http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
In the unfolding global financial collapse, it is not just our accounts and balance sheets that come up short, but our language as well. What do you call a bunch of liar loans packaged into toxic assets and placed on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve as collateral for rescue loans? J,K. Galbraith has proposed the term “Bezzle,” taking it to mean the eternal ebb and flow of questionable transactions within an economic cycle. Rational actors cut corners during easy times when they know no-one is looking, and then play nice again when the times change and someone starts paying attention again.
But I believe that the phenomenon we are observing is something different: we need a word that describes the artifacts generated in response to irrational actors who demand to be fooled. As the old saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted” – at the fool’s own insistence, no less! If the deer comes out of the forest and walks up to the hunter, it is not proper hunting, and this is not proper con artistry or grift or embezzlement or any other term we use to describe proper works of evil. If the victim, at the site of the economic predator, goes into doggie submission, we must stop discussing the phenomenon in terms of conflict and consider whether what we are observing might be some strange instance of symbiosis.
