TASE is dying and stock prices are agonizing. Israel Corporation, Discount and all other large corporations have lost 50% of their values in the last three months. The disaster is causing me much damage and I am distressed because what is happening in the bourse goes against my instincts of what the bourse should be doing.
After three months I am starting to see more clearly what is happening. It isnot hat foreign funds have confused Israel with Syria and retired their funds. They are less myopic than I presume. It is us. Last summer's middle class protest against the price of cottage cheese (!) and Pesek Zman candy (!), thanks to the incitation campaign led by HaAretz against the wealthy, has cowed the government and it is acting forcefully against "capitalist swines" (sic in Hebrew). Firstly they ordered our Potash mining Company KIL to "save the Dead Sea", meaning to restore that geographical concept into some ideal pristine state. I cant say that it is a "green" environmental demand since what the "Greens" want is to restore the original deadness of the Dead Sea, to reconvert into a lifeless body of salty water. By the way, Minister Landau has been accusing the Greens of irresponsibly killing the Ashdod Termoelectric Station Project in order "to save" some coastal sand dunes and causing a severe electricity deficit in the country.
The venomous campaign against the wealthy has succeeded to the point that most corporations in Israel are unable to pay their debts (Tshuva Group reached an arrangement with its bondholders to pay back about half) and now they are being ordered to divest their holdings. That is, a bank or financial entity is forbidden to have any relation with a "real" company producing material goods. I had no time to think out the logic of this new law, but it goes against what is happening all over the world. The trend is toward large mixed corporations with partly State ownership, because only these large conglomerates are able to compete in the global marketplace and carry out large projects. To break them up makes little sense to me, and even more because we are talking about conglomerates that are large only at the Israeli scale, they are veritable midgets out there. Anyway, Israel Corporation has lost 50% of its worth and even Nochi Dankner's wonderful corporation has been ordered to sell its banking or manufacturing assets (and its price is down).
6 comments:
The art of running a successful state is to balance the competing needs of economic entrepreneurs ie the wealth producers, on the one hand, and those who produce the next generation, ie the common people.
This is barely possible.
However, if you layer on another set of needs, relating to , eg, environmentalism, political correctness, gratuitous militarism, or whatever, the task becomes impossible.
This is my rather pedestrian contribution to this problem, which is not confined to Israel.
Anon.
Germany has shot its foot by destroying its nuclear electricity industry and betting on wind power. Very clean and very unreliable. Without cheap electricity they are done.
It is part of the conspiracy to destroy white Europe.
"Deutschland schafft sich ab."
Anon.
That is not what Thilo Sarrazin says. The subtitle of his book says something like "How we are destroying our country". No conspiracy.
yet he was sacked ipso facto.
What is happening in the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Southern Africa is not an accident.
Nor is it natural.
It is a secret, pernicious and destructive agenda forced on normal people by a corrupted and disloyal elite.
I think this is tantamount to a conspiracy. Let's call a spade a spade.
Anon.
This is not a new problem. WWI destroyed the moral basis of Western society and physically destroyed many of its finest proponents. What was left were a bunch of weaklings filled with self doubt and willing to follow false messiahs - Hitler, Stalin, etc. These moles in time came to lead the very institutions that they sought to undermine. What we have now are not textbook Marxists loyal to Moscow but still a group of leaders who basically despise that which they are supposed to lead. Obama's whole background reeks of anti-Americanism. All the fashionable isms are a sort of folk Marxism. The real Marxists were at least intellectual (even a brute like Stalin had pretenses of scholarship) but the current Gaia worshipers are childlike.
K
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