File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 165


From: "jurriaan bendien" <Jbendien-AT-globalxs.nl>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Catastrophe bonds and socialism
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 18:35:09 +0100


Hell I am starting to believe in Boddhisatva, although I am not rushing out
for my catastrophe bonds.  Listen up it's friday night and I already missed
out on a potential new friend down there by the library tonight, and I have
to get out and not sit here tapping the keys contributing to the total
volume of hot air on Thaxis at the moment, and thus to global warming
(still chilly in Amsterdam).  But we'll will return to these issues
shortly.

Jurriaan  

PS - if the RCP say the poor should move away from shitty living
conditions, where do they say that, exactly ? And if it is true they say
that, do they offer to help them move, or provide a vehicle service ?
----------
> From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
> To: marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject: M-TH: Catastrophe bonds and socialism
> Date: Friday, December 05, 1997 1:43 PM
> 
> 
> 
>  
>  
>  
> 		Catastrophe bonds and socialism 
>  
>  
>  
> 	Recently a new financial instrument has been gaining popularity
> and media attention.  It is the so-called "catastrophe bond".  This is a
> security that represents a collective (collective?, hmmm) effort by
> insurers to create a pool of cash in case a natural disaster should force
> simultaneous payments on large numbers of policies.  The bondholder gets
a
> nice return over the life of the instrument with the proviso that ,should
> a natural disaster of sufficient magnitude occur, he may lose *both* the
> forward returns on the bond and the principal he has put into it. 
> Actuaries and rating services estimate that there is no more than a 1
> percent chance of such a catastrophe occurring in any given year.  This
> security is similar, in a sense, to commoditized credit card debt in that
> it represents a pooling of very individual and variable cases of risk. 
> This pooling is then sufficient to create a uniform security that can be
> put out to the market, where it is subject to individual purchase
> decisions. 
>  
>  
> 	Such pooled-risk securities have been around for a while,
> particularly in the mortgage arena, but only the recent developments in
> information technologies have made things like the catastrophe bond
> effective and things like securitized credit card debt commonplace.  As
> such these are apparent triumphs for techno-capitalism, but could they be
> more? 
>  
>  
> 	The techno wing of the statist, anti-market maajority in academic
> socialismhas, through people like Cockshott and Cottrell, envisioned a
> uniformly bar-coded answer to the vast difficulties inherent in a command
> economy.  They envision a society that is, in effect, a great Home Depot
> with the seeming chaos of millions of items made perfect sense of back at
> Lenin-Central by democratically elected mainframes.  Socialist marketeers
> have rejected their digitized dystopia for many reasons, but have lacked
> an over-arching concept of how macro-economic problems would be
> collectively solved without state collectivization.  The method behind
the
> recent inventions of capitalism that I mentioned previously may show a
> way.  Private decisions made by small cooperatives can be managed by
> computer technology.  However, instead of micro-managing them, socialist
> economists and financial cooperatives can use pooling to create credit
and
> offset risk, thereby *increasing* market discipline and justification
> relative to capitalism. 
>  
>  
> 	The worry in market socialism has always been accumulation.  In
> accumulation the socialist sees the threat of oligopoly and monopoly. 
But
> what, in a socialist market economy, is the inherent advantage of
> accumulation?  Remember that few economic actions of real competitive
> advantage are done with cash these days.  Also, superior cash generation
> per value produced is , within a cooperative system, simply a hallmark of
> a superior cooperative that has every right and reason to flourish
> relative to its competitors.  So the real advantage of accumulation is
> that it makes credit easier. 
>  
>  
> 	Economic realities are quantized: a new factory must be built, a
> warehouse burns down, high minimum amounts of lab time and worker-hours
> are necessary for innovation - large firms use economies of scale to
> maintain creditworthiness across such events.  Small firms present an
> inherently greater risk. A single debacle, or a single inability to enter
> a new market can mean total failure.  No creditor, however public-minded,
> can prudently ignore that fact yet smaller cooperatives with equal or
> better ideas cannot remain vital and independent without equal access to
> credit per value produced.  The answer is to pool smaller risks. 
However,
> if these are pooled by an institution, like a bank, then that institution
> simply assumes the same accumulation advantage possessed by the big
> industrial firm, perhaps an even greater one.  The answer is to return
> that pooled risk back to the public.  Let the proletariat consume
> commoditized debt (as lenders/savers) like they would any other
commodity. 
> The difference here is that in their consumption they would fund their
own
> futures and undermine the power of accumulation in their society. 
>  
>  
> 	Instead of the socialist technocrat's usurping worker control over
> decisions in the cooperative, he can simply judge these decisions
> objectively, and use his opinion of the inherent risk in the creation of
> publicly consumed debt securities.  As long as the proletariat is the
> lender, and the proletariat is the borrower, with general participation,
> and no loci of power to restrict or withhold credit - no tenet of
> socialism is undermined.  Furthermore, the more this form of public
> financing becomes industry-specific, the more commodity production is
> structurally undermined.  The proletariat, as lenders, increasingly fund
> the exact industries that they deem personally and socially necessary,
> consuming what their credit pays for directly. 
>  
>  
>  
>  
> 	peace 
>  
> 	boddhisatva 
>  
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>      --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005