It would be easy to write a story about Venezuela’s energy problems and, in it, focus on the corruption and mismanagement that have taken place. This would make it look like Venezuela’s problems were different from everyone else’s. Taking this approach, it would be easy to argue that the problems wouldn’t have happened, if better leaders had been elected and if those leaders had chosen better policies.
I think that there is far more behind Venezuela’s financial and energy problems than corruption and mismanagement.
As I see the story, Venezuela realized that it had huge oil resources relative to its population, back as early as the 1920s. While these oil resources are substantial, the country misestimated how high a standard of living that these resources could support. To try to work around the issue of setting development goals too high, the country chose the path of distributing the benefits of oil exports in an almost socialistic manner. This socialistic approach, plus increased debt, hid the problem of a standard of living that could not really be supported for many years. Recent problems in Venezuela show that these approaches cannot be permanent solutions. In fact, it seems likely that Venezuela will be one of the first oil-exporting nations to collapse.
How the Subsidy from High-Priced Exported Oil Works
Oil is a strange resource. The cost of oil production tends to be quite low, especially for oil exporters. The selling price is based on a world oil price that changes from day to day, depending on what some would call “demand.” The difference between the selling price and the cost of extraction can make oil exporters rich. In a sense, this difference might be considered an “energy surplus” that is being distributed to the economies of oil exporters. The greater the energy surplus being distributed, the greater the quantity of goods and services (made with energy products) that can be purchased from outside the country with the hard currency that is made available through the sale of oil.
In fact, the existence of such a profitable resource tends to crowd out development of other, less profitable, enterprises. Thus, Venezuela has tended to be a country whose economy revolves around oil. There is a small amount of agriculture and quite a bit of services, but for the most part, the goods used by the economy must be purchased from outside the country. Furthermore, nearly all of the revenue that is available to purchase these goods comes from the sale of oil exports. Thus, the economy tends to follow the fortune of oil sales.
Figure 1 shows a rough estimate of the benefit that Venezuela’s oil exports have provided in inflation-adjusted US dollars. Based on this approach, the per capita benefit from oil exports seems to have peaked very early, in about 1981.
Figure 1. Venezuela per capita value of oil exports, calculated by multiplying Venezuela’s year-by-year quantity of oil exports by the price in 2017$ of oil, and dividing by estimated population. Both price and quantity determined using BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy. Population based on 2017 United Nations middle estimates.
The people of Venezuela did not realize that the amount of benefit that oil exports would provide would start falling very early. Instead, leaders set their sights on living standards that would be affordable if the level of subsidy that the economy could obtain from oil exports were to remain as high as during the 1973 to 1981 period.
Figure 2 shows how much energy the population, on average, consumed over the 1965 to 2017 period. This figure shows that energy consumption per capita rose dramatically between 1973 and 1981. In this way, citizens were able to benefit from the huge rise in per capita oil export revenue, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 2. Energy consumption per capita for Venezuela, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data.
This higher level of energy consumption meant that the economy readjusted in a way that added more goods and services using energy. For example, the economy added paved roads, airports, schools, electricity generating capacity and healthcare. People came to expect this higher standard of living going forward, even if the level of subsidy that oil exports had been adding was rapidly disappearing.
The way the amounts in Figure 1 “work” is that they depend both on the quantity of oil exported and the market price for that oil. If Venezuela’s oil exports are not rising quickly enough, or if the price of oil is not high enough, the level of oil subsidy fails to rise enough to support the economy. Also, rising population becomes an issue because as population rises, more homes, cars, electricity, streets, and other goods (requiring energy consumption) are needed. Because Venezuela must import practically everything other than oil, it must either (a) export an increasing quantity of oil per year, or (b) get an increasingly high price for the oil it exports, if it wishes to support its rising population at its chosen standard of living.
It became evident very early that Venezuela had set its sights on a living standard that was far higher than it could really support. In the period since 1965, Venezuela’s first debt crisis took place in 1982, as the subsidy suddenly started falling. Later debt crises occurred in 1990, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004, and 2017. Clearly, as soon as the per capita subsidy started falling in 1982 (see Figure 1), Venezuela’s economy became very troubled. It could not really support its chosen standard of living.
How could Venezuela hide the problem of an unsupportable living standard for over 35 years?
I see three major ways the insupportable living standard could be hidden:
(a) Pushing the problem off into the future using added debt
Nearly everyone is willing to believe that oil prices will rise as high as is needed to extract oil resources that seem to be available with current technology. Would-be lenders are also willing to believe that oil resources can be extracted as rapidly as needed to support the economy. Given this combination of beliefs, Venezuela has had little difficulty adding more debt, even in periods not long after it has been forced to restructure previous debt.
Recently, the biggest lender to Venezuela has been China. With this arrangement, Venezuela has been able to obtain the economic benefit of part of its oil resources, before the oil has actually been extracted. Unfortunately, this arrangement makes Venezuela more quickly susceptible to the adverse impact of a downturn in oil prices. To make matters worse, the debt to China appears to include a provision that creates a lower repayment level (in oil) if prices rise, but creates a higher repayment level (in oil) if oil prices fall. This provision no doubt looked favorable to Venezuela, back in the time period when it was believed that oil prices could only rise.
As far as I know, Venezuela is the only oil exporting country that has used debt as extensively as it has. Some oil exporters, such as Saudi Arabia, have taken the opposite approach, setting aside reserve funds to use in the event that oil prices fall. Needless to say, Venezuela’s use of debt has tended to make its economy very vulnerable to restructuring or defaults if oil prices fall.
(b) Pursuing economic simplification
A complex economy is one that is set up, as much as possible, to keep up with growing technology. A significant share of expenditures go both toward making new capital goods and maintaining existing capital goods. There are considerable differences in pay levels, to make certain that those who are providing technical expertise are adequately compensated for their efforts. Business leaders also are adequately compensated for their contributions.
A much simpler economy, which is what most of the Venezuelan leaders have been aiming for, is an economy in which everyone gets a basic level of housing, transportation, and healthcare, but virtually no one gets very much. There is also not much investment in new technology and new capital goods because nearly all of the hard currency being obtained by selling oil exports is being used to purchase imported goods and services to support the basic level of goods and services (such as roads, electricity, education, and food) being provided to the many citizens of the economy. Since the external value of oil exports sets an upper limit on the quantity of goods and services that Venezuela can import, this leaves virtually no capacity to purchase imported goods and services needed to support new capital investment and research.
In Venezuela’s economy, the cost of both oil and electricity have been kept very low–below the cost of production. This helps keep citizens happy, but it also cuts off funds for new investment in these areas. This, too, is part of the simple economy approach.
One disadvantage of a simple economy is that the low wages for engineers and other professionals encourage these professionals to move to other countries, where compensation is more adequate. Another disadvantage of a simple economy is that it encourages bribery, because graft is a way of adjusting the system so that those who “can make things happen” are adequately compensated for their efforts. The simple economy approach also tends to discourage research and investment in new areas, such as natural gas production and improved methods of heavy oil extraction.
A simple economy can be kept operating for a while, but it quickly reaches limits in many ways:
- The limited skill level of residents who have not emigrated for higher wages elsewhere makes the completion of complex projects, such as new electricity generation facilities, difficult.
- The inadequate level of oil export revenue puts a limit on the amount of spare parts and other goods needed to maintain the infrastructure, such as electricity transmission.
- As existing oil wells deplete, little funding (in hard currency needed for imports) is available to make investments in new wells for extraction.
- Research on new techniques for oil extraction is also inhibited.
(c) Neglect of current systems becomes an increasing issue, as the lack of hard currency revenue from oil exports becomes a bigger issue.
Venezuela can, in theory, buy what it needs from abroad, but there is a limit to the total amount of goods and services that can be imported, based on the amount of hard currency funds it obtains from selling crude oil. If the price of oil falls, then Venezuela must, in some way, cut back on goods and services that it had previously supplied. One of the least obvious way of doing this is by cutting back on maintenance and repairs.
The recent long electricity outage in Venezuela seems to be at least partially related to neglect of usual maintenance activities. It seems that Venezuela’s state-owned electrical company failed to keep the brush cleared under electric transmission lines leading away from the very major Guri Dam. It now appears that one of the causes of Venezuela’s recent long electricity outage was damage to transmission lines caused by a brush fire within the Guri complex. This could perhaps have been prevented by better maintenance.
Figure 2 shows that energy consumption per capita has been falling, especially since 2011. This would suggest that standards of living have been falling. Needless to say, if Venezuela’s oil exports drop further, a further reduction in standard of living can be expected.
Why Is America Issuing Sanctions Against Venezuela’s Oil Company PDVSA?
On January 28, 2019, the United States imposed sanctions against Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA. The reasons given for these sanctions are the following:
- To hold accountable those responsible for Venezuela’s tragic decline in oil supply
- To restore democracy
- To help prevent further diverting of Venezuela’s assets by Maduro, and thereby preserve those assets for the people of Venezuela
These reasons sound good, but I expect that the primary real reason for the sanctions was to try to take Venezuela’s oil production offline and, through this action, force oil prices higher.
World oil prices have been far too low for oil producers since at least 2014.
Figure 3. Historical inflation-adjusted oil prices, based on inflation adjusted Brent-equivalent oil prices shown in BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Many people, thinking about the oil price situation from the consumers’ point of view, are completely unaware of the problem that low oil prices can cause for producers. Oil producers may not go out of business immediately because of low oil prices, but eventually the low prices will cause a cutback in investment, and thus production. Countries that have sold some of their oil production in advance, such as Venezuela, are especially vulnerable.
Figure 4. Venezuela’s energy production by type, based on data of BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Figure 4 shows that oil production for Venezuela has been dropping for a very long time. Its highest year of production was 1970, the same early high year as for the United States’ oil extraction. Natural gas is mostly “associated” gas, which is made available through oil production. Hydroelectric is small in comparison to oil and gas. Hydroelectric production has been generally falling since 2008.
There is a widespread belief among oil executives and politicians that reducing oil production will force oil prices up. I expect to see, at most, a brief spike in oil prices. The major issue is that the world economy is a networked system. Prices for oil and for electricity cannot rise higher than consumers, in the aggregate, can afford. If there is too much wage disparity around the world, the low wages of many workers will tend to hold oil prices down, because these workers cannot afford goods such as smartphones and automobiles made with oil and other energy products. These lower oil prices reflect the fact that the economy has been changing in ways that leave less surplus energy to distribute to oil exporters to operate their economies.
The way the networked economy works is determined by the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. As far as I can see, the end of oil extraction comes because oil prices cannot be raised high enough to make extraction profitable. Once oil extraction becomes unprofitable, oil exporting nations will start collapsing. Venezuela is the “canary in the coal mine” in this collapse process, because of the extensive use it has made of debt.
What If Oil Prices Can Be Forced Upward?
If somehow oil prices could be forced up by reducing Venezuela’s exports to practically zero, this would have a double benefit:
- More oil from around the world, including the United States, could be profitably extracted, because oil resources that are more expensive to produce would suddenly become profitable.
- Venezuela’s oil could be more profitably extracted.
If prices actually rise, and if the United States remains in control of the situation, the US could theoretically expand Venezuela’s oil production. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world. Its expected cost of production is relatively low, if the exports of oil are not expected to support essentially the whole economy. The cost of pulling the oil out of the ground in Venezuela seems to be about $28 per barrel, if we believe a 2016 estimate by Rystad Energy.
Figure 5. Cost of producing a barrel of oil and gas in 2016. WSJ figure based on Rystead Energy analysis.
The cost of supporting the entire economy with the revenue from oil exports is far higher. Figure 6 shows that back in 2013-2014, the cost of oil, including the subsidies needed to maintain the operation of the rest of the economy, amounted to about $110 per barrel. I would expect that with all of Venezuela’s debt, the real cost might be even higher than this.
Figure 6. Estimate of OPEC break-even oil prices, including tax requirements by parent countries, from Arab Petroleum Investments Corporation.
If the US doesn’t plan to support all of Venezuela’s population with the export revenues from oil extraction, it can theoretically extract the oil more economically than the $110 per barrel price that is needed to support the whole economy. Thus, it could get along with a price closer to $28 per barrel.
Furthermore, the investment capabilities and technical expertise of the United States could, at least in theory, ramp up Venezuela’s oil production, if this is desired at some future date. Similarly, “non-associated” natural gas production could be ramped up, if desired, because this seems to be available, but has been neglected.
I expect that all of this development would be more difficult and expensive than a simple comparison such as this seems to suggest. The ultimate problem is that a whole economy needs to be in place to make the extraction possible. Even if a cursory examination suggests that substantial savings are possible, the cost associated with maintaining necessary support services would make the total cost of energy extraction much higher.
Conclusion
Venezuela seems to be the canary in the coal mine with respect to where oil exporters are headed. Other countries will want to push them out of oil production, so as to try to raise prices for themselves. Debt defaults and lack of availability of debt may also become issues.
One item of interest is the fact that in Venezuela, lack of oil revenues can adversely affect electricity supply. Thus, we should not be surprised if electricity supply fails at about the same time that oil production falls. Even electricity supply provided by hydroelectric plants seems to be at risk.
