Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism is well-connected: Harvard undergrad, Goldman Sachs out of B-School. McKinsey Consulting. Her book, ECONned, has made her a bit of a celebrity on top of that.
She was one of those warning early and often that a financial collapse was on the way.
She posts today about two conversations she had in a 24-hour period about the state of the nation. It's worth checking out.
She describes the person with whom the first conversation took place:
I ran into an old McKinsey colleague, who had subsequently had impressively titled jobs in Big Firms You Heard Of before semi-retiring to manage family money. He and his very accomplished wife were big Bush donors and had been invited to both inaugurations.
Then she reported what he said:
We need more fiscal stimulus. Obama did too little and too much of what he spent on was liberal pork. We could and need to spend a lot on infrastructure. This is looking a lot like 1936. I’m afraid it could get really ugly. And I’m particularly worried that the Republicans will win big this fall. They’ll cut even deeper, that’s the last thing we need right now.
Smith found his point of view, considering his old-line conservative politics, to be surprising.
Then she described the participants in the second conversation:
I had lunch with a two long standing, keen observers and participants in the New York scene, as in very involved in some of the city’s important institutions.
Pretty vague, but you will understand why she doesn't want to describe them with too much specificity. Here's one of the conversation topics:
The conversation turned to whether the US was going towards revolution or fascism. One argued for the a continuation of trends underway: that the continuing weakness of the Obama Administration (and the discrediting of other members of the elite) meant there was a power vacuum. The obvious group to exploit it is the most strident, uncompromising opportunists, an area where the extreme right has a monopoly. The other, who has been reading up on the French Revolutions. took issue with the conventional idea that a revolution is impossible in America: "In France, the trigger was that people were hungry. We are close(r) to that point than most think." He stressed the desensitization to violence (video games, more and more violence) plus widespread gun ownership. And he pointed to rising and underreported crime in the city, for instance, assaults of cab drivers.
He also noted that he believed that there were a lot of people (and he meant in the upper income strata) who were barely holding on, keeping up appearances, and hoping something would break their way. Some might get lucky, but most will hit the wall financially.
Smith is a critic of the Obama Administration and especially, Geither, Summers and Bernanke. Her perspective is from the Left (she often links to Chris Hedges and Counterpunch writers), but she travels in very Establishment circles.
Make of it what you will, but there is the widespread impression, some of it more articulate and some less, that our institutions are failing.
If the ball starts rolling, major change could come fast.
(The long comment thread at NC is as interesting as the original post.)