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I have said in recent posts that the world economy is hitting resource limits of many kinds. These limits include oil, coal, and other sources of energy, including uranium, used as a fuel for nuclear power generation. Because of these limits, the world economy is being forced to shrink back. In my opinion, the direction it is headed in is toward smaller, mostly less-advanced, more independent, economies. This change is also likely to lead to various types of financial collapse for many of today’s Advanced Economies.
Per-capita consumption of these early used energy sources has shrunk since peaking in 2007.
Most of us remember the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. With a declining supply of what used to be inexpensive energy resources, many economies have done poorly. Many of the wealthier countries have papered over their problems with an increasing amount of debt, but the limits to this added-debt approach are now being hit. It is the debt problem that leads to financial collapse.
In this post, I will elaborate on these ideas.
[1] Countries that are today’s Advanced Economies (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)) are likely to fare poorly in this coming contraction.
The Advanced Economies include the US, most of Europe, Japan, Australia, and a few other countries. Their per-capita consumption of oil, coal and nuclear electricity resources has been shrinking significantly since about 2005. The year 2005 was approximately the peak of “conventional” oil supplies. More oil has become available since this date, but this oil is generally more expensive to extract.
[2] Energy consumption for the Other than Advanced Economies is hitting limits, too.
The Other than Advanced Economies were able to grow in their per-capita use of these three types of fuels between 2001 and about 2013, but since then, their per-capita quantity of these fuels has leveled off. The big impetus for growth was China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. World demand for inexpensive finished goods empowered China to start extracting coal and other minerals in quantity. But coal mines deplete, just as oil fields deplete, leading to the flat per-capita availability of energy supply for the Other than Advanced Economies since about 2013.
[3] With these changing patterns for the two groups, one potential problem is conflict.
The Other than Advanced Economies have figured out that they are creating a huge share of the world’s goods, but their per-capita use of energy is much lower than that of the Advanced Economies. Why should the Advanced Economies get so much of the finished products available from the world’s resources, when most of the work (and the pollution) has taken place in the Other than Advanced Economies? I would expect this type of thinking to take place in China, Russia, India, Iran and other countries in this group. These countries believe that they could get along perfectly well without the Advanced Economies and their high usage of energy.
[4] With these changing patterns, a second potential problem is financial collapse, especially for the Advanced Economies.
Each economy can be encouraged to grow in two different ways: (1) Through more debt, indirectly adding to more “demand” for finished goods, or (2) Through added supply of inexpensive energy products. Adding debt to pull the economy forward seems to work well if there is not a problem with hitting resource extraction limits. Once an economy starts hitting resource extraction limits, however, the added debt partly adds inflation, rather than finished goods and services, to the output mix. Thus, the debt approach no longer works well.
The world as a whole is now hitting resource extraction limits. Not only do individual citizens become unhappy with the higher inflation level, but investors demand higher interest rates for lending. This higher interest cost becomes a huge problem for the Advanced Economies that already have very high debt levels.
A recently issued report by the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows what is happening in the US.
In a sense, the reports that the CBO publishes are “Best Case” scenarios. The reports are optimistic in two different ways: (1) They assume that no more added-debt bail-out programs will be needed, as were used several times in recent years, and (2) They assume that inflation will quickly fall to 2%, so that interest rates can fall quickly and stay lower from now on.
Even with these assumptions, the results are disturbing. Note that on Figure 3 (in both charts shown), the especially significant increase in debt starts around 2008. This is when the US, and likely most of the other Advanced Economies, started to hide their energy problems by using more debt stimulus.
Even when the most optimistic possible estimate of the future “primary deficit” is made, and when the most optimistic possible forecast of future “net interest” outlays is made, there is still a huge build-up of debt. The implication is that very large tax increases will be needed to maintain current programs. Even with these huge tax increases, the problem will get worse and worse, year after year. There is a need to cut back on existing government programs to avoid adding the need to pay even more interest on debt in the future.
[5] If an economy is forced to shrink back, debts of all kinds become more difficult to repay with interest.
Any economy needs to grow, in order to repay debt with interest. A growing economy has a surplus with which to pay interest.