Another item of interest is how Venezuela’s attempt at even distribution of goods and services, using a somewhat socialistic approach, is working out. This approach (which is now being advocated by some political candidates) seems to have some short-term benefits, because it tends to keep the population happy–almost everyone seems to have a minimum standard of living. But, over the long term, this approach leads to the loss of the ability to maintain today’s high-tech economy. This approach doesn’t prevent collapse either, because a lack of investment and expertise eventually causes important parts of the system to stop operating.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fiery Warning After Green New Deal Fails: ‘We’re Going To Pay For This’
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-apos-fiery-074708646.html
Gotta love this Lady…she’s got fire in her belly and if I were in my 20s or 30s, I’d would be by her side, even if I was a ready of OFW!
Gives the political scene some showy contrast and drama. I know PTB are using her as a prop to promote the illusion of “choice”, and can easily remove from the media scene, if they deem it.
Some of her words…
However, Ocasio-Cortez said that while the proposal may have gone down, Americans would eventually need to pay to address climate change one way or another.
“We’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not. We need to decide whether we’re going to pay to react or we’re going to pay to be proactive,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’m very sad to say that the government knew that climate change was real starting as far back as 1989. I’m going to turn 30 this year, and for the entire 30 years of my lifetime, we did not make substantial investments to prepare our entire country for what we knew was coming.
That’s right Alexandria, you are 100% correct spot on…. unfortunately, we can’t do much about it.
(Agreement with Gail). and there are no solutions….
Well, a Rep have a “solution”….BAU Baby…FULL THROTTLE….I couldn’t make this stuff up, honest
Republican tells Ocasio-Cortez that solution to climate change is to have more babies
The IndependentMarch 26, 2019, 7:40 PM ED
Republican tells Ocasio-Cortez that solution to climate change is to have more babies
A Republican senator has told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the true solution to climate change is to “fall in love, get married, and have some kids”.
As the Senate voted against a measure sponsored by Ms Ocasio-Cortez and others that sought to push the US towards the use of renewable energy, Republican Mike Lee said their plan – the so-called Green New Deal – was “ridiculous”.
During a speech that he illustrated with pictures and posters of dinosaurs, cartoon characters, babies and Aquaman, the senator from Utah claimed he was treating Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal “with the seriousness it deserves”.
“Unfortunately, fear is unavoidable when debating the substance of the resolution before this body today – that is climate change, socialism, and the Green New Deal,” Mr Lee said.
“Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions, unaddressed, might do to our environment, in the near-term future, or our civilisation or our planet in the next few years. Unlike others, I am not immediately afraid of what the Green New Deal would do to our economy and our government. After all, this isn’t going to pass.”
Mr Lee, a staunch conservative, also tweeted a photograph of his presentation. “The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution, but the serious business of human flourishing – the solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places: fall in love, get married, and have some kids,” he wrote.
Humans tend to disappoint,…whoever put this all together must be having a good laugh.
We don’t have a problem, obviously.
We have a predicament—-
Ya, but I demand a solution to the predicament!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MpITAjesxi4
Seek and you shall find…
Ask, seek, knock. Notice the three different senses being considered here. Asking is verbal; Christians are to use their mouths and petition God for their needs and desires. And believers are to seek with their minds—this is more than asking; it is a setting of priorities and a focusing of the heart. To knock involves physical movement, one in which the Christian takes action. Although asking and seeking are of great importance, they would be incomplete without knocking. The apostle John said Christians ought not to love in word alone but with actions also (1 John 3:18). In the same way, it’s good to pray and seek God, but if one does not also act in ways that are pleasing to God, all is for naught. It’s no accident that Jesus said believers should love God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind (Luke 10:27).
The commands are followed by promises: “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:8). God delights in the prayer of faith, and He promises to give us what we need.
https://www.gotquestions.org/ask-seek-knock.html
Gail sometimes stresses the Spiritual dimensions of the cosmos
Sorry, to burst the obvious bubble, but AOC is premanuf candidate simply picked up on audition-casting session done by Dem party operators as it has been recently revealed or rather confirmed the previously self evident. In similar way, they just tasked her to publicly present this joke Green Deal material.. shall we say to not much success.
She’s an Expendable….just to showcase the Demmies are the Party of Greenies and not pay too much attention to keeping BAU on track, full Blast…like during the Obama Administration.
Not a single senator, not even a single Democratic senator, voted for the Green Deal.
In the house, nobody, not even AOC, is pushing for a vote on the Green Deal.
And what happened to Medicare for all? I seem to remember that was on the Democrat agenda. So I must ask, apart from open borders and reparations based on skin color, what do the Demmies stand for at this junction?
Sounds like a repeat of the past 😂, the Senate will NEVER pass such a bill…
Nothing new here! Follow the money as the saying goes. Humans tend to disappoint, over and over and over. Good thing there was only one Garden of Eden God allowed us to inhibit.
Sydney: Record low for housing market
http://www.baharianwealth.com.au/wp-content/uploads/australia_housing1.jpg
The property market continues to struggle as buyers abandon once popular markets. Australia is shaping up to be ground zero for fast collapse amongst industrialised countries. A sick economy, where personal debt stands at a record level worldwide.
Psile, what’s the mood down under? Are people that you know fretful? Is the psychology of contraction taking a firm hold?
Currently Harry I am not noticing that anyone is really aware of a huge problem coming.
Even my brother who works in the mortgage arena see this as just a necessary correction. It could all change rapidly though.
My brother had a large business up in Cairns.
He has sold it, and left the country.
He is usually right.
IMO, Niko B, 99% don’t have any awareness of the coming catastrophe – they have no need to know at present being cocooned in a world of excess and surplus energy. I am whistling in the wind – even my children are too busy working their businesses to take notice. It will come as a massive shock to them and panic is likely to prevail at first before the dust settles and we get organised as is our wont.
Hi Harry, most people seem to oblivious to what’s going on. They are the epitome of sheople. 28 years without a recession can do that to you. Peeps are either too busy trying to make end’s meet, or hallucinating from watching TV, which is usually cooking or flipping shows.
When folks do get together all they ever seem to talk about is house prices, the latest restaurants frequented, or insignificant social justice issues.
Where there is worry, the media and politicians tell them that everything will be OK, that this is just a bump in the road, as any minute now there’ll be another round of stellar growth arriving to propel house prices even higher! (That’s as soon as we find another Earth to ravage).
They do not understand the mighty sledgehammer that is coming to wreck their tiny lives. As far as they’re concerned, life is destined to be like this forever more. Dolts! I won’t be shedding any tears, as no country more deserves the fate that awaits it.
Now I know what it feels like to be a prophet – nobody listens and even worse they sometimes burn you at the stake! Our lot is to be labelled “Doomsayers and Chicken Littles” or perhaps a little crazy. It has been the same throughout history.
Thanks, Niko and Psile!
I see that the unemployment rate in Australia is listed as 4.9%. The general recent trends has been downward.
It seems like new housing starts would start going down pretty quickly. Eventually, this will feed back into unemployment rates.
Also, exports to China seem important. A March 21 Guardian story says, Australia’s coal bonanza at risk as Chinese import ‘ban’ spreads
Hold-ups reach southern ports as analysts warn that trade could dry up amid China restructuring and diplomatic tension
Wow! I can believe this. If China can ramp up its coal production in the West of China, thanks to new rail capacity, it won’t need Australian coal, until the coal in the West depletes.
The article goes on to say that some things are unclear now. China makes its moves in subtle ways.
Gael, employment statistics are grossly misrepresented in Australia, like most other places. For instance , someone on the dole (unemployment benefits) is counted as being employed if they attend some job finding exercise. And, 1 hrs employment a week is enough to count you as “employed” and you’re no longer counted in the statistics as without work.
It’s the same the world over – the USA is one of the most distorted:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
“The Turkish lira slumped by more than 4 percent against the dollar on Friday in echoes of a currency crisis last year that ravaged living standards and employment.”
https://ahvalnews.com/turkish-lira/turkey-set-more-economic-pain-after-election
The deepening of Argentina’s recession calls for the loosening of the monetary policy; however, the inflation rate is still very high and not in a clear decelerating path, thus raising the risk of extreme volatility in the local currency… Breaking away from the vicious cycle of high devaluation and high inflation has proven quite difficult.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4251003-argentina-struggling-avoid-deeper-recession
“Brazilian economic growth has slowed more than anticipated this year… minutes of the central bank’s recent policy meeting showed on Tuesday, suggesting policymakers were in no rush to raise interest rates. Doubts about the success of a proposed pension reform and a precarious global outlook mean policymakers will be patient in assessing Brazil’s economy and in no rush to change policy, the minutes said. Their decision to keep the benchmark Selic rate on hold at a record low 6.50 percent was unanimous.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/brazil-economy-minutes/update-2-brazil-central-bank-highlights-growth-slowdown-ebbing-inflation-risks-idUKL1N21D08A
“A gauge tracking sentiment in [South Africa’s] construction sector dropped in the first quarter to the lowest since its inception in 1997… the current mix of a depressed economy, high levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit is proving toxic as contracts dry up.”
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-26-south-african-construction-sentiment-crumbles-under-soft-economy/
Another blackout in Venezuela as a power station blows up at the Guri dam as the infrastructure continues to decay.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-power-oil/activity-halted-at-venezuelas-oil-port-upgraders-after-blackout-sources-idUSKCN1R723R
“In a measure of how the global slowdown has caught officials on the hop, an interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve no longer sounds outlandish. As dramatic as the Fed’s pivot has been, it may not be dramatic enough. Just a few weeks ago, the idea that the world’s most powerful central bank should be loosening was a fringe view. Now, respected policy makers are entertaining the prospect, albeit without quite endorsing it. Substantial deceleration in Asia, principally China, and Europe are driving the re-evaluation.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-27/lower-interest-rates-could-come-faster-than-we-realize
“The Fed is …reducing the cap on US treasuries allowed to mature each month from USD30 billion to USD215 billion in May. Anxieties about a scarcity of reserves in the banking system are the driver. Regulatory shifts since the financial crisis demand banks to maintain safe capital that can be used in case of an economic shock. This has increased the demand for “safe” US T-bills. Interest rates may have peaked: this should put a floor on US equities.”
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/fed-backstops-risk-201903261106
Wha? When I learned math, a change in the amount allowed to mature each month from 30B to 215B was not a REDUCTION, but an increase of 185B.
Very bad sign.
Well spotted, Tagio. It should be $30B to $15b. They’ve thrown an extra ‘2’ in there to bamboozle us.
“Confidence in the US economy slumped this month amid signs of a wobble in the housing market, sparking new fears for the health of the world’s largest economy.
“Investors in US-focused plumbing supplies giant Ferguson baulked after it warned that a run of booming sales growth was coming to an end, in another gloomy sign for the economy as the construction industry can give advanced warning signs of an impending slowdown.
“It comes at the same time as deepening worries in Germany, the eurozone’s biggest economy, which is suffering from a weakening export and employment outlook.
“Together their woes underline the threat to global growth, with a slump in China adding to fears…”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/03/26/global-recession-watch-us-economy-wobbles-germany-stagnates/
“China’s industrial firms posted their worst slump in profits since late 2011 in the first two months of this year, data showed on Wednesday, as increasing strains on the economy in the face of slowing demand at home and abroad took a toll on businesses. The sharp decline in profits suggests further trouble for the world’s second largest economy, which expanded at its slowest pace in almost three decades last year.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-economy-industrial-profits/chinas-industrial-profits-shrink-most-since-late-2011-as-economy-cools-idUKKCN1R8054
A person wonders how much deficit spending increases to offset the slump in the industrial profits. Sounds a whole lot like the US’s recent tax cuts.
Sigh. When will we learn that it is “global growth” itself that is a threat to human existence.
Sadly people will never learn until it’s too late – cognitive dissonance comes to mind
“U.S. consumer confidence declined for the fourth time in five months on dimmer assessments of present conditions, suggesting that weak first-quarter growth and slower job gains in February are weighing on attitudes and potentially spending. The Conference Board’s index fell to 124.1 from 131.4, the New York-based group said in a report Tuesday. That missed all economist estimates in a Bloomberg survey calling for a rise to 132.5.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-26/u-s-consumer-confidence-slumps-in-march-missing-all-estimates
“The number of homes under construction fell 8.7 percent in February, as ground breakings for single-family houses plunged to their lowest level in nearly two years.”
https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2019-03-26/us-housing-starts-slumped-87-percent-in-february
“U.S. auto sales are expected to drop about 2.1 percent in March from a year earlier, partly due to bad weather, mixed economic data and lower tax refunds, according to industry consultants J.D. Power and LMC Automotive… The first-quarter sales are off to its slowest start since 2013, according to the industry consultants…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-autos-outlook/us-auto-sales-seen-falling-in-march-jd-power-lmc-automotive-idUKKCN1R71JK
Doesn’t help the economy!
All depends on what they mean by “hate group”, doesn’t it Duncan?
Almost everyone involved in politics or the news media these days enjoys their daily Two Minutes of Hate as far as I can see.
Good reply to Duncan (post above). A person needs to understand the context of why this situation occurs. We have the same problem everywhere.
Lol!
All depends on what they mean by “hate group”, doesn’t it Duncan?
Well, if you are having problems, I suggest a little humanity would help?
