1. I'm listening to billionaires on CNBC like David Tepper and Ken Langone saying we'll curve the epidemic like they did in S. Korea. And demanding we restart the arsenal of democracy to roll ventilators off the assembly line. "Get it done."
These people are f'ing DELUSIONAL.
These people are f'ing DELUSIONAL.
2. During WWII the government had massive competent bureaucracies. The army and navy had huge manufacturing facilities AND logistics networks to track what American industry could do. They had huge numbers of production plans developed during and after WWI. That stuff is GONE!
3. American corporations had productive facilities inside the U.S. and a large workforce of people who knew how to design, build, and bring production to scale. So much of that is GONE! We can't even make our own bibles. mattstoller.substack.com/p/bible-lobbyi…
4. The endless bromides from billionaires to just 'get it done' as if you can flip on River Rouge with a switch is as much a problem as anything else. We shipped all that stuff to China for 25 years because of those billionaires. They don't know what they did.
5. My org @econliberties put together a partial list of sole source dependencies on China. It's long. And there's literally no one in government to give it to. We have no functional bureaucracies. We can't even write checks to anyone but Wall Street.
6. America has immense resources, but we have spent 25 years shattering our bureaucratic competence in both public and private institutions. Right now the infection curve is growing in the U.S. so quickly it's scary. We will be so lucky if we are Italy.
7. Ex-Goldman CEO isn't crazy to think this, but he's assuming that there's a lot of public competence in the U.S. that there just isn't.
8. Governing and running production is hard work and we haven't done it for a long time. We can relearn but we have to reckon with what we did and how we allocate resources. @chamath actually framed it quite well. socialcapital.com/annual-letters…
9. We have our talented people focus on getting people to click on ads or structure useless credit products. Men like Tepper go on CNBC to demand we restart the arsenal of democracy, and then proceed to discuss how he's 'nibbling' on buying equities and bonds. That's the problem!
10. We have to rebuild our public and corporate bureaucracies to emphasize production instead of finance. Ironically we cannot address the financial crisis until we dethrone the financiers as kings of America.