On the other hand, a shrinking economy tends to lead to major debt defaults. Leveraged debt is especially likely to cause problems.
The CBO is now forecasting that the US government could run into debt limit problems as soon as July 2025. Perhaps the US government will find ways around the current apparent shortfall, but the issue of the government not being able to meet its debt obligations without major tax increases or reductions in programs still looms in the background.
I expect that within the next three months, we will start to see loan defaults of some type, such as defaults by hedge funds. Governments will want to step in, but they will be limited by their own financial problems. Defaults on many other kinds of debts are likely to start taking place, as well. If inflation rates rise, and interest rates rise with them, defaults on many kinds of debt could start taking place.
[6] It seems likely that nearly all the Advanced Economies will have similar problems.
The Advanced Economies have tended to offer their citizens many benefits, including pensions for the elderly and some type of healthcare coverage. Many of them have financially supported what they are hoping will be energy types that will take the place of the energy types they seem to be losing.
If an economic system is not growing as fast as it has in the past (because of low energy consumption growth, and lack of debt stimulus), or is actually shrinking, these economies are likely to face a choice between either cutting back on promised programs or raising taxes. Governments will find themselves needing to cut back on programs that they have promised to their citizens, or, alternatively, they will need to default on their debt.
[7] Adding to the problems of the Advanced Economies will be the issue of goods and services needing to be made closer to home.
Without enough oil for all purposes, a logical way to cut back is to use less oil for international shipping. This would tend to reverse the trend toward globalization that started many years ago.
Figure 4 shows that the US started shifting heavy industry to other countries with better supplies of oil as early as 1974. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 gave another reason (or excuse?) for shifting heavy industry to countries with less expensive, more abundant, energy supplies.
I expect that in the next few years, the Advanced Economies are likely to need to move industrial production back closer to home, to save on limited world oil supplies. This will be difficult to do, especially in a timeframe of less than 20 to 30 years. New mines will be needed for minerals, but the lead times on these are very long, typically 13 years or more. New processing plants for these minerals will likely be needed as well, potentially adding to the lead time. Whole new, short supply chains will be required. Finally, goods and services manufactured closer to home will need to be transported to citizens, sometimes in new ways.
Many of today’s manufactured goods require imports of minerals from China or Russia. To the extent that specific minerals from these countries can no longer be imported, additional closer sources will be needed. This will further add to manufacturing difficulties.
[8] It will not be surprising if governments, or parts of governments, collapse.
History indicates that when civilizations reach resource limits, governments tend to fail. A recent example of this was the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991, after an extended period of low oil prices. The Soviet Union was a major exporter of oil, and the low oil prices (plus other internal problems) led to the inability to repay promised debt. The separate republics within the Soviet Union remained, so the people were not left completely without a government. I expect something similar may happen elsewhere in the future.
[9] History suggests that even in a financial collapse, the entire economy will not fall apart, all at once.
Incremental changes are likely to take place. Governments are likely to try to make cutbacks. Financial investments are likely to do especially poorly in the next several years, and high-paying jobs seem likely to disproportionately disappear. The economy will no longer be able support as many specialists as are working today, in many industries.
The electricity supply likely won’t fall off all at once; instead, electricity will become increasingly intermittent, with some areas having more outages than others. Diesel and gasoline will perhaps be available, at least part of the time.
New car sales in the Advanced Economies are likely to fall very soon, leaving citizens mostly dealing with used cars, and the difficulty of finding appropriate replacement parts for used cars. The problem of “empty shelves” in stores is likely to return and get worse.
There will likely be an increasing divide between the relative handful of citizens who are doing well, and the many others. In fact, we are already seeing a trend in this direction in the US. But many of today’s big spenders are likely to be knocked down in any coming economic contraction.
[10] Perhaps the good news in this contraction is that major international wars may not be a problem.
Instead, civil wars and local skirmishes may be the order of the day. There may not be resources available to fight long-distance wars, even if many citizens might favor this approach. Wars give an excuse for more debt and more income for soldiers, so they are always popular in troubled economic times. But a lack of materials for making military supplies (including insufficient sources of antimony) and the inability to raise debt financing may impede efforts.
