NPR reports this AM on the effects of oil pricing on global policy actions (by various countries, not just the USA). While the reporter remains vaguely impartial her biases show as she hits on several important issues without discussing them: The current cost of oil is robbing the USA of pride of place in several areas. China, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria… these places are becoming more important as money flows out of the USA - both real money paying for oil and the virtual money of reputation, market power and production.
I’ve had the day to cogitate on the article from Harper’s referenced in the previous post. And it has been quite a day: my office, filled with mentally healthy folks, puts work down in some quite logical piles on Friday and picks them up again on Monday. Taking the reactor off line and bringing it back online make for some insane times. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to recognise the pattern.
Now, Cam preached a sermon, yesterday, that involved us Christians remembering who we are and whose we are, for a time today, I had to remember who pays my salaryl and so there really wasn’t much time to worry about the whinging of Episcopalians today, as the thing that butters my bread was more important today.
But now I can come back to the article, having relaxed a bit, taken care of some important personal business (my BF, my former-housemate, a wonderful Fraternity brother, some grocery shopping and cooking supper). Now I can attend to blogging and picking up the rant where I left off this AM.
The report finds that the majority of expert projections expect the peak to occur without warning any time between now and 2040. Most disturbingly, the report emphasises that the US federal government has failed to explore any preventive or mitigating measures to tackle the problem and associated implications of peak oil, even though, as the report warns, “an imminent peak and sharp decline in oil production could have severe consequences, including a worldwide recession.”
Word reaches us of of former coworkers loosing their jobs in non-profit layoffs (disguised as “restructuring”), letters speak of hiring freezes in higher ed and, this AM, NPR says NY State has a hiring freeze as well. My bank reports a huge loss lass quarter…
I’ve been told that things are, historically, so bad in Buffalo that they don’t get much worse. We’ll see.
The Difference between Soviet Style Communism and US Style Capitalism is that in the former, all the businesses belong to the Gov’t and workers pay money, to the Gov’t, for Toilet Paper. In the later, all the Gov’t belongs to the Businesses and workers pay money to businesses in the form of taxes.
As I read about the housing collapse, I understand more and more that the problem was with standard American greed: everyone wanted something for nothing. The idea that I could buy a house and “flip it” in less than 2 years, before the mortgage went up, and buy something new (and do it all again) would have been alien to any of our forebears (or anyone around the world) who simply wanted to own a home - not buy sell and trade so that they might get more money.
Yet none of this money was real! It was all imaginary money, based on loans from the banks - loans in which no cash ever changed hands and one only increased one’s debt.
No, I don’t like my tax money going to the businesses that profited from this insanity. But, increasingly, neither do I feel sorry for the majority of the other-wise smart folks who sought to make a profit of of their imaginary money and worth. Both the bankers and the homeowner invented this collapse (just like the dotcom collapse) by trying to sell nothing for money. The lesson is still the same: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Increasingly, I’d rather pay money to the gov’t for toilet paper than lose my tax dollars to well-connected idiots.
Currency exchange outlets in Amsterdam don’t want to trade US dollars for euros because the value of the dollar is dropping so quickly they’re afraid of losing money, even with the outlandish vigorish the sleazy little joints usually tack on.
Does that make your wallet feel lighter?
Perhaps this will?
Will the Dollar become the new Soviet-era Rouble (such that we insist it’s worth money while the rest of the world simply plays along when we’re standing there but uses greenbacks for TP when we’re not)?
Or, as a friend suggested today, is the current crisis being managed by the “bankers” to force us all into a one-world currency (which I like to call the “Woro”)
It doesn’t sound all that different from current economic woes, but the key difference is that the last market downturn was neatly contained in the tech industry. As a result, the overall market returned to its previous levels within months of April 2000, and by 2004, even the IPO market had rebounded. This time around, because of the desperate credit crisis among banks, an economic downturn could be more widespread and debilitating.
Although any of us may offer the idea that, well, hey, my house was not one of these sub-prime things, or, well, I don’t have any major debt, we’d be missing the point. It’s much bigger than all that. The New York Times says,
“The problem is bigger than the Fed,” said Meredith A. Whitney, an Oppenheimer financial services analyst. “Trillions of dollars of securities were underwritten on the false assumption house prices could never go down on a national basis. That falsehood has put the entire financial system in a tailspin.”
If we are looking at a credit crisis based on the housing market, we forget that the basic premise of American Capitalism is to throw money after profit. Everyone thought they’d make money with houses. HGTV - “House and Garden Television” - is an entire TV Network based on the idea that you bought your house not to provide a rooted home for your children and grandchildren unto successive generations, but rather so you could sell it in a few years with a $100,000 profit. Follow their suggestions and you can do it much faster! How much of our retirement funds are invested in housing by our brokers? How many of our pension funds are in housing? How many of our banks - with all of our savings and credit card debt - are fully invested in housing?
This collapse, like the Dot-Com bust, is based on Greed. Money is not magic: it doesn’t multiply without a referent. The bubble inflates and then it explodes.
And takes down the rest of us, too.
If the BBC is to be believed, the run on banks has already begun.
The Bank of England on Monday made an extra £5bn ($10bn) available for UK banks to borrow to ease credit fears.
The money was five times over-subscribed.
Where’s your money?
I blogged in 2000, “Welcome to the 3rd World.” We came close, but we didn’t get there. How close will we come this time?
There are many reasons we’re going bottom up in the USA right now: lack of financial restraint, lack of corporate ethics, an unjustified (and some insist, unconstitutional) war draining resources from a population not being asked to sacrifice, etc. None of these is a good thing.
But they are all combining with something that amazes me: Advancing Baby-boomer Citizen Decrepitude (ABCD). Their housing crisis, insurance demands, unethical stock choices and medical problems will be the end of all the security that their parents built - and doom for their children and the rest of us.
What was seen as a good thing (the over-population boom in the postwar years) is now, clearly, a bad thing. What helped us out of our past is now destroying our future.
Oh, the irony.
Further, because there were so many of them, the rest of us have had to deal with their aging generational mood swings: caving before their drug-crazed youthful mobs, unable to out-vote their conservative middle ages and totally powerless to cut them off in their retirement (because they still vote with their greed), we have become a nation unable to let go of the generation that has us in a strangle hold.
My own generation, born too close to the Boomers, is totally overshadowed and that’s ok: what amazes me, however, is the Gen Y, Gen Z (etc) that comes up now. Committed to green, to social organisation that furthers freedom, to responsibility which limits that freedom, to ideals that are beyond our conception - and yet easily within reach, given sacrifice and community - this generation is a mark of hope. I have conversations with people “my age” and we are continually amazed at the ideas, the brains, the creativity that comes out our our youngers and our betters.
But they are a smaller and financially less stable generation. They haven’t the financial support of trust funds or social security or even wealthy parents (us) because we are trying to hold up a wall of Advancing Baby-boomer Citizen Decrepitude. They won’t be able to support us in our retirement. ABCD may condemn a lot of us Xers to an entire lifetime of work without retirement, but I think we owe it to those who come after us to give them the freedom to build the world they want - while we support, in their death throes, the passing of the elders who pretend to still be kids.
This is the self-ruled blog of an Christian attempting to follow God in the Way of Jesus... sometimes. I most identify with the Anglican and Liberal Catholic flavours.
«The perfection of man does not consist in that which assimilates him to the whole of creation, but in that which distinguishes him from the created order and assimilates him to his Creator.» Vladimir Lossky,The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men. (Closing lines of the Táin Bó Cúalnge)
