Fabius Maximus has another post on the financial crisis: US economic update. Everything that follows is a result of what you see here.

I’m not an economist so I can’t comment on his analysis. However, he makes an interesting observation near the end of his post that applies to a lot more than economics:

Under stress people tend to narrow their circle of care.  Who is “us” and who is “them”.  Coordination both within and between nations becomes less likely; conflict becomes more likely.

Boyd was fascinated by this effect. One way to look at Einheit is that it defines who is “us.” “Us” is that group with whom you have Einheit. Your family, your unit, your company, etc. The primary force that drives your relationships within this group is mutual trust. It reduces friction/entropy, allows the use of Auftagstaktik and the implicit guidance and control link, and makes it more likely that organizations can take effective actions in time for them to be effective.

So one of the most important things you must do is destroy Einheit — in the other side. Once you do that, they fight themselves (“conflict becomes more likely”):

Surface, fear, anxiety, and alienation in order to generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as subvert those that adversary depends upon, thereby magnify internal friction. Patterns 122.

One way to do that is to operate inside their OODA loops, to change the situation in menacing ways more rapidly than the other side can comprehend. Sound like what’s going on today?

[What’s important is the nature of change, not whether it is caused by an opponent or is the result of natural / economic forces. In that sense, nature, or the world economy, can operate inside our OODA loops.]