Humanity = “compassion, brotherly love, kind-heartedness”
The biggest potential problem any species has is overpopulation, relative to food supply. In “k-selected species,” a major way this potential problem is handled is by males of the group marking off large territories, and fighting with other males who try to invade their territory. The territories are typically larger than just needed for food.
I believe that religions of the world act in a similar way. They bind groups together, and they encourage fighting with other groups, especially when resources per capita fall too low. They are very necessary to keep world population from rising too high, relative to the resource base. They are part of the self-organized way the world economy works. No one religion is right. They all serve a purpose, for a particular time and place.
Humanity is only possible in a world with growing energy consumption per capita.
I basically agree Gail.
Now if only we could grasp:
“Religion is poison”
Religions are extremely necessary. They help bind subgroups with the same beliefs together. They pass on the wisdom of the day. They provide easy ways of dividing up people, if there is a resource shortage, and it is necessary to fight regarding who should get the limited resources (and thus fix the overpopulation relative to resource problem).
The current populary belief that economic growth can take place forever is another type of religion. Its high priests are the Federal Reserve Chairmen: now Jerome Powell, but before that Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan. They believe with the right mix of interest rate changes and QE, the economy can be made to operate forever. All of the current government programs can continue forever. Energy prices can rise indefinitely, allowing nearly all of the fossil fuels to be extracted. Climate change is our biggest problem.
This new religion is more absurd than the previous ones. It serves a temporary purpose, as a distraction from what is really happening.
Whether or not the previous religions were, in some ways, absurd, they filled a very needed role in the world economy. Everything I can see is that there really is a literal Higher Power behind what happens. This Higher Power is continually recreating the whole universe, through self-organizing dissipative structures. These earlier religions offered their insights into what they could learn: how the the economy worked best in that time and place, and what the Higher Power seemed to be saying to them. As the Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The primary question of interest is “How should we live here on earth?” Heaven must know of the correct way for us to live our lives here on earth.
Our current man-made religion is just plan absurd, as far as I can see. Its foundation is a lot of economic models that sort of work away from limits, but do not work in general. Our man-made religion will very soon to prove to be 100% false, leaving those who do not marvel at the wonders of a self-organizing world economy with nothing at all. Religions at least offered a sense of awe, plus tips on how to get along in the world in the particular time and place. The book of Revelation in the New Testament even points out that our ultimate fate may be the same as that of ancient Babylon: collapse, with everything losing value.
Very true Gail. I prefer to think of spirituality rather then religious notions. It is true that the Bible predicts the coming storm and perhaps USA is the modern Babylon? My son discovered this book which explains many earthly conundrums and paradoxes:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Children-Law-Lost-Teachings-Atlantis/dp/0966001532
Fully agree with Gail: religions are necessary things.
I’d venture in this respect that the core trouble with Western civilization is that the Church thoroughly disenchanted the entire Universe in a bid to maintain its power during the 16th and 17th centuries (by employing the ideas of people like Robert Boyle), the idea being that when you can’t see value and meaning anywhere else but in the Church, then it’s to the Church you’ll turn for those things. The trouble is that it didn’t work out that way: people in the West ended up unable to find value and meaning anywhere at all. Descartes first became aware of this danger — to which he himself ironically contributed — and sought to avert it by working out a proof for God’s existence based on the bare fact that he (Descartes) is a conscious and thinking ‘thing’. But Hume and others later came and picked his arguments apart. Still later Kant and others came along and told us that much if not most of what we call ‘knowledge’ is really just a web of ideas and concepts we made up and imposed on reality. In this way the West was led step by step to the world of Yeats’ falcon, an utterly value-void Universe in which things fall apart, the center cannot hold, anything goes and nothing matters. Hence all the excesses to which the West led the rest of the world since the 19th century. Solzhenitsyn said it well: men have forgotten God; hence this whole mess we find ourselves in.
Hopefully after TSHTF we Asians — the survivors among us, that is — will see through the folly of the modern industrial narrative and a Renaissance in our traditional values will take place. As for the West, it is going to have to figure out for itself how to resolve its own philosophical impasse.
And yet it seems to me that China is today the embodiment of the “modern industrial narrative,” with most of the “asian tigers” close behind, just wishing they could do it as well as the Chinese.
It is difficult to return after having experienced the intoxication of high energy. I think it will be the surviving indigenous peoples, who have been defiantly eking out a living at the edges of civilization, who will lead the way.
Mr Nietzsche had a few things to say about life, the universe and everything, too!
Friedrich Nietzsche/Quotes
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.
And this wonderful one from Richard Bach:
“Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully”
from his book: “Illusions”
“Religions are extremely necessary. They help bind subgroups with the same beliefs together. ”
Gail, that may have been true in the past when we lived in small tribes but today, religions compete for believers & divide people against one another.
Religion today is a BUSINESS, they are in this business for the wealth, power & CONTROL it brings them.
Today we witness Moslums fighting against Christians, Jews against Moslums & Moslums against Judaism, Hindus against Islam, Christians fighting against Islam & all of them are fighting against unbelief.
I think the world would be much better off without these ancient & WRONG beliefs, there are other, more RATIONAL ways of bringing people together without dividing one group against another group because of different, unsubstantiated & usually WRONG BELIEFS.
Religion divides us, we need to unite against a common enemy, GREED & the lust for unlimited POWER.
Your comment reflects a lot of common misunderstandings about religions.
Our entire economy is self-organized. The many different religions we have represent pieces of these self-organized systems. Each religion is self-organized; each is designed to meet that needs of a particular time and place, with a particular level of energy consumption per capita. Religions fit in with other parts of the economy, including governments, customs, and culture. In some ways, they are not entirely separable. A government that seems to provide a “nanny state” seems to have less need for religions, than other governments, in my view. The government becomes the religion of the time and place.
You say religion is a business. I would say that individual religious groups are dissipative structures. They grow for a while, and then they collapse, and are replaced by new dissipative structures that are somewhat similar. Each religious organization is built to serve a particular time and place and level of energy per capita. A religion may seem out of place, especially to people looking from the outside in, from a high-energy culture to a religion in a lower energy per capita culture.
Part of what religions provide is a “guiding story.” We now have other ways of providing guiding stories. One source of guiding stories today are financial models, particularly those provided by actuaries and economists. The financial models generally say that the prosperity we have today will last forever. This guiding story is pretty close to 100% false. It is, in my view, such models are “more false” than the guiding story of religions, but these models provide the new religion of today.
There are other parts of this false guiding story. One is, “He who dies with the more toys wins.” Another is, “The purpose of life is to be entertained.” Supporting these stories are the myths of today, such as, “Fossil fuel energy is bad; we can get along without it.” “The economy can grow forever, without energy consumption.” “We humans can walk away from fossil fuels, and use wind and solar instead.” “Climate change is the biggest problem we face.” “Any problem we humans are up against, we can handle ourselves. We humans are in charge (forgetting the important role the laws of physics play). All it takes is better elected leaders and new financial and monetary policies.”
With lots of energy consumption per capita, we can afford to have gay marriages, and people who choose to change sex, as desired. We can demand close to equality for all. We can allow abortions on demand. People can choose to have as few children as they choose, and the government (with its promised pensions and health care) will take care of them.
In low energy consumption per capita economies, there is a need for built-in inequalities, with some groups (women, slaves, lower-cast individuals, people with different skin colors) getting a lesser share of the total. These ideas seem totally repugnant to us today. Low energy per capita societies need to encourage many children per family, because of the high death rate. Women need to be encouraged to stay home and care for the children, while men provide the much-needed manual labor. With lots of fossil fuel per capita, contraception and healthcare can be provided; the former heavy manual labor provided by men can be moved over fossil-fuel provided machines.
The church, in each time and place, fits in with culture and government, to provide many different things. For example, it may act as an employer of extra children, who live to maturity, as priests or nuns. Having them celibate helps keep population from rising too much. As another example, the church may provide legitimacy to the ruler; either, “I am god,” or “God appointed me.” As another example, building big religious structures over a period or years may provide a way of increasing or decreasing the supply of jobs quickly, when agricultural jobs are not available. Furthermore, religious groups generally encourage in-group cooperation and care among members, helping to bind the group together.
Strangely enough, fighting with other religious groups is another service religions provide. If resources get too depleted (previously, in an area, but now worldwide) there seems to be a need to fight for the limited resources available. Different religions provide convenient dividing lines. The differences between religious belief that are felt worthy to fight about don’t have to be great. I know that in Russia, we were told that one religious group believed that the Holy Sprit proceeded from the Father and the Son in combination; the other believed that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone.
The problem that seems to be behind nearly all wars is inadequate resources per capita (from a combination of rising population and depletion or pollution). If groups do not fight over inadequate resources, they all will die out. The way the self-organizing system economy we live in is set up, it is set up in such a way that there will be at least some winners. Groups fighting between each other help lead to a smaller total number people, with a chance of continuing on. This is the way the literal Higher Power, behind our universe, has set up the system to operate.
This all seems very strange to us. We have come to truly believe that today’s high-energy per capita way of doing things are the only “right” ways. We don’t think fighting over resources should ever be necessary–certainly not on religious lines.
If we object to the low-energy religions as being something we cannot get along with, we could figure out that there are religions that are basically “high energy per capita religions.” These religion ordain females clergy and gay clergy. They don’t have any problem with abortions or birth control. They don’t look at the Bible as the literal word of God. They are very much interested in the what archaeology says. They are also interested in the myths recorded in the Bible and how they correspond to the myths of other cultures. They basically serve congregations of well-educated members. The concept of hell is virtually never mentioned–it seems to have creeped in from other religions. Whether or not someone is “saved” is not particularly an issue of interest. A big part of religion has to do with helping us today, in our lives on this earth, and helping us move away from the “he who dies with the most toys wins” philosophy of living. I am a member of an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA Lutheran Church). It is one of the churches that follows this approach. There are others as well.
We are again reaching a situation of not enough resources per capita. We have to expect more fighting. One way this occurs is among religious groups. That is the way our self-organized economy works. One distinction recently has been between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
I’m not so sure.
A basic tenet of ecology is that, in high-energy biomes, competition tends to prevail, whereas in low-energy biomes, cooperation tends to prevail.
The example cited in a university ecology class, long ago, was this: In tropical biomes, there may be a half-dozen raptor species, vying for dozens of small vertebrate prey, which subsist off of thousands of species of plants and smaller vertebrates. But in alpine and arctic biomes, there may be just a couple birds of prey, living off a few different small vertebrates, which live off perhaps a dozen or so forbes and grasses. And even then, the Ferruginous Hawk and the Snowy Owl “cooperate” by dividing up their prey temporally, with one hunting by day, and one by night — as do their prey, with the Arctic Ground Squirrel hibernating during the winter, with the Arctic Hare coming above ground more in the winter.
Its not as though these animals got together, had a meeting, and cooperatively decided how to split up the available energy, but natural selection did that for them!
One thing is certain: energy equals complexity. It must be true that a low-energy future will be a simpler one, and therefore, a lot of modern systems of command and control won’t be possible in a low-energy world. That’s not to say that “Big Man” feudalism won’t happen without the Internet, but I think the mechanisms for global competition may well break down fairly quickly.
You are right about a low energy future requiring a lot less complexity.
What I was thinking was the “humanity,” in the sense of different groups not engaging in conflict, has definitely improved since we have been blessed with a growing amount of energy consumption per capita. Growing energy consumption per capita has kept us away from major international wars since World War II. We know that death rates from violence were very high in the life of the human species. These high death rates from violence have fallen a lot since World War “” (or perhaps even earlier).
Regarding cooperation versus competition, the US, with its high energy per capita (as well as high amount of arable land per capita) favors competition. Europe, Japan, and China favor cooperation. They have lesser resources per capita. Africa definitely favors cooperation. But even at this, we have had a lot of fighting that has gone on in Africa. Also, Europe and Japan were deeply involved in World War I and World War II. When there is not enough to go around, violence seems to break out, whether or not cooperation was the prior approach. We humans do not continue to use cooperation indefinitely, if we can see that doing so will be the end of our way of life.
All so true Jan, i agree entirely with your assessment which is why I prognosticate a cooperative New Emergent Economy following the later stages of crisis – something which our younger generations will need to learn. I fortunately had the experience of wartime and post war society in a nurturing environment – the fortunes of chance being born in UK.
I agree entirely Gail, well said. Maslow’s pyramid lays this out very well.
U.S.’S BIGGEST CHRISTIAN CHARITY REPORTEDLY CHANNELED $56.1 MILLION TO PURPORTED HATE GROUPS
https://www.newsweek.com/biggest-christian-charity-funding-hate-groups-1370055
I know this is not that much of a surprise.
Jupiviv
If there were no skilled people in the Middle Ages, as you seem to believe, how did they ever get to building Florence, Pisa, Milan and all the other great cities of the early Renaissance? It’s a rather patronising view of the Middle Ages.
So, here for your benefit, is a list of the immigrants invited by our wise old kings to Navarre in the 10th century, yes that’s 10th century as in ‘Dark Ages’, not even the Middle Ages:
Stonemasons, carpenters, tile-makers, inn keepers, merchants, coopers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, coopers, armourers and weapon-makers, scribes, tailors, cobblers, vintners, leather-workers.
