ALB
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He’s certainly not turned out to be the lesser evil he was cracked out to be. But then if you are there to look after the affairs of a capitalist class you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
There’s a good explanation of why the Silicon Valley Bank failed here:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-00086586
“Silicon Valley Bank has been bleeding deposits as the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised borrowing costs to fight inflation. Higher interest rates bludgeoned many of the tech businesses that had deposited their money with the bank. As venture capitalists retreated from offering companies fresh infusions of capital to sustain their businesses, startups needed to burn through the cash in their accounts to stay afloat. Deposits the bank had on hand have fallen steadily over the last several months, according to S&P Global Ratings. Higher rates also meant more investments offered an attractive yield, leading some clients to pull out their deposits and put them elsewhere.”
To try to compensate for this, the Bank sold off its holding of government and other bonds. Unfortunately for them, rising interest rates meant that the price of bonds went down and they couldn’t raise enough. And they went bust.
“When banks run into trouble, they can be forced to sell off investment assets, typically U.S. government debt and mortgage-backed securities, that they purchased to earn a return on their customers’ deposits. As interest rates climb, the price of those older securities fall — which means the banks sell those investments at a loss.”
If banks could, as some claim, simply create money to lend “out of thin air” and get interest on it, why would losing deposits make any difference? If a bank was short of money, all it would have to do would be create some more to lend and get the money as interest on them.
That this didn’t happen shows that banks cannot create money out of nothing but are only financial intermediaries borrowing money at one rate of interest to cover loans at a higher rate.
Our theory of the nature of banking stands confirmed. New wealth can only be created by humans applying their mental and physical energies to change the form of materials that originally came from nature, not by banks practising magic or financial alchemy.
Yes, everything we do is “biologically dependent”. Human behaviour is dependent on human nature. I don’t think we can say, though, that “instinctual behaviour” in humans forms a “sizeable” part of “our repertoire of behaviours”. “Non-negligible” might be a better term. The great bulk of how we behave is not “instinctual”. It depends on the society in which we were brought up in and live.
All animals can only do what their biology allows but, in the case of humans, this allows a wide degree of latitude that distinguishes us from all other animals, meaning that a much smaller proportion of our behaviour is “instinctual” compared with theirs.
Just heard that Paresh Chattopadhyay died on 14th January 2023 at the age of 96. He did a lot to expose the idea that the old USSR was somehow socialism or had anything to do with what Marx would have regarded as what we now call socialism ( and which Marx called communist society).
An obituary here:
Marxist Economist Of Global Fame Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay Is No More
I don’t know why we are arguing. I don’t disagree with what you say. Maybe it’s because I’m talking about the capabilities of the species while you are talking about that of individual members of the species.
As you say, what an individual experiences in the first years of their life, when their brain is still developing, is crucial for the formation of their personality which will shape how they are going to behave in response to later experiences.
I think this applies to the individual members of other species as well.
You write:
“This is why personality typology is linked to experiences, psychopaths personalities for example are not generally born but are generally results of many factors, including their early experiences.“
This it is an argument against those biological determinists who argue that some humans are born “psychopaths” (or homosexual or whatever).
I’ll go along with “linked to experiences” rather than “learned”. I wasn’t using it in the literal sense anyway but more in the sense of “not innate”.
But, then, as I said, I was talking more about the features of the species. Humans have a brain that enables them to engage in a wide variety of behaviours and to pass on a learned “culture” from generation to generation. It’s “human nature” to be able to adopt or adapt to, and so engage in, a wide range of behaviours. Hence the distinction we have always insisted on between “human nature” and “human behaviour”.
Actually, what you point out strengthens the argument that human behaviour is not determined by genes in the way biological determinists preach.
What genes determine is the physical anatomy and physiology of humans and other living things. That determines what they can and cannot do, the limits of how they can behave, if you like. The particular anatomy and physiology of humans means that they are capable of learning a great variety of behaviours. That the way an individual behaves shapes the physical brain, in the ways you point out, again shows that the genetic structure a human has at birth has even less influence on their behaviour.
