Europe s Financial Alchemy

Homaro Cantu Ben Roche Cooking as alchemy

And there it entered into the alchemy community as geomancy divination through the earth.

So, the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy.

CDOs are a form of financial alchemy special purpose vehicles that buy the financial equivalent of lead (low rated mortgaged backed securities) and finance themselves mostly with the financial equivalent of gold (highly sought after AAA bonds). This transformation is based on one sound principle and two shaky ones.

And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest race, religion, politics, sexuality only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.

While central bankers can provide such narratives to financial markets, it is political leaders who must provide the overall socioeconomic messages that encourage long term real investment, electoral support for reform, and hope for the future. Central bank alchemy, to borrow a term from the US journalist Neil Irwin s new book, has its limits.

In fact, even the term chemical science enjoyed some popularity in the nineteenth century a time when the field sought to distinguish itself from alchemy and the promotion of quack nostrums. But the need to use that term to distinguish true science from the practice of imposters was already fading by the time the Nobel Prizes were launched in 1901.

In this sense, the term alchemy could be applied to pre Keynesians like US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose prescription at the start of the Great Depression was to liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate in order to purge the rottenness out of the system. It could also be applied to those today who favor returning monetary policy to the pre 1914 gold standard.