Short article from Bahrain weekly 'The Gulf' in which the author of 'Super Imperialism' and 'Global Fracture' makes what is hardly the 'modest proposal' he pretends it is, and perhaps also gives a clue as to what he thought he was doing as 'economic adviser' to Denis Kucinich's presidential run. Hudson proposes that an unspecified bloc of 'Middle Eastern' state-capital should try to settle the dollar-standard blackmail once and for all by offering to buy the US out of the military infrastructure (i.e.

Thanks to Meltdown III stalwart Jon Amsden for finding and introducing this impressionistic but telling survey of what a dollar free-falling towards worthlessness ('Monopoly money', anyone?) means in terms of everyday survival in some parts of the world.

For those who may wish to take a break from the lofty abstractions of financial skullduggery and dollar decline, here's how it looks on the fishmarket floor and in other places where the dollar was once the basic currency of international trade but is now losing its former luster.

Financial Times 'Insight' column (April 2, 'Companies & Markets' section) which may be too quick to dismiss the role of the free-falling dollar in dollar-denominated oil prices, but makes an interesting case for the necessity of the current 'speculative' $100+ a barrel rate based on total stocks, once producer countries' excess capacity levels are considered in relation to their own domestic energy needs.  The author unwittingly comes close a 'Midnight Notes'-type argument: the Opec states are forced to provide for electricity demand from growing

Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

Walkabout

these cartographies bleed biographies