More, recent stuff on this sort of thing here:
Do you know what our theory of banking is? In case you don’t, it repudiates the quasi currency crank view that banks can somehow create money to lend “out of thin air”.
If this was the case, then why would a bank go bankrupt? It could simply create more money. In fact, of course, banks can only lend funds that they already have (or can quickly get) as from depositors or by themselves borrowing money.
The news report confirms this:
“SVB. . . launched a rescue share sale to plug a near-$2bn (£1.7bn) hole in its finances.
The bank lost the funds when it sold a portfolio of bonds in response to a decline in customer deposits. Those bonds had dropped in value as a result of rising interest rates, leaving SVB with a shortfall.”The “shortfall” was between its loans and the funds it had to cover them due to a fall in deposits, and then to the sale of the bonds (loans it had made to companies or government) not raising enough to cover it.
As they couldn’t fill this “hole in their finances” (the difference between the loans they had made and the funds to cover them) they went bankrupt. This confirmed our view that banks don’t and can’t create money to lend out of thin air.
Banks are financial intermediaries borrowing money at one rate of interest and lending it a higher rate, the difference between these being their income of which a part is their profits.
The Professor Andrew Whiten mentioned in that report (not one of the researchers) is recorded in our pamphlet Are We Prisoners of our Genes as pointing out:
“Humans are the most social species on Earth and our ancestors formed hunter-gatherer groups which pulled together to adapt to their new lifestyle. Unlike every other species, they had an egalitarian culture where everything was shared out equally: no other animal does that. There was also no hierarchy in the society or tribal chiefs, as anyone who tried to lead was pushed back down by the others. Everyone was considered to be equal and they lived in a culture of primitive communism. We might expect as the products of evolution our ancestors would be selfish, but it was their ability to work together and support each other which made them more successful than any other. This supportive culture allowed technology and skills to be passed down and improved with each generation. Although this egalitarian lifestyle is not present in most of the world today, it may be resting dormant within us waiting to be reawakened” (Paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, see The Times, 19 August 2000).”
I don’t think he criticised Putin but was just saying that various governments departments were fed up with his lobbying for more munitions. In any event, he seems to have got his way. According to Al Jazeera:
“In another audio message on Friday, Prigozhin said he had thanked the Russian government for a “heroic” increase in ammunition production. He said his men had been “blown away” by the fact they had started to receive ammunition deliveries labelled as produced in 2023. He said ammunition was now being produced “in huge quantities, which cover all the necessary needs”.
Yes, to give the old witch doctor his due, he’s put his finger on it again, just as when last June he said that the Russian invasion was “perhaps somehow provoked”:
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops
I wonder if US is plotting to overthrow him.
RT are running this news item. Reproducing it in full for those subject to censorship. Presumably it is true in the sense that he said and, hopefully also, in the sense that there are a growing number of people in Ukraine who want to stop the war.
Kiev security chief names ‘dangerous tendency’ among Ukrainians
More citizens want their government to sit down at the negotiating table with Moscow, Aleksey Danilov has admitted.
A growing number of Ukrainians would like to see Kiev launch peace talks with Moscow, the head of the National Security and Defense Council, Aleksey Danilov, admitted on Thursday. The top security official claimed the development was a “very dangerous tendency.”
“[One should] bear in mind that those [people advocating talks with Russia] are growing in numbers. It is a very dangerous tendency when even people in western Ukraine are starting to talk about such things,” Danilov said during a live appearance on the Ukrainian talk show ‘Greater Lviv speaks’, as cited by RIA Novosti. He also referred to a local politician in the western Lviv region who reportedly called on Kiev to sit down at the negotiating table with Moscow.
https://www.rt.com/russia/572725-security-chief-dangerous-tendency-ukraine/
The “West” seems to be trying to overthrow the government in Georgia and install a pro-Western one just like they did in Ukraine in 2014. If they succeed in doing that expect Belarus to be next on their agenda.
Couldn’t these also be stored on the World Socialism Movement site here:
More accessible there.
At the time they said it was Russia. Now they are revealing that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline was organised by some Ukrainian oligarch. I wonder why they are revealing it now.
