Chomsky on the bailout

Markets have inherent and well-known inefficiencies. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. That is particularly true for financial institutions.

Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.

Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.

The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words - and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.

~ BBC ~

 

The Mozart Effect

The medicinal properties of Mozart continue to stun scientists. Listening to his works has been linked to reduced stress, improved learning, and pain relief. Now a University of Illinois study has found that a child with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy, had fewer seizures while exposed to Mozart's Sonata in DMajor for 10minutes every hour, The Independent reported.

Another study at the university found changes in brain activity in 23 out of 29 cases when Mozart was played. In some cases the changes occurred during coma, suggesting any effect is not linked to the music being appreciated; it appears to have some kind of direct effect. The university's Dr. John Hughes said Mozart's complex music might have an effect similar to pulsating electrical stimulation, bringing order to malfunctioning nerve cells in the brain.

[...]

Music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone usually associated with stress, says the pianist and surgeon Dr Claudius Conrad, of Harvard Medical School.

In a paper in Critical Care Medicine, Conrad said his team had revealed an unexpected element in distressed patients' physiological response to music: a jump in pituitary growth hormone - known to be crucial in healing. "It's a sort of quickening," he said, "that produces a calming effect."

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