The Ice Age is Cometh

Information Asymmetry is what drives the market. I alluded to this in an earlier blog posting (see Market Responsibility, Saturday, 18 October 2008). Yet I still hear the socialist agenda mention regularly that if it wasn’t for the recent government interventions to ‘save the market’, the market would have collapsed. I am sorry, but I just don’t buy this. Yes it is true that individual institutions in the market would have failed, but as a mechanism, the market would have wobbled and other participants would have picked up the distressed bits and pieces and carried on. True, there was a crisis of liquidity in the system, with severe knock on effects, but as a mechanism for allocating resources, effort and reward, I still believe the market would have survived, with or without the ‘nuclear’ option intervention we saw. The moral of this tale is that unfortunately the socialist elite now believe and make the rest of the market believe that they hold the moral high ground and can dictate the agenda for the next several years. Oh well and so the pendulum swings…

Which was entirely a side track to the real intention behind this posting.

‘The Ice Age is Cometh’ was an article headline in the Radio Times edition of 16 – 22 November 1974. I friend of mine came out with the rank smelling edition of the Radio Times of late 1974, that he discovered stuffed in the chimney breast of his new home. Stuffed in that chimney-breast to obviously keep the cold draughts out, as according to the subtitle the next 1,000 years could be very, very cold, with an advance of the polar ice caps and glaciers. Did I blink or something? I will challenge the BBC to dig out the programme aired in the week of 16 – 22 November 1974 on BBC 2, so that we can be reminded how quickly the agenda and the focus can shift, if we take our eye off the ball and let information asymmetry spin the agenda out of our control.

And I suppose we cannot deny the evidence currently in front of our eyes. Polar ice caps are retreating, which is true if you focus purely on an evidence based approach to trying to understand the wider system. But do make your observations and emotive arguments from within the system, or do you need to step outside that system in order to be more objective. And what about intuition? On a purely intuitive level I believe the earth of GAIA is a self correcting system but we do not have enough evidence to conclusively prove this assertion.

So, in the meantime, we swing one generation to the next, waiting for the ‘Information Assymetrists’ (yes my new made up word de jour) to set the agenda and the morals of the market.

As a soul in this market arena I just keep on being amazed, day in and day out. Please just give me the ability to take the long view…

theMarketSoul ©2009