[11] What should we expect in the future?
The US and many other Advanced Economies are likely heading into a worse and longer lasting financial crisis than the 2008 crisis, starting as soon as this summer. The problem will likely not start out as a full financial collapse. Instead, various leveraged borrowers will encounter difficulties. Gradually, the finances and very structures of many government organizations are likely to be threatened. Some government structures that we currently depend upon may disappear.
How the long term will unfold is unclear. We know that ecosystems often operate in wide cycles, and that economic systems are a kind of ecosystem. This relationship suggests the possibility of a later renewal.
Furthermore, Eric Chaisson, in Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, points out that there is a very long term trend in the universe toward more complex and more energy-dense structures. His analysis seems to suggest the possibility of evolution toward a different kind of more complex, energy-dense economy ahead.
In this ever-changing world, there may very well be opportunities for personal success. It will likely be a time of major readjustment, however. Perhaps quite a few people will be able to do well if they can keep their eyes open for opportunities to prosper, making the best possible use (or reuse) of resources that are available.
Appendix: Background on Oil, Coal and Electricity from Uranium
Oil Background
Oil was at one time a very inexpensive fuel, even when adjusted for inflation to 2023’s price level.
With the low prices that were available before 1970, oil could be used widely. It could be used to create electricity, and roads could be paved. Many people could afford cars who could not afford them previously.
In 1973, oil prices soared (Appendix: Exhibit 2). Appendix: Figure 3 shows that between 1981 and 2021, falling interest rates helped to make higher oil prices more tolerable. More debt could be added, and with lower interest rates, monthly payments could stay low.
Appendix: Exhibit 2 also shows that a big part of the problem since 2021 is that while debt levels are now high, interest rates will not stay down. This means that the cost of drilling new wells is now higher, and the general cost of investment in the economy is higher.
Appendix: Exhibit 1, indicates that, since 1991, the greatest per-capita quantity of oil that customers were able to afford occurred in the 2004 to 2007 period. This was a time in which home mortgage debt stimulus was used to keep the US economy growing; it was the time of Alan Greenspan and the NINJA (No Income, No Jobs, No Assets) home loans. The resulting sub-prime US housing bubble is reported to have lasted from 2003 to 2007. This sub-prime debt bubble is at least part of what led to the 2008 financial crisis.
The high US demand for oil as a result of the home mortgage debt bubble of 2003 to 2007 helped world oil prices to rise and consumption to rise. More recently, per-capita world oil consumption has been down, especially in 2020. Oil supply has not regained the 2004 to 2007 level, or even the 2018 level, in the most recent estimates.
Oil extraction has traditionally been a huge source of tax dollars, especially for oil exporters, even when oil was sold at relatively low prices. Anything that replaces oil needs to fill this role as well, because the economy needs energy (and taxes from energy) to operate. This tax revenue is a way to share what is sometimes called the “surplus energy” of the oil with the government of a country. At currently high extraction costs, this surplus energy benefit is largely disappearing.
Coal Background
Appendix: Figure 1 shows that the fuel in second largest supply has been coal. Its supply grew greatly after 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization. This growth in coal supply did not last long because coal that was cheapest-to-extract and closest-to-markets quickly depleted. Appendix: Figure 1 shows the peak in per capita coal supply was hit in 2011.
Coal helped start the industrial revolution. By 1700, it grew to be the dominant fuel in England. Coal gradually replaced firewood and was used in many new ways.
Appendix: Figure 5 shows the ways coal has recently been used. It is used directly in industry, besides being burned for electricity.
Nuclear Background
Appendix: Figure 1 shows that the peak in per-capita nuclear energy production occurred in 2001. But at one time there had been great hope for nuclear power.
It was known as early as the 1950s that fossil fuel supplies were likely to face depletion issues as soon as 2050. Physicist M. King Hubbert was of the belief that electricity from uranium would be too cheap to meter. He also believed that the quantity of electricity produced could be very high. Neither of these things has come to pass.
