Humpty Dumpty Iraq

Who's Humpty Dumpty? (quietly)

Humpty Dumpty and Global Financial Imbalances

How do you mean, Humpty Dumpty?

Then you'll be just like Humpty Dumpty, all smashed up.

It could end up looking like Humpty Dumpty or somebody else.

Well, the short run, it's hunky dory, but the long run, it's humpty dumpty.

And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Nobody, it appears, can put Humpty Dumpty Iraq together again. But it will require courage to acknowledge what is occurring before our eyes, rather than continue to grasp at the chimera of a consolidated Iraqi state.

Humpty O'Dougal's saloon.

Be seeing you, Humpty.

We collect a bunch of biological information in this artificial setting, and we fix them up, like Humpty Dumpty all over again, and send them home, and hope we might hand them a brochure, maybe an interactive website that they do as asked and don't come back into the mainframe.

But no solution is possible until we abandon the savings shortage and savings glut hypotheses and connect today s global financial imbalances with global production patterns and inadequate demand in developing countries. Tortuous claims that saving is merely the flip side of consumption and investment spending are the economic equivalent of Humpty Dumpty s argument in Through the Looking Glass When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.