No doubt these skills are all so easy and primitive that you could perform anyone of them tomorrow to perfection?
Each and every one of them with more to offer than an unskilled peasant from Somalia today, or some quat-chewing yokel from the Yemen. But that is what we are getting in Europe.
… some cube-farm keyboard jockey.
I’m not as certain that such skills will return as I am that current skills will not buy you much, post-collapse. How many middle-managers will a low-energy future need?
I have an RSS feed on jobs in the area. Most of them, I can’t even imagine what they do every day.
I’m afraid you are too over influenced by the short flash of North American experience, in totally different conditions, resources base and time frames etc.
What Xabier likely meant was the movement of skilled people across the border for centuries within European setting, different nationalities and languages, process ongoing at certain limited pace and volume hence integration was possible.
However, if such movement of peoples suddenly took shape of a looming invasive ‘horde on the horizon’ it was swiftly dealt with by ‘turf protection’ defensive means. That’s for example why “the int left” and EU establishment freaked out from the images how the Hungarian police promptly and forcefully denied to that ‘never ending’ swarm of migrants free trespass across their country to put it mildly..
Oh, the horrors should they (in Germany, ..) act in the same way and protect their own countries and inhabitants-citizens, which in fact where not deemed to be theirs to begin with under the mantra of global multiculti religion and other trendy ‘feel good’ dogmas.
I think you may be unvaluing the skills needed in organisation and management of even a low energy society. The middle ages had many skilled organisers, not to mention clerks, priests (people need spiritual strengths), taxmen, local government finance people (yes even bankers to some degree – much to my chagrin!). I am sure you can think of many more, like entertainers and actors and writersd like Shakespear et al.
I do hope the New Emergent Economy is at least civilised enough after the intitial chaos to support a diverion of labour.
New Emergent Economy!!?? I agree with Gail when she writes the current reserves of fossil fuels will be locked away FOREVER when BAU ends. She also alluded to perhaps 100% mortality rate due to collapse (no potable water, conflict over just staying alive, exposure, and plagues and sickness, and of course, famines ( with or without CC).
Never mind dealing with the mixture of man made left overs that will eventually find it’s way in the biosphere, like nuclear waste and toxic stew chemical residue.
This ain’t gonna be BAU lite like the old covers of Mother Earth News!
Yep, reality bites, but we can always HOPE….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dCsr0CNqB3g
Enjoy TODAY…because it is MAGIC.
I don’t agree with these predictions here, ST. The earth and human beings have survived many catastrophes in our time and even the great floods of 10,000+ years ago didn’t cause the extinction of the human race. I forsee a lot of trauma in the early stages and much culling of the people but there will be many survivors in pockets everywhere across the globe.
If you use the last war prison camps as a benchmark; Changi jail self-organised very quickly and built a sustainable community in short order even though starting out with very little infrastructure because the Japs had stolen or destroyed it all.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Changi-Diaries-Singapore-1942-1945-JAPANESE/dp/B00AEQSN6I
I don’t under estimate the ingenuity of our fellow man to survive almost any crisis – history is full of amazing examples.
OK, Disagree…we still can AFFORD to now…the luxury is ours!
Perhaps you’re right. I was thinking more of “post civilization,” rather than “low-energy civilization.”
For a great look at the middle ages, look for the film, The Return of Martin Guerre.
[SPOILER ALERT]It is about the first recorded case of identity theft,[/SPOILER ALERT] in sixteenth-century France. One of the main characters was a mid-level bureaucrat, whose job was to prosecute the case, which strengthens your assertion that there will always be middle-managers — as long as there is civilization.
But I’m thinking more of indigenous peoples, who essentially had no organization above genetic heritage of tribes, clans, bands, etc. They tend to operate as a functional anarchy, making decisions by elder-led consensus.
In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter points out that civilization is largely transient, with long periods of non-civilization in-between.
So yea, a decline to the Middle Ages will have middle managers. But a decline to the Stone Age may not. I doubt even the Five Tribes of the Haudenosaunee had many professional middle-managers.
Excellent information Jan, thank you, and I have read the book. My view is that we won’t revert to a palaeolithic level of existence which implies a hunter-gatherer environment.
In my book I postulate an eventual return to something akin to 18th-19th centuries based on agriculture and mimimum levels of concentrated energy sources after the initial chaos period and much culling of populations.
Different locations will fare differently depending on basic resources available. I’m betting on South Africa first because of family links & climate and then perhaps a move to Russia (a long trek I guess, but our ancestors did it OK – but then I do have survival skills)
How true, Jan.
But the keyboard jockey, wherever from, can at this moment actually gain employment and will seek it and is most unlikely to try to knock you on the head.
The temperature is rising in Europe: politicians of the Establishment, and even in fact especially – the ‘radical’ Left, insist on the narrative that mass immigration is good, that privilege has to be shared and that all immigrants are useful and benign, while ordinary people see with their own eyes that crime is rising (often very violent assaults on homes and the elderly) and that well-organised foreign gangs have proliferated, whole suburbs of their towns taken over, and read statistics which cannot conceal the failure of many new immigrant groups not only to assimilate but even work at all (45% minimum unemployment in Spain).
A new aspect which I have noted in comments in the Spanish press is something along the lines of ‘I used to be a radical Left nationalist, but now I’ll vote for anyone who will sort out this mess, even Vox (latest version of the Francoists).’
This is unheard of until now, and shows how stressed people are getting and just how hopeless they feel watching it unfold while being told that any crimes are ‘not typical’, that the perpetrators ‘need help to integrate’ (even those who recently tried to hang their teacher in an integration centre!) and that, basically, they have to suck it up.
They also have to watch a host of property owners, service suppliers, counsellors, mediators and NGO’s feed off the influx – a lucrative business.
From such growing chaos, the decline of civil society, and the discrediting of Establishment ‘democratic’ politicians comes the an actual desire for a Dictatorship, a strongman. rather than it being imposed: the greatest anger and violence, desire for revenge, always spring not from strength, but from a sense of impotence and hopelessness.
That is why I find it so amusing for Brussels to be critical of Poland and Hungary for saying no. I expect the Visegrad group to man-up and perhaps eventualy even include Austria and Northern Italy. Hopefully Germany will eventually figure it out. Finland might actually be the best place to live.
There are really two sides to the many conflicts going on. Picking one side, and saying the other is wrong, seems to be a popular approach, even among some commenters on this site.
I guess this informal grouping has been upgraded to Visegrad+ status already, since many issues are at least consulted and few policies starting to be closely coordinated. So in that sense, Austria and Italy are on board already, and to some small distant extent Germany too via the AfD opposition party and conservative leaning regional govs in Bavaria and some smaller constituencies in Saxony etc.. Not mentioning the French, Dutch and Scandinavian nationalists sort of in the wings when they step up to governmental or coalition seats.
But obviously there are many pre-existing division lines as well, such as non/membership in the Eurozone, and various old specific grievances between individual countries.
What does “context” mean? The mediaeval concept “skilled” =/= the current one, to the extent that
a) the economy of the former accommodated orders of magnitude less of skilled labour (whether actually useful or not) as a percentage of the population.
b) most relevant skills did not require nearly as much training, investment, specialisation and much less so integration to be practiced profitably.
It is patently false to suggest that the migrations you refer to, or any others outside the industrial era for that matter, were regulated or monitored to any meaningful degree (while they were occurring, anyway) by states.
Are you surely up to speed in this question?
For one thing, there used to be guilds for given tradesmen and profession, which in turn had to somehow cooperate with either the city state authority and or within some more direct feudal hierarchies. To make the story short, you have to be approved into the club by others, no free flow migration possible, full stop.
“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?”
When those of the baby boomer generation looked back, they saw that they themselves did better than their parents. They also saw that their parents and grandparents had both seen many huge changes, for the better. They saw electricity delivered to their homes for the first time; they saw gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.
The younger generation now sees an entirely different situation. Instead of everything getting better and better, they are living in a world of broken promises. They were told to borrow to get an education; then they find that there are way too many people with advanced education for every type of job there is. Some of these people with advanced education (competing indirectly for US and European jobs) are in China and India. They get a job, and then they are laid off, because the job is being sent overseas. (At least this is the problem both of my sons have had. They are both computer programmers.)
Instead of life getting better and better, it seems to be getting impossible. Prices of homes seem unaffordable. Jobs are simply not stable enough. Healthcare, even though it is horribly expensive, really doesn’t make people “more well.” It simply tries to patch up problems caused by poor nutrition., lack of exercise, and depression about the current state of affairs. The system is no longer working.
Yep, after 1965 things have slowed way down with discoveries.
After going from riding horses in 1895, to satellites in space and antibiotics by 1965, we are now playing with toys.
DNA in 1953 is still our world, with many upgrades, but same model.
Reading this on a smart phone? Gee, how kool!
Bravo Gail – you sum up very well the dilemma faced by our younger people and I feel so sorry for them, having to face the deprivations of the coming storm without having the information and knowledge to prosper and grow;. Unless of course they are motivated to do the hard work and research necessary to learn for themselves.
I am afraid that modern distractions and the lies of the elites makes this unlikely. This is why I wrote my book and try to promote my ideas about the future at every opportunity. (My 4 children and 8 grandchildren still haven’t read it though – just goes to show! – I can do no more than take the horse to water)
we were ruined by those Jetsons cartoons
I knew we should’ve stuck with the Flintstones
Ha. I’ve always said Flintstones > Jetsons
http://bytesmiths.com/Personal/from_the_future.png
Yep!
Teotihuacan wasn’t that easily built either, was it? Let’s see the stonemasons and carpenters of the Middle Ages build something like it.
As for the people of Teotihuacan practising things like human sacrifice, all I can say is: with them I’m at least safe if I stay away, whereas with ol’ whitey there’s no place on Earth where I can be safe from his depredations.
Well said, the western world has much to answer for but don’t forget the good bits too. The stonemasons of yesteryear didn’t do badly with their cathedrals etc.
Sir Harry: the grandfather of a former girlfriend owned the land which the creaky old Hunterston Reactor was dumped on: he moved to, I think, Switzerland or France as soon as the monstrosity appeared, driven out after 900 years! Once among the best farmland in Scotland, beautifully farmed.
The dry winters are certainly worrying in Spain, although reservoirs have filled up quite well recently, they could always plummet again, and shepherds on the east coast are worried about dessicating pastures even in the Pyrenees.
Catalonia may well burn up, literally as there are more fires and more furious ones, so even though I’d love to live near cousins on the coast there, and go totally Mediterranean, I have the dampest part of the Pyrenees in mind. Barely any snow there this winter, and some nasty fires this February, which is a trend to watch.
One could easily go quite mad trying to weigh it all up and find the optimum location…..
Well, no more weighing it all up for me, as I fear neither my bank balance nor my marriage could survive another move.
At the risk of sounding horribly bleak, it still seems likely to me that our socio-economic complexity will at some point unravel so rapidly that any relocation one might make now is going to be a fairly meagre time-buying exercise rather than any kind of panacea for what lies ahead. The Pyrenees sounds very pleasant though. You can get one of those splendid mountain dogs to defend your stash of chorizos.
we have a Border Collie, now we only need some land and a small herd of goats and/or sheep for him to manage.
We have a three-month-old, black Labrador puppy because we promised the kids a dog ages ago. She is a most beguiling creature but I struggle to see her savaging hungry marauders. Perhaps she will channel her inner wolf when the need is greatest.
If I know labradors, she’ll lick’em to death! Or just sitting on them.
Sporting spaniels are also fantastic guard dogs: they will bark like crazy and….. run, but give you warning at least of any ‘strangeness’, and sound far larger than they are.
Our province in Spain actually has its own ancient breed of hunting dog, the Pachon Navarro, with a most amusing split nose, (as painted by Goya and Velasquez) so I plan to get one of those, or three.
As for the chorizo stash: I have my axes. Not,officer, that I’d think of using them on anything other than fire-wood. 🙂
goats and sheep might appear as idyllic setup, but are simply too prone to irreversably destroying – overgrazing any land available, either heavily undershoot their numbers vs given land area (and rotate diligently) or try something different..
That’s called “bad management.”
There’s no reason to not raise goats and sheep, if you’re going to properly take care of them and the land.
Pigs are better, and they plough and fertilise the field at the same time.
Follow the pigs (plough) with turkeys (disk), then with chickens (rake), and your field is prepped — no petroleum needed!
Oh great, I hadn’t thought of this – you have made my day. I did ‘self-sufficency’ for 20 years here in Somerset UK in the 1970-80s on 2 acres, it was all the rage. We had horses, goats, chickens (not turkeys though – I never thought of them), rabbits, ducks. We never got round to pigs but I did think about it and bees of course. My daughter is following in our footsteps, I’m too old now to manage the heavy work. And it is lots of work and many failures in weather, bugs, escaped animals etc.
“Failures?”
Failure is an attitude. As Margaret Meade once told a nosey reporter who wanted some dirt on her three “failed” marriages: “I didn’t have any “failed” marriages — I had three wonderful marriages… that ended!”
If I thought every little thing that I’ve tried that didn’t work out as expected was a “failure,” I’d have ended it all by now.
“Bugs” are little messengers, trying to tell me what plants are weak or need help. “Escaped animals” are little messengers, telling me there’s something inside the fence that they’re not getting. “The collapse of civilization” is a little messenger, telling me… I’m still figuring that one out!
