Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Purple Library Guy nicely sums up how the financial industry has become completely detached from anything that could be considered useful in generating real economic growth:

When you abstract something, it tends to make it possible to do it on a larger scale, with more complexity. And originally, that's what finance was for. With the abstraction of money as a fungible claim on wealth, there were a lot of games you could play to arrange for the stuff you wanted done to claim the wealth needed to do it, at the right time, on the right scale, in theoretically arbitrary places.

But if you can do that, you can play games for other purposes. Increasingly nowadays the financial sector does not operate to enhance investment in genuine production. Rather, it acts first as a rentier and second to create money and paper profits, out of nothing, that are re-invested in nothing but more paper profits.
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(F)inance capital makes nothing. Rather, it steals. It makes up new money in the finance capitalists' hands, reducing the value of that held by traditional capitalists through a form of inflation in financial assets. In a way it's like a kind of really large scale counterfeiting. That's one reason why all the bubbles. One thing that almost makes it worse is that the tricks are mostly not very stable, as we've noticed; the apparent value is apt to disappear as soon as enough people lose confidence that it really exists.

Capitalism is a system I don't much like, but it is a system for doing real things that can generate real productivity gains, technological advance and so on. Its claims to be the only possible such system are specious. But finance capitalism isn't even a system. It's a method for cannibalizing an existing system, rendering it for its value until nothing but the bones are left. When finance capital becomes dominant, capitalism has serious crises. And finance capital has probably never been as dominant as it is today.

- Thomas Walkom offers up a few lessons for Stephen Harper based on his utter failure to sell the Keystone XL pipeline south of the border:

The first is that, politically, the environment still matters. Prime Minister Stephen Harper may have successfully ignored environmental critics at home. But, as the U.S. president’s abrupt reversal on the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates, such critics still wield considerable clout in countries that Canada is desperate to do business with.

The second is that continental energy integration — a long-standing dream of both the Conservative Party and its allies in the oil industry — is neither as simple nor advisable as it might seem.

- Peter Thurley points out who stands to suffer most from the Cons' crackdown on refugees.

- Finally, John Warnock notes that Saskatchewan's voter turnout - already unimpressive based on the numbers released by Elections Saskatchewan - looks much worse when taking into account unenumerated citizens of voting age.