Early nuclear reactors were built to avoid problems that engineers could see needed to be avoided. This approach led to accidents: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). It became clear that design upgrades were needed, raising costs and lengthening timelines for building reactors.
In theory, there is quite a bit of uranium to be extracted, but getting the price up high enough, for long enough, has been a problem. The World Nuclear Association shows this chart of production through 2022. Production in recent years has been lower than consumption.
Fortunately, there has been a supply of nuclear warheads which could be down blended to provide uranium for nuclear reactors. This supply of nuclear warheads is now close to being exhausted. If nuclear power is to be expanded, more uranium will be needed.
Other details have proven problematic as well. In theory, the spent fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for reactors, but in practice, this process seems to be costly and time-consuming to set up.
Another issue is the high cost of building new nuclear reactors, and the need for debt to fund this cost. Clearly, the higher the interest rate, the higher the cost. Not many organizations can fund these high costs, in advance of actually getting electricity out and delivered to customers.
In general, to keep costs low for customers, the sale of electricity is priced at the margin. In many places, electricity from wind turbines and solar panels is given “priority.” As a result, wholesale electricity prices tend to be too low for electricity from nuclear power plants, driving them out of business. The price level is certainly not high enough to pay high taxes to governments. Such a margin would be needed if nuclear were to have a chance of truly replacing the benefits we have had in the past from inexpensive-to-produce oil.
France and the UK think they can beat Russia. In this 16 min video, London based Alexander Mercouris calls it madness and says both Macron and Starmer are dead serious about taking Odessa and other Russian occupied territories. They think they can beat Russia with their Armies.
It is strange how France and the UK think that they can beat Russia. They haven’t been doing very well so far, even with the aid of the US.
From Zerohedge – Released on Good Friday
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/lab-leak-white-house-unveils-massive-report-true-origins-covid-19
and much more.
Limited hangout?
Yes
you bet. and it is possible, even likely, that the provenience is also wrong. It could as well be Maryland. But now everything is in place for an “accident” narrative, when in fact it was spread intentionally and was a major operation which involved distribution, pushing of respirators to increase mortality, and extreme censorship and propaganda.
https://usawatchdog.com/white-fibrous-clots-from-cv19-vax-contagious-tom-haviland/
“white clot” is an oxymoron. Blood clots are red-black. They are not clots. They are fibrous however because the main building block is fibrin, which is white. They are not contagious because there are probably no prions. If he wants to claim prions he needs to identify prions en masse. Prions btw are not contagious besides, they’re a biological dynamic.
What these are are tumors in the blood. The last place that tumors are meant to be found. If it looks like a duck it probably is. Tumors are fibrin structures with cholesterol compartments for the last resort sequestration and stabilization of dangerously reactive fat-soluble carcinogens. The LNPs in the vaxxes are super nasty and hyper reactive fat-soluble carcinogens.
The tumors are probably being mistaken for being infectious because tumors produce and release tons of two classes of signaling exosomes. One type calls to the body for more fibrin (building material) and the other tells the inflammatory complex (the ‘immune system’) to stand down in attacking it; together they create the microenvironment conditions for more tumor growth as necessary which looks like ‘infectiousness’ to the unaware.
Let us all here not to forget to pay homage to the now in self imposed exile by crying out..
“FAST EDDIE WAS RIGHT!!!”
Please, oh great one, show mercy and forgiveness to all those that doubted your wisdom and perfection…we all are waiting to die for our short coming
Happy Easter
shortcomings (and similar obsessions) were eddies main problem…..
he insisted on telling everybody that…..
i constantly advised him to desist…that we didn’t need to know….
he was too dim to realise that that was what he was telling about himself…..
Ahh, always have one Debbie Downer in the crowd.
ALL HAIL FAST EDDIE, THE NOBLE ONE, MAGNIFICENCE IN RADIANCE..
Norm, we get it, really we do…
Now what about China?
Chinese factories build fire trucks for $400,000 in six weeks. In the US it’s $2 million in 4 years
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78nZ-JJNmzQ
Costs for fire trucks of all types have soared, along with delivery times. Ladder trucks, for example, jumped from $1.3 million to $2.3 million in just two years. Cities typically wait over four years to receive their rigs, after placing deposits for them.
Firms also cut back on supply of replacement parts, and as a result hundreds of trucks across the United States are out of commission, awaiting parts that do not arrive for months.
These were contributing factors in the Pacific Palisades fires, which ravaged Los Angeles and caused over $52 billion in damages.
Sure thing, made in USA..MAGA
Decades ago a WSJ article I remember featured a owner of a manufacturing plant wanting to stay in the USA. His consultant cost accountant said it was not possible….the Chinese would undercut him and bankrupt him…
Sure, Tiger Blood, we’re winning
we wanted high wages and cheap goods
china eagerly supplied the cheap goods because they paid low wages……
that worked for a few years……and all was rejoicing in the land of trump……
but if you pay wages 5x that of your supplier, then that supplier is going to take all the manufacturing jobs
hmmmm
////Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments////
i seem to recall someone suggesting injecting bleach to cure covid.
now we have another idiot recommending cod liver oil to cure measles
“Is the US dollar at risk of a ‘confidence crisis’?
“Fears about unpredictable policy are prompting investors to question their faith in the US dollar.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/19/is-the-us-dollar-at-risk-of-a-confidence-crisis
Aljazeera is more willing to say something like this than, say, the WSJ, New York Times, or Washington Post. The whole idea of investors losing confidence in the dollar is a scary thing to say.
HHH
“When these banks become risk averse. And decide not to lend. Well there just isn’t enough dollars to go around.
Then sh&t really really starts breaking. And the dollar spikes.”?
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-10-2025/#comment-787794
This comment starts out:
It ends:
I would add that the expanding energy supply is what allows a growing supply of goods and services to be made. Without these, debt cannot be repaid with interest.
“As the dollar supply shrinks so will the price gold and bitcoin. Which will decrease their purchasing power.”
Nicole Foss always insisted that the gold price would indeed decline during deflation but less so than the nominal decline in the price of goods and services; therefore gold’s purchasing power would increase despite its nominal decline. I believe that she is correct and clearly so do the central banks of the world.
There will be less stuff to buy, as time goes on, but the supply of gold will stay constant, or increase. There will be a problem with inflation of the amount of gold required to purchase anything.
Yeah great follow-on point Gail. After dollar deflation comes dollar hyperinflation during which gold hyperinflates but just not as much as the dollar, the mirror image of the gold-dollar relationship during deflation.
Deflationary spiral kills money supply faster than dead money supply kills production, hence the increased increased purchasing powers of the dollar and gold. When deflation bottoms out industrial production has collapsed and money printing without the debt-servicing overhang chases too few goods resulting in hyperinflation of the dollar and high inflation of gold too but to what degree seems hard to say. Ultimately depends on how much oil is still coming out of the ground by then I figure.
The other thing I could point out is that energy supplies drop, there are fewer and fewer goods and services apart from food available. Among other things, there will be less government available to impose its will on citizens. Also, any reasonable government would make certain that those people who grow and transport food will be fed first, if there is not enough to go around. Investors, especially in enterprises other than food supply, will be left out. Elderly who are no longer working will be left out, unless their families are well enough off financially to provide for them as well. Infrastructure will fall apart in not many years, so energy-powered vehicles will be of less and less use, over time. Those who are well off now may find that the pixels on their bank accounts are ultimately of little value.
my question to AI
“given the rising rate of autism project when 100% of the population will be autistic”
Grok answers 2070, with about 60 pages of supporting reasoning.
Perplexity evades saying there is no scientific theory to make such a project.
Russia announces one sided Easter ceasefire . Trump is bailing out .
https://www.moonofalabama.org/
Is the failure an excuse for Trump to bail out .?
.. DEVELOPING: Ukraine has refused to agree to a ceasefire for Easter, despite Russian President Putin’s call for a truce starting at 6 PM tonight.”
https://x.com/ElectionWiz/status/1913606465169854687/photo/1
Sounds like more of the same that we have been seeing before. If Trump can stop giving more money, more weapons, and more soldiers, that would be good.
