One Of The Consequences Of The Iranian

My Belief, For What It Is Worth, Is That City Dwellers Cannot Understand The World. Insulated From Reality By Complex And Expert Systems Of Provision And Police, Baffled By Fashion And Spectacle, City Dwellers Can Distinguish Neither The Sources Of Their Existence Nor The Consequences.

For All Their Current Prestige, Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers Are Still Regarded In All But The Most Desperate Districts Of Gaza Or Peshawar As Romantics With Little Chance Of More Than Symbolic Victories, However Bloody And Brutal. That Gives Both The Middle East And The West A Small And Distant Hope Of Security.

Viewed From A Distance, Or Through The Eye Of The All-knowing Ceo Of The Universe, The Crash Of 2008 Followed The Usual Pattern. A Long-lived Boom Driven By Cheap Credit, Going Back As Far As 1982 (though Subject To Interruptions In The Mid-1980s And 1990s, And In 2001), Came To Grief Because Of A Rise In The Cost Of Borrowing Money.

Cause And Effect, The Riddle Of All History, Is A Particular Devil In Financial History; And Never More So Than Today, Where Entire Classes Of Security Are Collapsing Not On Public Exchanges And Stock-tickers But Because There Are No Markets To Establish Prices This Side Of Nothing.

Life Without Oil, In Fact, Would Be So Different That It Is Frightening To Contemplate. We Are Addicted, And It Is No Comfortable Addiction.