Charles is right, of course, and hopefully he is only telling you what you already know. Globalization is not the wave of the future. It is a short term aberration which is nearing the end of the road at high speed. Fictionalization is really just Ponzi under a new name. This Ponzi is coming to an end sooner or later and when it implodes well, it may well be CENTURIES, at least, before financialization is again floated as somehow preferable to real production. Take Jon Law or the South Sea Bubble on steroids and you only have a *small* idea of how massive the leveraging has been and how impressive the implosion could be.
And what about delegitimization? Well, once you find out your girl friend is a hooker is is hard to go back to admiring her in the same old way. What else is there to say? The US government is burning through a century or more of respect in a matter of a few years. Y'all know how just how proud I now am to live in "land of the free and home of the brave".... It's my dream to change that some day. I may be only a leading indicator but I doubt I'm the only citizen who is coming to the conclusion that our government is hard to distinguish from any other criminal gang.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly11/threeDs6-11.html
The Three Ds: Delegitimization, Definancialization, Deglobalization (July 1, 2011)
Two major trends are reversing, and trust in centralized institutions is eroding.
I tend to be years early on identifying trends, but three that will make a difference going forward are what I call "The Three Ds": Delegitimization, Definancialization and Deglobalization.
Broadly speaking, the global economy and thus globalization and its sibling, financialization, depend on the legitimacy of centralized institutions. These include nation-state governments, international organizations such as the IMF, central banks, the mainstream global media, and various Central State agencies tasked with reporting data accurately, for example the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the U.S. and equivalent agencies in other trading blocs.
By far the grandest experiments in legitimization of the past 20 years are the European Union (EU) and its common currency, the euro, and China's one-party rule combining a command economy with a quasi-free enterprise model, i.e. "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics."
The vortex of insolvency gripping Europe is rapidly chewing through what remains of the legitimacy of the euro and the EU institutions tasked with overseeing the financial sector. As the legitimacy of these agencies erodes, the rot spreads to the political institutions which have placed their legitimacy in the hands of bureaucrats and central bankers.
As for the euro and the EU's grand integration experiment, we can turn to George W. Bush's inimitable phrase for a summary: this sucker's going down. The subprime mortgage meltdown offers a cogent preview of Europe's future.
(continued)
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. -Napoleon
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