Electric Semi-Truck Infrastructure Costs
– Charging Stations: Installing high-powered chargers costs $50,000–$250,000 per unit, depending on location and power capacity.
– Grid Upgrades: Fleet operators may need $500,000–$1 million in electrical upgrades to support multiple chargers.
– Battery Replacement: While electric trucks have lower maintenance costs, battery replacements can cost $100,000–$200,000 over their lifespan.
Diesel Truck Infrastructure Costs
– Fueling Stations: Diesel fueling infrastructure is well-established, with station installation costs ranging from $250,000–$500,000.
– Maintenance Facilities: Diesel trucks require specialized maintenance shops, costing $100,000–$500,000 to set up.
– Fuel Storage: Large fleets need underground diesel tanks, costing $500,000+ for installation and compliance.
Summary:
Electric Semi-Truck Total Cost per Mile
– Base Operating Cost: $0.80–$1.10 per mile (electricity, maintenance, depreciation)
– Infrastructure Cost per Mile: $0.05–$0.10 per mile (charging stations, grid upgrades)
– Total Cost per Mile: $0.85–$1.20 per mile
Diesel Semi-Truck Total Cost per Mile
– Base Operating Cost: $1.73 per mile (fuel, maintenance, depreciation)
– Infrastructure Cost per Mile: $0.02–$0.05 per mile (fueling stations, maintenance shops)
– Total Cost per Mile: $1.75–$1.78 per mile
Charge with solar, moving storage. One step at a time.
Credit to Copilot for above, direct copy.
Dennis L.
Same fallacy the 3rd reich leaders had on their supposed wunderwaffen
It all looked good on paper. In practice it did not work as advertised
And it did not help that the allies bombed the hell out of the Reich.
Same thing. It does not help that the mostly Asian techies actually working on these send the tech to China and India
Battery technology isnt ready for Electric Trucks. When one of these inevitably burns down near a populated area, there will be hell to pay. They are the most toxic of fires.
Charging stations will require their own gas powered turbines, if the driver doesn’t want to wait around for several hours. Charging stations for multiple trucks will be very expensive to build in order to be reasonably beneficial.
If you have to climb a mountain, electric does not work. Carrying the weight of the batteries along with the cargo will empty the battery pack in no time. Cold batteries are hard or impossible to charge.
Driving over 80km/hr means high wind resistance, also takes a toll on the maximum distance possible.
Battery powered trucks work nicely in town, but long haul is so far away from realistic that its still a dream.
It is futile to convince a true believer who really believes hus delusions.
Dennis, have you ever come across a working diesel bowser by itself in the middle of nowhere?
That’s what the cost of your ‘charging station’ is the equivalent of. I’d expect because of the high amount of copper in the charging infrastructure, that they would have to be in some type of ‘station’ just like diesel bowsers, and hence cost a lot more than Copilot mentions.
Also why no cost for the building of all the solar and batteries required to hold enough MWhs for when the weather is cloudy, night or winter?? Diesel has been available at all these times, even though it’s leaving us.
The entire problem is that the electrical system envisaged by cornucopians and A.I. is way less efficient than our current system, which means it’s the opposite direction we’ve been heading for 300 years if not 10,000 years.
Less efficient doesn’t work in gathering of lower quality ores of all types that enable our complex civilization to exist..
Your concept of the Hydrogen economy still hasn’t worked out where we get the Molybdenum from, which is mined in the parts per million range from mostly copper porphyry mines but used in the 2-5% (20,000-50,000ppm) range in stainless steel pipes to contain hydrogen and reduce embrittlement of the pipes….
Every one of the cornucopian plans for the future is way more complex than thought, which means a growth in our human civilization to accommodate the increased complexity, plus a growth in the materials and energy use to get there, which can’t physically happen in a world of less minerals, metals and energy coming very, very soon…
He lets his delusion go over any kind of common sense or reality.
Per this site, diesel is leaving us; your bowser already has a depreciation rate greater than assumed in financial statements.