Ah, you speak words of wisdom, Jan, you clearly are a spiritual person and in touch with the reality of that with which we are endowed:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Children-Law-Lost-Teachings-Atlantis/dp/0966001532
The prices of palladium have gone up more than 3 fold over the last 3 years. From $500 in 2016 to nearly $1600/oz today. The trace amounts in the automotive catalytic converter are generating incentives for thieves to steal the devices. Apparently the Prius design leaves the catalytic converter in a place where it is easily stolen. Some Prius owners are installing cages around the converter to protect them from theft.
Note to self – Prius catalytic converters
The Brits are sitting in a nuclear bunker preparing for Brexit…while EU nations are selling off everything to Communist China during Xi Jingpin’s tour in Europe.
A bad omen?
Brexit has been canceled in its original meaning as leaving the club.
In terms of China, that Italian strategy to put wedge into status quo (EU-Germania) via direct deals with Asia as the first G7 country to do that is quite clever, at least in the sense of buying time at the edge of precipice. Simply there is new parliament and gov in place where the old establishment is hugely marginalized by ratio of ~1 : 4 , very unique situation, that’s why they have been able to smash the illegal migrant influx and deliver other nationalistic reform goodies (blocking NGOs is on the way ala Hungary) already.
But you have a point on the zoomed out macro level, Brexit is a great laboratory of post empire status balkanization in progress, almost every tribe and faction at each other’s throats today, especially in these times when pushed to make last minute decisions.
You have got the Tory conservatives who split into hard core brexiteers group ERG, but also into more numerous centrist almost ‘left leaning’ ideologues aka EU-global agenda drone group.. And moreover each faction has its inner sub faction, hah. Then you have also various factions inside the Labour party, there are also the SNP and DUP, regional nationalists etc..
And don’t forget the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage. They will get lots of votes if we stay in:
https://thebrexitparty.org/thank-you-for-signing-up/
We have never been more divided, sadly.
Farage made great mistake not leading UKIP after the referendum, as that would have kept the white hot burner under both parties (especially their centrist wings) as well as the civil servants never leaving swampers, media, EU-politburo affiliated and other foreign agent NGOs etc..
You are correct, that the threat of new/revamped Brexit party makes the Westminster guys nervous now, it would be surely more numerous than previous third party attempts like Libdem etc.
The daily evolving Brexit saga is very fascinating, apart from the already mentioned balkanization process underway, very noteworthy are all the ‘old sins’ returning like boomerangs to the UK, like these various international law shenanigans (to be exploited only by specialized lawyer caste), unwritten constitution, not proportionally representative parliament, sectarian boarding school fraternities breeding socio/psychopats, etc.. and much more..
All of it is just feeding the self destructive explosion.
All agreed – TPTB have had it wrapped up for many a long year. But now, thanks to the internet and rapid communications generally, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that they have been had all these decades and are not actually living a happy and fulfilled life after all..
They are debt-slaves, trapped in the merry-go-round of work – sleep – work and still fail to make enough to live on. Globalisation, zero hours contracts and the gig economy have much to answer for; but it will all end soon enough and hopefully a better and more sane world will emerge.
IMHO you are so right about the Russiam experience, Yoshua. I was in Belarus in 1994 and gained a good insight into the Russian psyche. They are morally strong, sensible, resilient and resouceful people. I would much rather spend the coming crisis with them in their motherland than here in UK, where the collapse will be catastrophic with so many people on a tiny Island.
My experience in UK during the 2000 fuel crisis convinced me that the Brits will be eating each other in short order, so I’m off at the first signs.
Maybe I should prepare for an immigration into Russia as well?
If you are still somewhat ~youngish and hands on guy do it pronto.
There have been few cases of even way older people relocating there but this was more of a multi generational coherent family situation (very few old single individuals), e.g. some SAfrican white farmers or Germans moved there recently on the .ru gov’s supported relocation scheme.
Not a bad idea IMO. We are planning to go to South Africa (my wife is South African) first at least, although living there is expensive and risky. In fact they are suffering extreme electricity cuts at present and they are short of diesel too. Still, they do have resources if they can get their act together and take advantage, and there is plenty of sun so solar power is OK.
Lots to think about. BTW Russia is four times larger in land area than USA I discovered the other day.
go and live near Mr McGibbs on his island
not much sun but nobody knows where Islay is and at least the whisky will make you oblivious to everything
As he has revealed, the ‘travellers’ know how to get there and steal gas cannisters!
South Africa would not be high on my list, as it is a multi-racial tinderbox and likely to be beset by worsening droughts.
The Mediterranean is where I would be in an ideal world. But then if we were in an ideal world I wouldn’t have had to move in the first place. And the Med is far too densely populated and in any event likely to desertify as the Sahara expands northwards (the Costa Del Sol and the Algarve have just had their driest winters on record, I noted).
Even Islay is far from foolproof. The AMOC is slowing down most unnervingly and we are a long way north. It could get very cold indeed here. Ageing Hunterston Nuclear Power Station, which is in a parlous state with hundreds of hairline fractures in the reactor core even before the Fast Eddy era gets started, is only 60 miles to the east.
But what can one do but play the percentages and hope for the best? And of course, as Norman points out, there is enough whisky here to keep every last resident sozzled for decades.
:-))) Very good idea – I’m still laughing!
BTW Russia is four times larger in land area than USA I discovered the other day.
Russia has almost twice, but certainly not four times, the land area of the USA.
And much of the land is essentially uninhabitable in the winter month.
What’s not to like about long dormant off season..
Besides there are winter mini activities like hunting, hot spa outside your cave, etc..
Quite correct – false news sorry – I just checked. Just goes to show I shouldn’t believe everything I hear in the pub without checking!
I expect that the problem in South Africa is that they if the country really reflected the cost of coal extraction, the price of electricity and goods made from electricity would be outrageous, relative to salaries. Solar is not at all helpful in fixing this problem, either, no matter what kind of silliness you read in the press.
Commodities other than coal also tend to sell for prices that are too low, relative to the cost of extraction, forcing wages to be low, and tax revenue for the government of South Africa to be low. South Africa should be another country on the “watch list” for collapse.
I don’t disgree Gail. It’s just better for us to be in a warmer climate and maybe scratch a basic living in the Karoo, herding and local crops which like dry weather. Also, being in the southern hemisphere, we should miss much of the polution and wars which tend to be in the northern countries if history is any guide. The air quality in Cape Town is fabulous, straight from the Antarctic. And contrary to popular opinion the people of all colours are really nice and friendly. Plus plenty of land area. Water shortage is a problem but many bore wells are used with plenty aquafers well stocked.
So it’s pluses and minuses, but we know the area well and can’t wait to get back there when I can work our finances right. The British pension is frozen for expats in ex-commonwealth countries. We have been fighting it for years to no avail. And the ridiculous situation of pensioner expats in Spain et al getting the £200 Cold Weather Payment each year is a joke!
Much of the sense of strain in the air here in England comes from the over-population inflicted on us: this results in steady pressure and discomfort, and the over-whelming of public services.
The innumerable subliminal tensions resulting from class, racial and religious conflicts are exacerbated by being all on top of one another, not to over-look the effective collapse of public authority – most notably in policing (less than a 10% chance of being convicted for a crime -great business to be in!) and in schools.
Not a pretty picture. An Italian barber, who has been here 50 years said to me ‘I look around, and I think is this the England I was so happy to come to, when everyone was so smart, clean and polite? ‘ Coming from poverty in Italy, England was his paradise and he did well: the perfect – very welcome – economic immigrant.
A relative visiting from Spain for the first time in 45 years simply said ‘What happened here?!!’ What indeed!
Peter Hitchens explains it quite logically, large (volume) and hastily done immigration is just by default impossible to deliver smooth integration (small dosage valuable), and it’s an obvious drag on prosperity.
The perfect model for immigration was established in the 17th/18th century, with the integration of the Huguenots fleeing Catholic persecution.
Same culture, more or less; same religion as the host state; many highly skilled, often in industries undeveloped in England; no welfare to depend on, although some charitable help was given.
While they were allowed to listen to sermons by their own preachers in French, all services had to be conducted in English as per the Book of Common Prayer.
By the second generation they had fully adopted English, and many had anglicized their names so as to further their integration and avoid any prejudice. Result? One of the most successful, entrepreneurial, and law-abiding communities in the country, also with a strong record of honourable service in the military – many of the impoverished enlisted, and others were noble, trained, soldiers and sailors.
The only unpleasant incident I have found was the stoning (!) of Huguenots in Yorkshire in the 16th or 17th century, but they then moved to the East of the country and settled down happily enough.
I suppose the nearest equivalent today would be the Hindu Indians, who speak excellent English, dress in Western style for everyday wear, and contribute to the professions in a way which is an asset to everyone here, much as my Iranian friends who have been only too grateful to arrive in a civilised country far away from the mullahs, and who work hard and successfully.
An even earlier assimilated community was the Flemings, who brought the skill of clog-making to England, and the dish of ‘Lancashire’ hot-pot.
But of course, mass migration has nothing to do with these important lessons of the past, nor with applying the best and most sensible models.
In the collapsosphere it should go without saying that the good or harm attributed to any type of migration can only be confirmed within its larger energy-economic context.
There never has or will be a “perfect model” of immigration. Such a thing could never account for either the desire/need to migrate or the long-term effects of any type or size of migrant population and labour.
I see no valid reason – other than to serve the ends of performative cruelty and/or bigotry – for blaming the crisis/crises awaiting almost everyone on recent mass migration. Once economies collapse to the point where a lot of high-skilled jobs disproportionately occupied by immigrants become redundant, it’s an easy guess where “von hinten erdolcht” will first be heard.
On a somewhat related note – the best place to go after/during the collapse is wherever I can use my well-honed fighting/farming/hunting/gathering skills most effectively. What’s that, I hardly have one of those? I guess I’m fracked.
On the contrary Jupiviv, I have just provided some historical examples of large settlements that actually worked out rather well, which justifies calling them ‘perfect models’. So I am not a bigot as you imply.
Same as the French who moved to Spain in the 10th and 11th centuries ( from whom I am in part descended): they arrived by invitation, were skilled and in fact they restored civilisation in Northern Spain after the terrible destruction caused by the Roman collapse and the Arab conquest and slave raiding expeditions.
Now, of course our Collapse has far wider-ranging causes than mass migration, but large numbers of unassimilable migrants, with a high % of criminals among them – above all in the 2nd and 3rd generations – and the spread of violent organised crime (Turkish, East European, African, etc) under the guise of ‘open borders’, is a part of the declining quality of life in many major cities in Europe these days, and the way it would turn out was apparent to anyone objective from the 1970’s.
The unfortunate thing is that resentment is growing, even boiling over now in some places, and innocent settlers will be blamed for things which are not of their doing, resulting in many tragedies: a wiser policy would have avoided this and not balkanised European society. Balkanised communities eventually explode.
However you put it, you’re referring to largely unrestricted and unvetted movements of people as has been the norm throughout our species’ history. Also not sure what “skilled” is supposed to mean in a mediaeval context!
It is true that the recent immigration waves will worsen the European situation when SHTF. That doesn’t however justify the half-baked fas_cistic BS being passed off as poignant commentary on the West’s decline. Given the disproportionately senescent perusers of said BS, crime is predictably central to its narrative.
Bigotry: noun
intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.
Looked in the mirror much recently, have you, Jup?
Only bigots think calling people whom they agree with bigots is bigotry.
If you’re not sure what “skilled” is supposed to mean in a medieval context, then perhaps you should stop commenting so authoritatively and superciliously on the subject until you’ve given the matter sufficient thought and study.
Here”s a clue to point you in the right direction. Medieval people possessed plenty of skills, obviously, even though they didn’t code or use Microsoft Office.
You are so right Xabier and such a tragedy that a once proud and prosperous nation who offered sanctury to so many distressed people has come down to this. I remember the 1950s, not so long ago, when my mum said if in trouble always ask a policemen. What has become of us?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44884113
Move to Marin–
You’re less likely to die prematurely in Marin than nearly every other county in the US
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Marin-healthiest-county-California-longevity-13710031.php
I’m a former resident.
Wealthy people live longer, in general.
Hi Duncan, my wife and I are former residents of Marin County, CA. We moved and have never regretted it. Having grown up in Sausalito since 63, I saw it change over time not for the better. On the surface it seems nice enough, but the roads are crowded, the people under a lot of pressure to make a lot of money to afford the super high housing costs. We moved a ways north and love where we are away from that hustle. Hope it all worked out well for you too.
Well I certainly wouldn’t recommend asking a cop in the U.S. for help. In fact I instruct my 6 yr old son to avoid the police and not to look to them as your friends. They are not there to help they are there to hurt and kill.
Whenever I hear a politician praising police and wanting to “get tough on crime” that is an automatic no vote in my book.
There are hundreds if not thousands of videos and stories from the U.S. similar to this below. I think this is part of the reason that people are actually looking forward to a collapse because as they see it it is the only way out from the authoritarian yoke they must live under day in and day out with no escape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/8/16752914/police-arizona-philip-brailsford-daniel-shaver
At one time, cops were people’s friends. In some places they still are, I expect. When cops are being asked to deal with too much breakdown in society, it seems like it can be too much for the cops. The people most likely to be shot by the police are the mentally ill and the ones with problems like autism. Perhaps people who are high on drugs as well.
