“The Chattering Classes”

THE FALL OF WALL STREET IS THE BERLIN WALL OF SAVAGE CAPITALISM: The historical analogy dominates CartaCapital magazine this week. I am not sure I agree with the analysis -- Hegel famously said he thought human beings incapable of learning from history, and may have been correct. But it certainly is a dominant South American meme at the moment.

Brazilian political and economic commentators perform their analyses before the fact. Before they know that it actually happened, they have an explanation for it. They present opinion divorced from information. –Ricardo Kauffman

From the unsigned Têvêlândia (“Televisionland”) column in CartaCapital (São Paulo, Brazil) No. 518 (R$7.90 at your local newsstand.) My loose translation.

They were so sure of themselves, the poor bastards, with their prophetic self-confidence. They knew all there was to know about the current situation and about the future as well. They preached fiscal discipline and criticized public spending. They said things like: Brazil ought to sit up and take notice. Globalization is irreversible. We cannot turn our backs on the world. The Lula government will not give the international financial community the benefit of the doubt. The State represents oppression. Long live the free market.

With their bow-ties, their tousled haircuts, their cheeks swollen with platitudes, all very much in the style of the Chicago Boys (and Girls), they gabbled absurdities and prophesied catastrophes. They had the certainty of fools and never failed to provide the needed partisan-political spin. If you were, for example, married to some pompous scholar who does yeoman service for the PSDB, you were obliged to say, whenever something went right in the administration of your ideological adversary, that it was not your adversary who deserved the credit, but the previous administration, which “planted the seeds of the future.”