There is “bootstrapping.” H used locally may have merits which avoid some of your issues, Cu for example. A man has built a H house and claims it is self sufficient with solar photovoltaics as the source of electricity. His storage looks sketchy, but such is life. Processes on earth which can use interruptible or stored energy are tackled first.
Battery packs can be made to be switched, that is current technology in the forklift business. One harvests and grows crops at maximum insolation. Can that photovoltaic energy also be harvested locally?. Is optimum insolation for solar at the same season as plants grow?
Solar can currently be purchased for $.07 per watt and has a 33% tax credit. Use it locally, store the energy directly in machines, in batteries. Elon has a new battery out, sooner or later it will be on the market. The panels are in China, ship a container full, maybe get the container as a bonus.
All of this takes some optimism there will be a tomorrow. We get one life, we have to plan for tomorrow, adapt to today and learn from yesterday.
Per this site, the diesel age is so yesterday, tomorrow is coming.
Dennis L.
Operating cost difference between diesel and electric semi tractors.
Per Copilot:
“For an autonomous electric semi-truck, the cost per mile is significantly lower than traditional diesel trucks. Here’s a breakdown:
– Electricity Cost: Estimated at $0.20–$0.30 per mile, depending on charging rates and efficiency.
– Maintenance: Lower than diesel, averaging $0.07 per mile, due to fewer moving parts.
– Autonomous Operation: Eliminates driver wages, saving $0.36 per mile.
– Total Cost Per Mile: Around $0.80–$1.10, compared to $1.73 per mile for diesel.
Tesla’s Semi, for example, is expected to save up to $150,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over three years. ”
Dennis L.
Maintenance: Lower than diesel, averaging $0.07 per mile, due to fewer moving parts.
Isn’t there also a damageability and possible shorter lifetime of the truck issue, also?
Batteries are very easily damageable. We know from auto collisions that insurance cost for EVs tend to be high. Part of this is replacing batteries that might have been damaged. Our course, if a semi truck hits a car, the semi-truck is enough bigger and heavier that it wins.
Also, the fact that charging is not yet available, and will likely never be available, to service these semi-trucks is an issue. If electricity charging is available, it likely will need to be manned. Perhaps these semi-trucks can be used only for short distance travel, in a hub and spoke arrangement from the place these semi-trucks are garaged.
Simply having enough electricity to charge any significant number of semi-trucks is likely to be a problem. We cannot ramp up electricity production with any fuel we have, very well.
This analysis should consider depreciation, including amortizing the initial cost. These likely will be bought with debt. How high an interest rate will be required? If the debt is to be repaid with interest, how high a charge per mile will be needed, to pay back the loan and make a profit for the owner? Isn’t the interest rate pretty important?
Will the semi-trucks be able to carry the same amount, or will considerable space be lost to the batteries? If they cannot carry the same amount, this is another issue.
How heavy will the batteries be? Will this subtract from the weight the semi-truck can carry? Again, this needs to be considered.
Tesla Semi: Uses 1.7 kWh per mile, with electricity costing around $0.10 per kWh. That means the cost per mile is $0.17. Given its cargo capacity of 44,000 lbs, the cost per cargo mile is $0.00000386 per pound.
Diesel Semi: Averages 6-10 mpg, with diesel priced at $5.50 per gallon. At 8 mpg, the cost per mile is $0.69. With a cargo capacity of 40,000-54,000 lbs, the cost per cargo mile is $0.0000125 per pound (assuming 40,000 lbs).
Insurance costs per mile can vary significantly based on factors like driving history, location, and vehicle type. For human drivers, pay-per-mile insurance typically includes a base rate plus a per-mile charge, with costs ranging from $57 to $139 per month.
For autonomous systems like Optimus-3, insurance pricing is still evolving. While self-driving technology could reduce accident rates, insurers may charge higher premiums due to liability concerns and repair costs. Some estimates suggest that autonomous vehicle insurance could be 20-30% lower than human-driven policies, but exact figures depend on regulatory developments and real-world performance.”