Yes Dan, the USA is well ahead on the authoritarian stakes but UK is catching up fast. We famously had no armed cops in UK up to a decade or so ago. Now all we hear are swat squads and armed attacks, just like America.
We always said in UK that America will come over here in time. France not so much. They still have those cute little blue lights on their police cars but UK has those glaringly bright multi coloured strips on their roof which I find to be emblematic of a failing state security system
“The United States’ central bank may have to dust off some of the tools that helped steer the economy through the global financial crisis a decade ago should another recession hit, Boston Federal Reserve Bank president Eric Rosengren said on Tuesday. With interest rates already low leaving limited room for cuts, the US Federal Reserve would likely have to turn to quantitative easing and other balance sheet tools to stimulate its economy, in the case of a downturn.”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3003312/central-banks-must-turn-global-financial-crisis-tool-box
“The emergency tool kit that helped to pull the global economy out of the Great Financial Crisis might not work a second time, the world’s lender of last resort has warned. David Lipton, deputy director of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, delivered a stark warning about the depleted power of central banks and governments to combat another sharp economic shock.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/03/25/world-has-run-firepower-fight-next-recession-imf-warns/
“The world is wealthier now than it’s ever been – but only on paper. Much of this prosperity may prove illusory as a global shift toward less liquid investments undermines the basis of valuation.
“Private equity, infrastructure and private credit have become a bigger share of investment portfolios, making mark-to-market values increasingly uncertain. The standard method of valuing assets assumes prices are available and that there is adequate trading liquidity to be able to sell at those levels. This may hold for traditional investments such as stocks and bonds. But assets such as private equity are rarely traded or not tradeable at all, necessitating the use of models or proxies instead.”
https://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/the-illusion-of-global-wealth-is-just-that-1.841165
Harry, I just wanted to say how grateful I am for all your reports – it is saving me an immense amount of research time! I hope you are being rewarded for your continuing efforts! This one is a humdinger.
Yep, thanks Harry—-
You are all most welcome.
The value of an asset is the amount that you can actually sell it for, often on short notice.
Now that the younger generation is poorer than the older generation, we shouldn’t be surprised if there is a chronic shortage of buyers of expensive real estate, jewelry, and other goods that older people want to sell. The WSJ recently published an article called, “A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses.”
Harry, good line of articles posted in this thread. What happened after 2008/2009 debacle 1st major step down was a shift from organic growth from net energy to forced growth by way of CB intervention. Almost like a person having trouble breathing, fitted with a ventilator/oxygen assist. We all knew eternal growth was a myth and coupled with declining net energy, financial additives have been warranted, but its an end game strategy. When the next recession hits the usual QE and lower interest rate tactics will begin anew, but the process of people having less to pay for more and going further into debt to try and make it work will reach a point of cascading loan defaults much like they did in 08/09, but this next time it won’t mostly be mortgages, but all types of loans across the board on a huge scale. That will mark the 2nd major step down. I figure we’ll get some time after the 2nd, before the 3rd and final, but not anywhere near as much as from the 1st to the 2nd. Maybe a year or two at most.
So strange to drive around while everything is still BAU, realizing it won’t be indefinitely.
“A second major power cut in just a few hours has plunged the Venezuelan capital Caracas into darkness again, with other regions also affected. It came after a four-hour blackout on Monday which the government sought to blame on opposition sabotage. A nationwide power cut earlier this month prompted looting and desperation in many parts of the country.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-47703864
This article, published an hour ago, says:
“Power was restored in some parts of the country by late Monday, including the capital Caracas, but residents in other states said they were still in the dark. ”
So it sounds like the new outage has been partly fixed already.
“Brazil’s government has resumed studies to build a large hydroelectric power plant in the northern border state Roraima, which currently relies on the shaky Venezuelan grid, officials at state energy planning agency EPE told Reuters. Roraima, the only state not connected to Brazil’s national grid, has faced repeated shortages of the electricity it buys from Venezuela, which is suffering a severe economic crisis.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-power-dam/brazil-eyes-new-amazon-dam-in-roraima-amid-venezuela-crisis-idUKKCN1R72RV
Don’t worry Venezuela, the USSA will see to it that the power goes out again. Gotta keep that chaos going.
Lol!
Don’t worry Venezuela, the USA will see to it that the power goes out again. Gotta keep that chaos going.
“Global trade has taken a sharp turn down, reinforcing the view that the world economy is in its worst state since since the financial crisis a decade ago.
“Figures published Monday show trade fell 1.8 percent in the three months through January compared with the previous period. That’s the biggest drop since May 2009. On a year-on-year basis, trade posted its first decline in nine years in the three-month period.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-25/global-trade-takes-sharp-turn-down-with-biggest-drop-since-2009
“Factory activity in the eurozone contracted at the fastest pace in nearly six years… The bloc’s aggregate PMI fell to 47.6 in March from 49.3, well below the 50 threshold that is the baseline for whether the sector is expanding or contracting… Japan’s manufacturing PMI also has fallen into contraction territory, following China’s weakening readings that started falling below 50 late last year… The market will likely be on pins and needles for the rest of this week awaiting readings on the U.S. economy.”
https://www.axios.com/global-manufacturing-data-europe-japan-united-states-68c40ee5-fbdf-4517-aecd-4f7a0e5e8f9b.html
The downturn in trade in the last three months is indeed disturbing. Data for the US for January was missing due to the shutdown, so its change was estimated to be 0. That probably won’t have too material an impact on the overall result. It would have be to be greatly increasing, to truly be helpful to the overall result.
Keep calm!? Minus is less than…that means negative..that means Seneca Cliff, Dave!
Got it? That means the “End of the World Party”, Dave….Game over, Bro.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gDV-dOvqKzQ
a fun with numbers update:
Japan 10 year bond now lower at MINUS 0.084%
German 10 year Bund now lower at MINUS 0.032%
recession is on the way…
keep calm and no Brexit?
David – An update on Brexit will be posted hopefully before 12th April (the new deadline):
https://www.gofundme.com/fnahvp-free-book: If you are interested in Brexit then:
A full article will be added to the 3rd edition of my book. A free pdf in the coming weeks will be available on request to: peter@underco.co.uk
And also a word doc for current details of Brexit – where we are now – is available today but it is a daily moving target at present and goes out-of-date quickly.
Apparently, as of today, there are two new dead lines 12/22 April/May, but this could well change on Wednesday or anytime, the plot thickens, what a dizzy world, lolz.
Lets have Mr. Juncker reach for yet another bottle..
“The stockpile of global bonds with below-zero yields just hit $10 trillion — intensifying the conundrum for investors hungry for returns while fretting the brewing economic slowdown.
A Bloomberg index tracking negative-yielding debt has reached the highest level since September 2017 as 10-year bunds trade in negative territory and the U.S. yield curve flashes recession warnings.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-25/the-10-trillion-pool-of-negative-debt-is-a-late-cycle-reckoning
“The bond market doubled down on scary warnings Monday, signaling both a possible recession is looming and that the Fed could have to cut interest rates this year to stop it.
““People are starting to get fearful,” said Andrew Brenner of National Alliance.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/25/bond-market-says-a-recession-is-coming-and-the-fed-will-cut-rates.html
Yes the original Brexit date has been breached and blocked by both by the gov as well as direct no vote in the Parliament, the likely-hood of UK crashing on default by the original deadline is virtually zero.
The latest development on Brexit seems to be that the issue has been just on yesterday night transferred from the gov hands towards the parliament and on Wednesday they will vote there in more detailed fashion in which direction to move forward and that decision will have to be delivered by the gov. And since this is majority ‘remainer’ assembly they will most likely end up with some sort of semi-membership of the EU, there are several existing models of it already (e.g. Norway). So, now the battle will be centered on how bad deal – treaty would come out of that process eventually, essentially what parts of the EU law and institutional framework to retain but mind you it will be definitively more biased towards sort of full membership status than the other way around..
Since this turn of events is within the spectrum of favorable options of the continental Reich v4.0, it’s doubtful the EU is going to suddenly hasten the kickout of the UK from the club, despite some expected further prolongation and comedy is surely to be continued for a while..
I use this website for daily and correct assessments on the Brexit saga, Dr North is an expert on this and has been for many years. His Flexcit paper (450pages) describes a very workable Norway type option for a efta/EEA solution, BUT nobody is listening – very frustrating!:
http://eureferendum.com/
NB Be careful when commenting, the good Dr is very spikey and doesn’t welcome off-topic and unnecessary comments (see his instructions)
It is really difficult to believe that negative interest rates can be sustainable. They seem to imply that the economy is not growing fast enough to support a higher interest rate.
I will gladly pay you a negative interest rate Tuesday on a large lump sum borrowed today.
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/3195240741/d1482dc9b97a17e3b89b1e8257520dd0_400x400.jpeg
Gail, if Trump want’s to shut down Venenzualias oil production, why would he need Guido as president so he could have American oil companies take over their oil fields? I had thought it was so we could use Venenzualia’s heavy oil to refine with our light oil to produce diesel, am I wrong?
Is it instead to keep their oil offline until the oil supply get’s too tight, prices too high & then switch on production to bring prices back down but still profitable?
So far it looks as though Trump has already strangled Venenzualia’s oil output & the Saudies are going to cut their production to boost oil prices higher.
Too bad we can’t convince our “representatives” that “renewables” cannot keep us above water & we are wasting money, resources & OIL producing them.
Ditch MSM and look at reality.
Maduro is still ruler, with popular support.
“Random Guiado, the President who wasn’t There. The longer this goes on, the stronger the Bay of Pigs smell grows.”
The oil is not getting less valuable—
And Russia, China and India are buying it.
This is not a usual pricing policy, set up by capitalist.
This is going to be a long battle.
as you recently pointed out, VZ has some kind of a happiness rating as the #108 country…
this wasn’t updated into 2019, so it is likely lower, perhaps way lower…
so Maduro has “led” his citizens to low happiness… good job!
I doubt any leader of a #108 range country has “popular support”…
Maduro = Trump
but I agree, it’s going to be a long battle… in the long run, there might be some hope that one of these big countries will be able to help VZ to increase their oil production and thus bring a bit of relief to the deteriorating conditions of the VZ people…
my sympathies to the people of VZ…
I ditched MSM decades ago, I get my news online from many sources both independent like Truthdig, The Intercept & commercial like the Guardian & Al Jazeera but with so much propaganda around, it’s hard to find “reality”.
How can you know what is “real” these days?
I know Maduro was democratically ELECTED & validated by UN observers unlike our fake, rigged “elections” where we refuse to allow UN observers & Guiado is a US puppet. I also expect oil will rise in price as we MUST HAVE OIL to survive now, how high it will go, I don’t know but not $200. a barrel, the economy can’t support that but the military probably could.
But can the military, fed by our tax dollars, buy enough oil to keep oil extractors in business?
Or will they use force to keep it flowing until it can’t?
Our rulers will do what ever it takes to dominate the world, that’s why we have the worlds largest & nastiest military.
It’s pretty clear to me that to our rulers, we the working class are expendable, mere pawns for them to use & disguard & our “votes” are worthless unless their tied to MONEY, lots of money.
I’m boycotting the 2020 FAKE “elections” their a waste of time as nothing will change.
It will indeed be a long long battle with no winners.
I don’t know much about Maduro and am woefully ignorant about Venezuela in general, but Wikipedia paints him in pretty grim colors. Of course, WIkipedia is heavily politicized to the point where its portraits are mere caricatures.
Even so, regarding his democratic ELECTION:
An opposition-led National Assembly was elected in 2015 and a movement toward recalling Maduro began in 2016; Maduro maintained power through the Supreme Tribunal, the National Electoral Council and the military.[6][7][10] The Supreme Tribunal removed power from the elected National Assembly, resulting in a constitutional crisis and protests in 2017. Maduro called for a rewrite of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly of Venezuela was elected in 2017, under what many—including Venezuela’s chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega[11] and Smartmatic, the company that ran the voting machines[12]—considered irregular voting conditions;[13] the majority of its members were pro-Maduro.[14][15] On 20 May 2018, presidential elections were called prematurely;[c] opposition leaders had been jailed, exiled or forbidden to run, there was no international observation, and tactics to suggest voters could lose their jobs or social welfare if they did not vote for Maduro were used.[19][20] The majority of nations in the Western world did not recognize the Constituent Assembly election or the validity of Maduro’s 2018 reelection;[21][22][23] the Canadian,[24][25] Panamanian,[26] and the United States governments sanctioned Maduro.[27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro
Sergey on March 24, 2019 at 6:01 am
“I think comfort price is above $80/bbl. As largest-state-owned CEO said (this was a private talk which was publicly released two years ago) the break-even price average $30.”
The good news is that oil prices are still on a rising trend…the bad news is that emerging markets currencies are about to break down again… just as they did last year…just before the oil price collapsed and took down the stock markets.
Anyway…I work in restaurants in Finland…and the most straight forward and honest people that I work with are Russians…they just don’t f**king care to lie.
