The Davos Apocalypse

Europe s Zombie Banks

America s Zombie Prison

The Horseman of the Jewish Apocalypse

Now, back to the unfolding apocalypse.

Zombie assets would be destroyed.

Scene from a movie Apocalypse Now great movie.

Back then, the specter of the Apocalypse helped keep borrowing cheap.

Eman al Nafjan tweets a picture of the apocalypse to come

Responding with military aid will simply turn a catastrophe into an apocalypse.

Today s crisis is acute, but there is no sense of an approaching apocalypse.

Officials know that if they wait too long, zombie or near zombie banks with little or no net worth, but treated as if they were viable institutions are likely to gamble on resurrection.

So, what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization.

Engaging Iran is also the only way to stave off a nuclear apocalypse in the region.

Merging zombie banks is like drunks trying to help each other stand up.

On this foundation of zombie economics and slipshod research rests the case for austerity.

More rapid resolution may be necessary to prevent zombie banks from infecting the financial system.

As a result, America has created its own generation of zombies in this case, zombie consumers.

Caught between a zombie and a bloodsucker . Art by Ganzeer. Image is also available in Arabic.

Words like cockroach, delusional, derp, dope, fool, knave, mendacious idiot, and zombie have no place in civilized debate.

Zombie banks dead but still walking among the living are, in Ed Kane s immortal words, gambling on resurrection.

As a result, Europe emerged from the recession with too many zombie banks, wounded households, and struggling companies.

The credit crunch will last much longer if we keep zombie banks alive despite their massive and continuing losses.

Zombie like companies were kept on artificial life support in the false hope that time alone would revive them.

The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right?

With retrenchment and balance sheet repair only in its early stages, the zombie like behavior of American consumers should persist.

If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway.

As a result, house prices collapsed, leaving a trail of zombie banks (whose liabilities far exceeded their assets) and ruined borrowers.

(Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right?

Policies aimed directly at debt forgiveness and enhanced saving incentives contentious, to be sure would at least address zombie consumers balance sheet problems.

I talk freely almost as a provocative performance. I hope that the result is contagious for the rest of our somehow zombie citizens.

Illustrating this complex situation, Egyptian artist Ganzeer depicts the army as a vampire and Mohamed Morsi (impersonating the Muslim Brotherhood) as a zombie, highlighting

This makes them safer, because they are more able to absorb losses, and less likely to become zombie banks (which do not make sensible loans).

Higher equity capital requirements for banks are good for the broader economy they make financial crises (and the zombie syndrome) less likely, less severe, or both.

I'm sorry it was a cheap laugh, but I wanted to find a way to transition back to this idea of the unfolding apocalypse, and I thought that might do it.

Instead, regulators must take forceful steps to unwind zombie banks and compel viable banks to rely more on equity markets, where risk is traded and priced, to become stronger.

For decades, the US and Europe lectured the world on the importance of cleaning house in the wake of a financial crisis in particular, repairing or resolving zombie banks.

On this foundation of zombie economics and slipshod research rests the case for austerity. In fact, the austerity boosters in the UK and Europe frequently cited the Alesina and Reinhart Rogoff findings.

Having run out of basis points to cut from interest rates, the Fed has turned to the quantity dimension of the credit cycle injecting massive doses of liquidity into the collapsed veins of zombie consumers.

This is old information we've known since about the 80s, yet there's no medicine I can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three horsemen of the apocalypse that is cancer.

As a result, Europe emerged from the recession with too many zombie banks, wounded households, and struggling companies. In Germany, the private economy was fit enough to recover, but this was less true in southern Europe or even France.

And to be honest, if I had known when I was asked to give this upbeat talk that even as I was giving the upbeat talk, the apocalypse would be unfolding I might have said, Is it okay if I talk about something else?

Most businesses in the eurozone rely on bank finance, and while credit conditions have improved somewhat, lending is flat (and continues to fall in southern Europe). As long as zombie banks are weighed down with bad loans, that is unlikely to change much.

And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting attending zombie back home.

Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation.