I beg your pardon

Humbly beseeching you for your pardon for the troubles and wrongs I may have inflicted on you, I am wishing you a Happy Eid Mubarak 1 Syawal 1427 H. Thank you; thank you!

One Day in the Life of a Blogger

One day in the life of a blogger — 515 words in one sentence ;)

I was leafing through pages of the new decrees and regulations recently signed by Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono (read: Indonesia’s first democratically elected president) on bio-fuel when, in the mid of our growingly laissez-faire office hours these days, as the great Lebaran celebration and ensuing holidays are but a matter of days, I received a phone call from a new insurance company whose name I had never head of, nor the name of the officer (this insurance agent) who had wished to speak to me, and to whom I had a bit of pity because at that instant I already knew my answer to his offer, which would have been a rejection since after the insurance policies for our family car and our daughter, I virtually could not afford any other type of insurance protection for anyone or anything else in our household; at any rate, this morning, perhaps out of the benevolence or positive fasting-month atmosphere in my heart approaching the closing days of the holy month of Ramadan when all Moslems are actually supposed to outshine themselves in terms of their spiritual performances in other months, I was not prepared to say no to anyone, especially to someone, as I learned later, who had just joined a new growing insurance office fortnightly; so I let him the intrusion, confirming that I was the Mr. X whom he was looking for, and that I was honestly always interested in the idea of insuring (although no insurance companies so far have won my respect through how they undertake the idea of insuring people or their property) but could not afford it and assured him that even if he had this gift of the gab he would not be able to make me buy another insurance service anyway, and offered him a choice of hanging up or talking on without the possibility of prospecting me as his new client, to which, to my surprise, this young man (younger than me, by ten years I’m tempted to suppose) opted the latter and shot the breeze for some time about his own life on and on and so it was only when the conversation took a swerve, I managed to ask him how he had come with the phone number to reach me, to which, he answered he basically got it from the market, and to which, I suggested that he talked to his bosses or office to allow him to disclose sources of information contact, because especially in the very business that hinges on the trust of clients, they cannot afford to win customers without first and foremost being able to instill trust; I never knew how he had gotten to contact me in the first place; rather than thinking that I was serious about the trust, that man might have thought I was being irrelevant. (By the way, the palm oil aside, prospect for Indonesia’s biofuel--through jatropha, cassava, beans, etc—looks to me, despite the media cacophony, very grim; I fear I am being more serious this time...)

On 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics

The recent selection of the Noble Laureate in economics either suggests how very poorly we have tried to embrace (and missed!) the most fundamental concepts of economics in the last five decades--i.e. what money is not, and what inflation is; or how very strongly we have clung to the mythical idea over the roles that governments and central banks do; or a combination of both. I go along with Frank Shostak, who said that Edmund Phelps did not actually really explain stagflation except that, rather, together with his colleague, another laureate Milton Friedman, has only introduced more confusion than clarity regarding the explanation of the phenomenon of stagflation. To accept their theorem would basically mean to believe that manna from heaven, or money created in thin air, could in itself serve as an agent of growth. It may remind one of Rothbard’s hypothetical example of a 20 percent gift in the form of money gratis from Archangel Gabriel, in the disastrous attempt to make the people more well-off.

If the modern Austrian theory of business cycle and the underlying concept of inflation are correct, then in the period prior to and during the 1970s stagflation, or any period overshadowed by stagflation, the money supply must have increased at level that more or less correspond to the average inflation score. This remains to be proven. Once proven, the relationship must be understood as causal rather than correlational.

Frank Shostak couldn’t have made himself more lucid. However, he could have been more enlightening by resorting to some historical datay—i.e. proving how much more money was in actual “circulation” during that period in question. Many would be curious to review what happened after the stagflation, perhaps to see how an economy picks up or muddles through afterward.