, Chairman Hu and the people of China. In the vastness of space, I felt proud of our motherland."

Hours after the Chinese module returned to Earth safely, the US House of Representatives rejected the Bush Administration's rescue plan to allow the Treasury to buy distressed debt so that US credit markets could start to function again. US stocks fell by 7 per cent and more than $US1 trillion in value was destroyed as investors despaired. It was one of the biggest one-day falls on Wall Street.

There's more in this thought provoking article.
The 'Coelacanth 2' album's working theme has been about The American Century, so I take great interest in discussions on this point.I have hard predictions of an end to the US hegemony and the end of the American Empire, but I am always wary of such claims. Unless the barbarians at the gate end up parading down Pennsylvania Ave with a noose around the captured POTUS's head, I don't think it's a likely 'scenario'. This is just a temporary dip in its power, mostly thanks to the ineptness of its current leadership.

That's not to say these damages by the current incumbent idiots cannot be undone.

A Note About Oil

Because the Financial Review does not have a free-to-public online edition available, I cannot reproduce the text here. Clever people, those Fin Review folks. Anyway, in it was an article last week about the crude oil market which drew my attention. OPEC has been tightening quotas in order to drive up oil prices because naturally, per unit sales helps their economies more and they know the world is hooked on to it. Iran in particularly loves it when the oil price goes up and the price rise puts a hurt on the US consumer.

What is not widely reported is that Saudi Arabia often over-produces its quota and then sells off the excess production to oil companies in order to lower the crude price.
The reason given for this was that if the world consumer moves away from their SUV to a hybrid car, them they are not coming back to the SUV market - in other words, Saudi Arabia does not want you to be weaned off its chief export. It made me laugh.
After my accident, I think I want to wean myself off cars entirely.

Damien Hirst's Big Haul

He's like some chubby rock star, really. Yet his works are worth millions.

What could be dumber than Hirst's dot paintings, painted by assistants with stencils? Or ashtrays of all sizes filled with used butts? Such pieces were sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds in last week's auction. The piece-de-resistance was his Golden Calf - a dead bull with gilded hooves and horns in a gold-rimmed tank of formaldehyde. Nothing could serve as a more pointed "up yours" to wealthy, eager buyers. It was a descendent of the effigy erected by the Israelites while Moses was conversing with his Maker on top of the mountain.

Hirst may be saying that money, or perhaps the stockmarket, is the false god of our times. Just as easily, he might be talking about himself. "Here I am," he says. "Come and worship!"

This sort of grandiose cynicism is greeted with admiration in art circles - "Ho, ho, Damien is really giving it to those rich capitalist bastards." In this scenario, Hirst becomes ever more subversive as his personal wealth increases. By this standard he must be the most subversive artist that has lived, since he is now said to be worth more than $US1 billion and employs almost 200 people in a chain of specialised art-making workshops.

Money exerts a narcotic influence on seemingly rational minds and Hirst has made the accumulation of capital his central artistic concern. In this, he has perfectly captured the temper of our times, in which cultural achievement is measured by the mass media in dollar terms. So it is hardly surprising to read in a wire service article reprinted in many papers around the world (including this one) that last year "Hirst sold a platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds for £50 million, which is thought to be the world's most expensive piece of contemporary art".

In fact, as reported in The Art Newspaper and other sources, the skull was actually "sold" to a group that included Hirst, his dealer and his business manager. His record-breaking achievement must be tempered by the knowledge that Hirst was both creator and purchaser.

The auction represents an even greater triumph of publicity over probity, because we have no way of knowing who was buying all those works via the telephone. Even if the artist was not personally involved, there were enough dealers and high-end collectors who simply could not afford to see the auction fail and the value of their own investments plummet. The idea that this event represented a "gamble" on Hirst's part was sheer spin. This was one auction that never stood a chance of failure.

It's a bit mind-boggling where Contemporary Art has got to right now. The diamond encrusted skull is a little bit too 'Elton John' in its aesthetic, but what the heck. It's still a Diamond encrusted skull! Literally, it is what it is in a way that defies critical dissection.
This following bit caught my attention:

One gets the measure of Greer's shallow nihilism when she writes: "What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things." Call me naive and sentimental but I believe that's almost the definition of an artist: someone who makes things. Those who employ hundreds of people to make saleable commodities are perhaps better known as "manufacturers".

Few people embrace poverty but for most artists the pleasure of making things exceeds the pleasure of making money. If it were the other way around, everyone would tailor his or her work to the most obvious commercial imperatives. Yet some artists, driven by their own wilfulness or creative compulsions, will persist with works nobody wants to buy for most of their careers

I think the art work is actually an artefact of the artistic moment. The legacy of the inspiration. The physical evidence of the Edisonian notion - the artwork itself represents the 99% of perspiration part, but signifies the 1% of genuine inspiration. This has been my personal theory for about 10 years but every time I bring it up with artists they treat me like I've gone insane or have no insight whatsoever into why they do what they do. Don't listen to me guys, but I am somebody who has translated 2 books on Contemporary Art, so I do think I have a clue.

Nonetheless, when you think about it, when you buy the finished album by say, your favorite band, you're really buying something that represents the culmination of the labor which points to the inspiration - what's this song about? - and not the artistic moment itself. It's certainly true of my songs, good and bad, that the final recorded version is merely the reflection of the moment I went "ah ha! There's a cool idea!"

All the pricing issue is a matter of how much people value the labor or materials. Sometimes a work of art is worth less than its materials - much like the copper statue that was stolen and smelted for export to China. Damien Hirst is doing alright.