I can easily believe that Russia really needs $80 per barrel, or more. I am really doubtful that we can get there, and stay there, for very long.
What people tell today is “part of the truth.” For example, “If we could get off fossil fuels, we could save the earth.” We can’t get off fossil fuels, however.
Or, “All we need to do is use less.” In fact, Jevons’ paradox holds. The amount we spend seems to depend on the size of our paycheck. If we reduce spending in one way, we are likely to increase it in some other way.
OPINION:
This is why we must listen to the dictates of a higher power. It tends to accord in a most cursory way to what we intend. It informs and is informed by what we intend (if we learn how to “listen”.).
The individual is a tiny microcosm of that inscrutable higher power. If the individual acts with a clear conscience, that puts them more in touch with the “intention” of the higher power. I guess you’d call it a dialectical process. Back and forth conversation that has its own independent outcome. Intuition and faith are greater guides to what is going down than intellect.
It is therefore not reasonable to conclude that individuals have a total lack of control over events.
I do so agree, Artleads, individuals have no control over events we can only react and prepare to survive the coming storm. Our economic and financial future is in the hands of The Higher Power (which I recognise, as it seems that you do too, which I discovered at the most exclusive club of all!). I found this book most revealing and it gelled with my own concepts of the nature of man:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Children-Law-Lost-Teachings-Atlantis/dp/0966001532
Many thanks! I preferred the first part of the “story” than the last. I don’t buy books, but this video was nice to hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQxkoVZ5Csc
I like that the philosophy encourages skepticism even of its own procedures.
It feels as if we in the West live in a phantasy bubble. The New Green Deal and technology will make resources limitless…Modern Money Theory will create a new paradise…and so on…
Maybe because nothing has broken yet? Nothing has collapsed yet.
Russians on the other hand have experienced the collapse of Soviet Union and a near breakdown of their economy and society.
You are so right as usual Gail, we can’t get off fossil resources, not with 7.6 BILLION HUMANS that continue to produce too many new mouths.
Those who still believe we can “get off oil” & “transition” to “renewables” are in for a rude dose of reality & a lot of pain.
Knowing that we & this civilization are doomed, I “escape” by watching youtube videos of trains traveling through beautiful countries like Norway for example. Lovely country but rather chilly.
It’s a beautiful clean, green country but I also often wonder what will happen to all those pretty little homes so far away from resources & towns, how will they cope when the trains stop, fuel stations close & the trucks stop coming?
Same thing that will happen to most of us I expect – compost.
«Nature is in freefall and the planet’s support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That’s the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it’s stark.
The last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat climate change poses to life. Far less talked about but just as dangerous, if not more so, is the rapid decline of the natural world. The felling of forests, the over-exploitation of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and water are together driving the living world to the brink, according to a huge three-year, U.N.-backed landmark study to be published in May.»
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nature-destruction-climate-change-world-biodiversity_n_5c49e78ce4b06ba6d3bb2d44
Of course, this articles ends with
No, we really don’t have a way to fix the situation, short of cutting back greatly on our own population. Our self-organizing economy doesn’t seem to have a way short of collapse to fix the situation. But our media insist that we know how to fix the situation and we can. They often seem to include “get off fossil fuels.” What? How? We somehow have a magic wand, but aren’t using it.
It seems like the fewer useful or impactful technological breakthroughs we see, the stronger people’s faith in the omnipotence of technology gets. At this point it seems to be a common belief that the only thing preventing us from switching over to BEVs and renewable energy sources is the political will to do it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
(however, looking at the Clinton campaign may produce a different result)
Repugs and Dims—– such a sorry bunch.
Meanwhile the money keeps flowing through the foundations, special interest groups and lobbyist. The theater continues in DC and the MSM and none of the big players go to jail. The people are being played by the two party system. The people keep picking sides without realizing that there is no choice, no real opposition, no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. The real goal of today’s politicians is to profit from passing legislation that favors corporate profits. Then, manufacture or inflame a crisis to distract attention from all their nefarious deeds. Then run for re-election using ill-gotten gains, a rigged corporate media and rigged electoral process. Rinse and repeat until there is so much corruption the gov’t collapses.
The “choice” between two corporate oligarchs is no choice at all, that’s why years ago I stopped playing that “game” & for a while, “voted” for third parties.
Now after the blaitant corruption, rigging, etc in the 2016 “election” I see no point in bothering to “vote” at all, voting just assures our rulers that we still believe in the system.
Trying to vote for change is useless in such a corrupt, fraudulent system, let the dam electoral “collage” select our corporate rulers as usual – I’m OUT!
What if we all vote – NONE OF THE ABOVE ?
Then there is my dog Spike that said, “Dad your crazy if you vote for some guy and you haven’t smelled his butt.” Spike’s is a pretty sharp little guy. He might have a point.
I think we need better writers up there in D.C.
This show we got playing now is’t very funny.
OOOH, I wish we had that choice! It would win by a landslide?
Since we don’t have the option of “none of the above”, not voting at all is the only option left to show our rulers we don’t believe in you any more or this corrupt system.
But I’m not smelling anyones butt!
I recall hearing of some fellow who legally changed his name to “NOBODY” and ran, campaigned, and won.
“Who’s gonna lower your taxes? NOBODY! Who’s going to fight crime? NOBODY! Who’s going to clean up corruption? NOBODY!“
Sheila, I share your frustration and anger – it is the same here in UK and around the world. The French are people who don’t isht easily and they are not going to let their leaders get away with it; after all it was they who had a successful and bloody revolution.
I see no way to change the corrupt system short of a collapse which is coming. To replace it with ‘rule by the people, for the people’ might then be invoked through our small group with its six demands: (after Brexit that is!)
http://harrogateagenda.org.uk/
Why is everyone so interested in particular personalities? They are actors, being pushed in the direction the self-organizing system tells them to go.
I HAD a reply but I was interrupted with a demand to “log in”! then the reply was deleted!
I stopped “voting” for either of those two corporate parties years ago & tried to “vote” for third parties that won’t be allowed to win.
After the blaitant corruption, fraud & rigging of the 2016 “elections” I have had enough!
I’m not wasting any more of my time “voting” in a rigged, fraudulent corrupt, system, let the dam electoral “collage” select our corporate oligarch rulers as usual, voting just assures our rulers that we still believe in the system, I don’t so I”m OUT!
Calm down…We can reclaim old tires and produce diesel blend….That’s what I’m talking about!
Next Solent Green….
Tests on oil recycled from tyres finds a cleaner diesel blend
November 29, 2016 by Niki Widdowson, Queensland University of Technology
Farhad Hossain, Professor Richard Brown and GDT’s Trevor Bayley in QUT’s Biofuel Engine Research Facility with a truck tyre that would yield 460litres of reclaimed oil. Credit: Queensland University of Technology
Old tyres can be completely recycled into lower emission diesel engine oil, instead of being dumped in dangerous, highly flammable stockpiles that become breeding grounds for malaria and dengue-carrying mosquitoes
“The process recycles end-of-life tyres into oil, carbon and steel, leaving nothing wasted and even uses some of the recovered oil as the heat source,” Mr Bayley said.
“Carbon is the most common recovered ingredient and the steel rim and framework is the third most common ingredient, while the oil is the most valuable.
“We are delighted at the findings of the QUT research as it will help us promote the sustainable use for end-of-life tyres
“A recycled 10kg car tyre yields 4 litres of oil, 1.5kg of steel and 4 kg of oil, and a 70kg truck tyre provides 28 litres of oil, 11kg of steel and 28kg of carbon.
https://m.phys.org/news/2016-11-oil-recycled-tyres-cleaner-diesel.html
“GDT plans to have the first fully operational commercial plant delivering eight million litres of oil a year from mid-2017, followed by a world-first mining tyre processing plant in either Qld or WA.
Gives these guys a open ended loan and some IPOs, TEN more years of kicking this baby down the ROAD..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yDAmweqwMSM
RIP Jim..see you soon in the Highway in the Sky…
“DUBAI/LONDON (Reuters) – Budget needs are forcing Saudi Arabia to push for oil prices of at least $70 per barrel this year,…”
“Riyadh, OPEC’s de facto leader, said it was steeply cutting exports to its main customers in March and April despite refiners asking for more of its oil.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-oil-prices-analysis/more-shale-who-cares-saudi-arabia-pushes-for-at-least-70-oil-idUSKCN1R31IP
KSA will cut oil output, trying to push the price up, but they will just damage world economy. German manufacturing PMI below 45. It’s not looking good.
I agree.
“Since the start of the year, some of the most visible companies in the US have warned growth is cooling in one segment or another of their businesses — at a time when global economic growth is under a microscope.
“Apple set the stage back in January with a revenue warning. Then weeks later, the industrial giant Caterpillar said its outlook for this year assumed “modest” sales growth. Amazon offered weak sales guidance in February, and FedEx said this week that its sales and profits came up short due to macroeconomic weakness.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/economic-slowdown-here-are-some-of-the-notable-companies-warning-2019-3?r=US&IR=T
“US corporate debt, excluding debt by banks – so “nonfinancial” corporate debt – has surged in recent years by all measures and to such an extent that it was featured prominently in the Fed’s Financial Stability Report, in terms of what might trigger the next financial crisis. The Fed is counting total nonfinancial business debts, which include the debts of businesses that are not incorporated. It found about $17 trillion in debts…
“But the US is only in 25th place.”
^^^ link:
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/03/23/countries-with-most-monstrous-corporate-debt-pileup-u-s-wimps-out-in-25th-place-debt-to-gdp/
One thing I get confused about: in the US, businesses take out a lot of debt using the sale of bonds, rather than getting most of the debt through banks. Does this get included in the total? Even something as small as an individual church can sell bonds to finance the building of the church.
Also, the US has by far the biggest stock market in the world. “Equity” is somewhat different from debt, but not a whole lot. I wonder what happens when “debt” and “equity” are added together. In recent years, US businesses have been taking out more debt and buying back their stock. In total, there is a lot more debt outstanding, than value of stocks.
Buying back their own stock at the highs. If the stock market “crashes,” companies stranded with “worthless” stock they have paid dearly for, unless of course, they have “hedged” themselves accordingly, and the counterparty can actually pay up.
You are quite correct, but bear in mind that most of the loans are hedged with CDS, just like last time to profit from loan failures:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-05/after-irreparable-damage-warnings-wall-street-finally-cracks-down-cds-manipulation
Is there no end to the financial manipulations of these Wall Street criminals?
Two differences that people pay more attention to with the storm clouds on the horizon:
1) Return on equity is variable, or even zero, whereas bonds typically pay a fixed rate of return. So when profits look unsure, people switch from equity to bonds, whereas if the likelihood of good profit looks good, people switch from bonds to equity.
2) In forced liquidation, bonds get paid out before equity. (Actually, legal fees typically get paid first, then taxes due, then employee salaries, then lines of credit, then corporate bonds, and then finally, equity.) So in a liquidation of a heavily-leveraged company, equity is the most likely to simply “go away” entirely. This reinforces the flight to bonds with perceived hard times coming.
“Britain’s escalating national emergency over Brexit has led optimism in the financial services industry to plunge at the fastest rate since the financial crisis, according to a business survey.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/25/city-optimism-falling-at-highest-rate-since-financial-crisis-brexit-cbi
“I do not like calling “Wolf” but we may be headed for a crisis. My gravest concern is the European banks and the European bonds currently governed under British law. Both could be in serious trouble. European banks are poised to underperform in 2019 thanks to their inherent issues that not even the ECB, with their zero cost money, can cover up.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4250669-european-banking-crisis
Ouch! Stock markets seems to be down today also.
“Deutsche Bank’s prospective merger with smaller rival Commerzbank threatens to unsettle the German banking industry and puts 30,000 jobs at risk. But the deal is just the latest drama to hit the 150-year-old lender after a string of losses, an executive boardroom battle and billions of dollars in fines.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/18/deutsche-bank-commerzbank-merger-talks-jobs
“Fears of global recession continued to spook equity markets this morning, with stocks in Asia down sharply and those in Europe sliding. Investors ditched shares and fled to the safety of bonds as risk assets fell out of favour on growing fears of a recession in the United States, sending global yields plunging.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/global-markets-spooked-by-recession-fears-bjdxcpcr7
“Wherever you look in developed markets, sovereign bond yields are at their lowest levels in years as traders ratchet up bets that major central banks will be easing. Yields in Australia and New Zealand dropped to record lows after a closely-watched part of the U.S. curve inverted on Friday as investors wager that the Federal Reserve will need to cut rates. Trading volumes in Treasury future were double the norm during Asian trading, while Japan’s 10-year yields fell to the lowest since 2016.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-24/aussie-10-year-bond-yield-drops-below-1-8-to-new-record-low
Pension funds will not be happy about these yields. Of course, banks won’t be either.
“This was supposed to be the year when, more than a decade after the crisis, the world made some progress in unwinding the unconventional policies that encouraged excessive risk-taking and shifted the global financial system onto sounder footings. That moment now appears to have been pushed further away and the economic downturn that seems to be developing might well force a fresh burst of GFC-inspired policies.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-world-is-slowing-down-at-an-alarming-speed-20190325-p517ag.html
“safety of bonds!” Safe, until they default.
