for a quick rumination regarding our $40.7 trillion U.S. federal debt, crypto hijinks, and nascent AI market bubble burst.
So, I watched PBS Newshour tonight, as is my long habit. WaPo journalist David J. Lynch was an interviewee. Intrigued by the discussion, I bought his book.
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PROLOGUEThe swollen, blackened bodies on the tile floor were barely recognizable as human. Just an occasional belt buckle or fragment of clothing revealed that these charred forms, shrouded in plastic sheeting, had once been someone’s husband, friend, mother, or child. The dead lying at my feet were casualties of powerful forces reshaping the global economy, forces that eventually would contribute to historic changes in my own country. But on that sweltering May afternoon in 1998, I couldn’t know that.
I was in Jakarta to cover the uprising that within days would end the thirty-two-year reign of the Indonesian dictator Suharto. Massive street protests had begun after he imposed sharp price increases on food, fuel, transport, and electricity, meeting conditions set by the International Monetary Fund in return for $43 billion that Indonesia needed to stay afloat.
What started a few days earlier as a peaceful demonstration had degenerated into mob violence against ethnic Chinese shopkeepers, who were resented for their relative affluence. The bodies lying in the airless morgue were Indonesians who had been caught in fires set by rioters at the Glodok shopping center. In the morgue that day, I spoke with a man named Tamin, who was searching for his twenty-year-old daughter. “I don’t know whether she is here or not,” the anguished father told me.
I had flown in from London the day before to fill in for a colleague. When I arrived, the airport was crowded with expatriates and wealthy Indonesians fleeing the chaos. In a taxi heading downtown, I could see fires burning in the fields along the highway. Jakarta’s streets were lined by armored personnel carriers full of soldiers awaiting orders. With tens of thousands of students, activists, and union representatives demanding a new government, there were fears of a Tiananmen Square–style ending. I stuck around long enough to cover Suharto’s surprisingly peaceful fall and then moved on to my next assignment.
Indonesia’s turmoil came nearly a year into an Asian financial crisis that began in Thailand, when the foreign investors who had flocked to the country during its boom years suddenly took flight. The upheaval spread to other emerging markets, including Russia, where the era’s hopes of democracy were already souring. Before the summer’s end, I found myself in Moscow, reporting on the aftermath of a ruble devaluation that impoverished ordinary Russians. Long queues formed outside banks as people withdrew whatever money they could get their hands on. I spent some time one afternoon with Mikhail Gorbachev, long out of power, listening to him blame everyone but himself for Russia’s plight.
I grew up during the Cold War and spent years studying and writing about the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. To be reporting in a free Russia, whatever its economic circumstances, seemed a marvel. But I failed to understand the implications of what I was seeing in places like Indonesia and Russia. I thought, wrongly, that they were temporary difficulties amid the steady march of markets and democracy. Instead, they were alarm bells that continue to reverberate more than a quarter century later. Trouble abroad posed a stark contrast to the triumphalism back home, where Americans were enjoying a tech-fueled boom marked by low unemployment and high stock prices…
Lynch, David J. The World's Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right) (pp. 1-2). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Update: A wonderful book. Knocked me a bit off course, but well worth it
THE AI BUBBLE
Ed Zitron rocks.
And then we have this crap:
eah. More shortly...