“Nick Tolchard, head of Invesco’s Europe, the Middle East and Africa fixed income division, writes in the report that “respondents broadly view global economic conditions as being late-cycle – expecting an end to the long-running global expansion within one to two years”.
“In particular, investors said they see high levels of government debt, brought on following the financial crisis and as a result of ongoing structural fiscal deficits, as the main risk.”
http://www.pensions-expert.com/Investment/Investors-worried-high-levels-of-debt-could-trigger-next-recession
“Two Russian air force planes landed at Venezuela’s main airport on Saturday carrying a Russian defense official and nearly 100 troops, according to media reports, amid strengthening ties between Caracas and Moscow.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics/russian-air-force-planes-land-in-venezuela-carrying-troops-reports-idUSKCN1R50NB
Russia would like to ensure repayment of its debt, perhaps?
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I found the following verbiage on another website. Just another source confirming what most of us now understand.
“As the net energy (available\ exergy) supplied to the economy declines the economy slows, and its ability to service its existing debt declines. When it reached the point (around 2012) where it could no longer cover those debt service costs with its organic growth the central banks stepped in, and created the additional currency. If they hadn’t there would have been massive defaults. Depending upon whom you read that was at least $16 trillion, or 28% of all currency in circulation. Since the 28% of additional currency created wasn’t in conjunction with the production of goods and services it deformed the system’s true pricing mechanism.”
“Since consumption was inadequate to absorb the 28% of additional currency (the goods and services were never created to be consumed) the additional currency created poured into assets. Land, the stock/ bond market, and commodities absorbed the inflation created, and did it outside the CPI. It is hardly surprising to find that the points on the oil/ GDP curve are floating away from their historical correlation.”
“Because the net energy supplied to the economy from petroleum is not going to be improving (it will only continue to decline) the central banks will have to keep creating money from nothing for there to be enough currency in circulation for the existing debt to be serviced. True price discovery will be further eroded until the system no longer functions. The present currency expansion method selectively transfers the newly created funds which leaves the majority of the economy out of the process. The poor get poorer faster than the rich get richer, which subsequently results in a contracting economy. With no other options available to the central banks, QE4 and additional rate reductions are now baked into the process.”
“We are watching the failure of the monetary system as it attempts to compensate for fossil fuels decline. Because the monetary system operates on references relative to each other, an energy approach is the only way to project the outcome.”
Oh, that other website is Peakoilnews and Shortonoil posted it from the BW Hill Group that proposed the ETP theory of depletion. Whew…
Yes, we here know Shorty ….it is a good read and a battle been going on there for years with him and his supporters and oilers….
So far I’m gave he’s been only half right or maybe half right…whatever…
Yes, whatever it TAKES…BAU FULL THROTTLE BABY…
P.S. Just like to give credit when it’s due…ho offense
I agree with most of that stuff…
it begs the question of how long can this go on before “the failure of the monetary system”…
I think it’s a fact that natural gas is a very cheap FF when its energy content is compared to oil… which means a relatively higher EROEI…
so, if the world can increase the use of natural gas, then this could (and should) prolong BAU, perhaps for another decade or so…
natural gas has the potential to actually raise the overall EROEI of the world energy system!
Yep, add other interlinked factors of demographic nature, changed (forced) consumer habits (no carz for young), digital hermits (people living on the internets) etc… The system has got plenty of road to bump around.. despite occasional shocks to be whacked a mole..
Gotta like shortonoil’s posts at times Chrome.
In some ways, I agree with this. What we have recently been getting is asset prices increases, as more debt/currency is pumped into the economy, at ever lower interest rates. The benefit of these asset price increases tend to go to the already wealthy, rather than to the poor. The CPI has tended not to increase much, because the prices of oil and other commodities depends on affordability by the masses.
The section ends:
“We are watching the failure of the monetary system as it attempts to compensate for fossil fuels decline. Because the monetary system operates on references relative to each other, an energy approach is the only way to project the outcome.”
I wonder if the energy approach predicts turning points properly. My impression is that it doesn’t. The energy approach has no proper idea of debt bubble collapse. No one really understands what the minimum EROEI is (in part because it is sort of a nebulous measure). Interest is cost-free in EROEI analyses. Too often the energy approach is followed up by, “and then prices will rise because of scarcity, and the system will be saved.”
What the author is taking about is a nice idea, but I am not sure he has any way of implementing it.
and some fun with numbers:
Japan 10 year bond is MINUS 0.078%
German 10 year Bund is MINUS 0.019%
welcome to the new normal…
keep calm and carry on…
Lets enjoy the calm days while they last.
I don’t have the proper slush fund for it exactly, but lets do it a bit like in Orson Welles style: the best available caviar, Cuban cigars, drink.. and bit of ‘..fresh sexuellence..’ ; knowing fully about the ever present dark undertones of our existence..
https://youtu.be/dXpVA7IAH1o
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/24/wall-street-expects-big-rally-after-mueller-finds-trump-campaign-did-not-conspire-with-russia.html
Trump = Maduro
Please–
Maduro is much smarter.
Trump is a good politician for late stage capitalism (he has been bankrupt 6 times), but not the brightest porch light on the block.
Both are parts of a self-organizing economy. Take out one or another, and a replacement will be found.
19th– not bad
http://worldhappiness.report/assets/images/fig-2.7.png
Duncan, you don’t seem to be a particularly happy person…
but then after all, you are American…
of course, I am also…
but hey, VZ is 108… are you surprised it’s that high?
peace, dude…
Duncan, you don’t seem to be a particularly happy person…
but then after all, you are American…
of course, I am also…
but hey, VZ is 108… are you surprised it’s that high?
peace, dude…
the second time, I should have asked “are you surprised it’s that low?”
Actually, I surprised it is that high—
And I’m an elder– the happiest members of society.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/better-research-is-needed-to-understand-why-elders-are-happier.html
research schmeesearch…
we’re happier because we’re closing in on the erasure of all of life’s unpleasantries…
but…
it’s interesting that you are surprised that the citizens of Maduroworld are as “high” as 108…
do you think by now (it’s 2019 after all) that they would probably be down to about 150?
because Maduro succkks?
Maduro = Trump
Top 12th percentile, and mostly tiny countries before. Not bad. Probably thanks to Trump.
Yeabut Canada is half as far from the top, with only the evil socialist Scandinavian countries ahead of it.
In general, I think Americans would rather be angry than happy. It’s pretty hard to be both at the same time.
It looks to me as though cold countries top the list. Cold countries use a lot of energy per capita. They top the happiness chart. These are the energy consumption per capita amounts for 2014, in kg of oil equivalent per year for the top countries on the list:
Finland: 6,213
Denmark: 2,873
Norway: 5,596
Iceland: 2,742
Netherlands: 4,326
The countries at the bottom of the happiness chart are hot, low energy consumption per capita countries. These are the corresponding energy consumption per capita figures for these countries.
Rwanda: N/A
Tanzania: 475
Afghanistan: N/A
Central African Republic: 390
South Sudan: 61
Energy consumption per capita tends to predict this kind of happiness!
The miscalculated population dynamics: After the fall of communism in 1989, the Catholic diocese of Banska Bystrica in central Slovakia built a new seminary that was projected for 120 seminarists. During its 25 years existence, the seminary produced over 150 catholic priests. Now they are closing it down, as it is occupied only by 20 seminarists and the operating costs are high.
https://mybystrica.sme.sk/c/22082526/knazsky-seminar-v-badine-ukonci-po-26-rokoch-svoju-cinnost.html?ref=trz
We should read more https://econimica.blogspot.com/ about the population.
I say burn it down,
Time to get rid of the bad stuff– it may smell as it decomposes.
Duncan, what is your recommendation for Moskques?
http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?40,file=192181,filename=Jesus_-Oh-N-Not-This-Shit-Again.jpg
hey, Tim…
we’re kind of triangulating here, but our friend Duncan seems to put up a lot of silence when it comes to any religgion besides his favorite target…
you know, those evvill Chrissttians…
I’m not insisting that Duncan answer my question…
it’s just very revealing that he only slams those Cs…
I could try triggering him:
Trump = Maduro
Take your hand off that trigger, David. Our Duncan can be provocative, but he isn’t an argumentative sort. He just likes to state his views or feelings and leave it at that.
As he’s an atheist, one would assume he should be ideologically opposed to all organized theisms, but Christianity seems to be one of his pet hates. I’d like to know what Christianity has ever done to him personally that makes him single it out for burning.
Or perhaps he’s equally opposed to Islam but is justifiably afraid of getting the Salmon Rushdie treatment?
http://www.supernewsworld.com/videos/images/110000/What-Did-Salman-Rushdie-Say-About-Islam-On-The-Fatwa-And-The-Satanic-Verses-1992-Image-118383.jpg
I’d say the ‘Salman Rushdie Treatment’ is shaping up rather nicely in that photo. I feel, in fact I’m quite certain, that it would be effective in my case, too…..
In Spain, the Church has turned empty seminaries into care homes. Smart as ever!
Not bad!
Taverns would be a upgrade—
In England, old banks get turned into pubs or restaurants, mostly those from the days of real full-throttle Imperial wealth, c 1900, but haven’t seen that done to a church yet – they become’ upmarket quirky’ residences. There’s one in this village, the former Methodist chapel. Bad karma if you ask me. ……
https://www.jalou.co.uk/york
We have a lot of spare churches.
Everyone now worships our political and economic leaders. They tell the citizens the story of everlasting salvation through lower interest rates, more debt, sustainable development, and more technology. This story is much more pleasant that the idea that we may be facing the same fate as Babylon, as mentioned in the book of Revelation. We now have a manmade religion that can save us! There is no need for any of the other self-organized religions.
York, the city of haunted churches – very fond childhood memories!
We seem to have to ask ourselves, in comparing economic models: ‘Which is the most diseased horse at the slaughterhouse…….. and which will manage to bite the others to death before facing the slaughterer itself?’
In Russia, as Sergey points out, the fatal disease undermining any positive policies seems to be monopolies,naturally arising from cronyism and corruption in an authoritarian state structure; combined with a repression by the state of free speech, which would help to remedy such abuses – as it did in 19th century England.
In the West, we have short-sighted Neo-Liberal doctrines, built on a foundation of complacent arrogance engendered by too long a run of unsustainable prosperity, and pandering also to powerful vested interests.
If Russian food is patently inferior, then ours is secretly poisoned by the chemical giants, who clearly have their own cosy relationship with Brussels and Washington.
So much irony in this for US/EU policy-makers, that their attempt to encircle – and dismember – the Russian Federation, destroying a Russian state recovering from the utter humiliation of the 1990’s, and incorporating it as a resource-supplier for economic exploitation within the global system, has proved to be the best favour they possibly could have done to Russia. Like mass aerial bombing, it hasn’t destroyed, but hardened.
One can compare it with the British (and general Western) strategy, which is to believe that as long as enough money can be made from finance and services, everything essential can be bought on the global markets and imported, while in the meantime encouraging feckless consumerism among the masses and also destroying the fabric of society with massive immigration of economically redundant, low-grade -and often actually hostile – people.
Also doing next to nothing to halt or reverse the accelerated environmental degradation of the last 70 years, above all of farmland: one sees lip-service to this, nothing much more.
++++++++++
Yes, my reply on previous page is under moderation, but mostly along the same lines.
In terms of farmland, the first practitioners – adopters of low impact agriculture originated in the west (UK, US, W Europe) but it is still beyond marginal fraction of the overall acreage, after few decades. Nevertheless, they have proven it does work on all accounts, healing land (and ecosystems) as well as feeding people but differently (no till, woody crops, etc).. the cat is out of the bag already so to speak..
We never know perhaps the mass adoption of this would have to wait post crash for the new ‘feudal class’ coming out of these various balkanization, secession movements, jettisoning old paradigms out of necessity.
Agriculture is mining for minerals and nutrients. If the fields lack sufficient amounts of nutrients due to such mining activity, they can not produce quality food and the human population is doomed to extinction.
While this is certainly true of modern, conventional agriculture — and has been true in some situations historically — it is possible to do in a sustainable manner.
See Franklin King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries for one description of how it could work, and see Permaculture for a more contemporary example.
? I was not talking about fields..
I always had a sneaking cynical suspicion, admittedly based on no hard evidence, that China and US have always had “designs” on Russia’s vast stores of potential mineral wealth. I think I can understand why Russia would have a pucker factor.
China’s motivation may be similar to pre-world war II Japan’s search for raw materials, only China may see the folly and wasted expense of the US overt militarism style of doing things.
Metaphorically, this is like a pride of lions vs a pack of hyenas, mortal enemies, eyeing a potential meal of a huge Cape Buffalo, no easy task to take down, but if a hunt by either party were successful, the inevitable fight ensues between the predators over the kill.
we follow in the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, with their fabulous architectural ruins scattered among the rocky hillsides, baking in the hot Mediterranean sun…
Well, if you are paying attention, we really haven’t exceeded 5th Century Athens.
But that may possibly be out of bounds for our current residence—-
unfortunately, our population has gotten a lot bigger, but our culture has not greatly improved.
Also, adding robots to replace people in manufacturing, and talking about what an advance this is, without ever mentioning what negative impact this has on “demand.” There aren’t enough jobs to go around. The ones that are available don’t pay well.