Unless you use modern DEF diesels perhaps you don’t understand the level of maintenance necessary to keep them working. DEF freezes at 12 degrees F, it expands 7%, think tubing with DEF in it. So, the solution is simple, allow engine to run continually even when not under load, or store in a heated space. And cost, oh yes, it costs, and down time is time lost; if the load is perishable, send another tractor, tow the down tractor to a heated garage, make that $3-$10/mile. When you get there, a mechanic is needed, think over time, the big clock.
Smaller Battery Packs with Electrified Highways: Some studies suggest that electrified highways could allow trucks to operate with smaller battery packs, reducing weight and cost while maintaining long-distance capability.
One could go the old fashion way, local, steam heated greenhouses heated by coal moved by train which has a coal steam engine. But wait, there is no coal. Is the sun shining?
Earlier I showed the bpy per capita in the US had gone down. So something has to change, I see solar electric and probably standardized battery packs changed every 400 miles or so which is about 8 hours road time, drive at night.
I could not find the cost per gallon of JP-5 to have the US Navy maintain freedom of navigation. Someone here might want to calculate that, even doing estimates of the amount of JP5 used per day would be a start. Non nuclear ships have turbines which burn JP-5, that is more expensive than diesel; it simplifies fuel handling, modern fighters probably don’t like even the best diesel.
I appreciate all the negativity, that rules out what cannot be done. We are going to have to adjust, or maybe better to say we will be adjusted. Tomorrow is going to be different from today. Some of us do look forward and adjust. It is going to be bumpy.
Dennis L.
No. We won’t adjust because we cannot.
Some of you prefer to remain in your delusions since reality is harsh.
As the Turks crashed into the walls of Constantinople some people hid in the Haghia Sophia. Believing God would send the angels to stop the Turks.
You are like one of them.
The Turks broke into Hagia Sophia. Captured and enslaved everyone there. And God, even now, doesn’t seem to be too interested on reclaiming Hagia sophia, which Erdogan made back into a Mosque.
Perhaps the electric semis will work in a hub and spoke arrangement in a relatively flat area, for some short haul assignments. With that arrangement, it might be possible to save the diesel for more strenuous needs.
In no way trying to be negative nor a know it all, but electric semis will beat a diesel due to properties of electric motors.
“For example, Tesla’s electric semi can handle grades of up to 5% at highway speeds (65 mph), thanks to its multiple motors that adjust torque dynamically. Additionally, electric semis benefit from regenerative braking, which helps recapture energy when going downhill, improving efficiency and reducing wear on brakes.” Copilot again.
This may be part but not all of the tire problem with Tesla’s, the damn things go like snot from the standing start.
My Camray Hybrid has no problem doing 100 mph going up hill although the battery shows it is draining, bummer.
Dennis L.
Copilot has never serviced a machine
Again it is like shooting at the hip
Denise , request please stop with BS . Fooking Tesla is facing bankruptcy and along with it the Musk bubble . Get your head out of your a88 . I am civil all the times but now your fantasies are getting on my nerves and also on the others who have to spend time to counter your BS .
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/04/17/oh-elon-tesla-crushed-further-in-california-in-q1-non-tesla-ev-sales-soar-cybertruck-joining-failed-models-of-automotive-history/
Ravi,
I was there when the end of oil was predicted in the early seventies, there when mass starvation was predicted in 1969, but by well respected groups or individuals.
Tesla bankrupt? My guess is it is a strong long, that means going up.
You are looking at cars, trucks. I see AI and self driving taxis.
If you see my name, simply skip it.
Dennis L.
I won’t, for the newbies who do not know the messages you are trying to spread.
It is very easy to make too simple a model of the future. The world economy has held together since I first got involved with peak oil in 2005. It was hard for me to believe that it would last this long.
The models of economists have all proved wrong as well. They keep assuming that shortages will lead to very high prices, but this isn’t the case.
History says spiking prices are what we get. The system keeps readjusting in ways we wouldn’t imagine.
Dennis, fuck Copilot. No, really, fuck it and the horse it rode in on.
Well, if it is a sure thing puts are the game. An in the money put at $242.5 can be had for say $13. Call your broker, put yourself down for say 1000 shares and be one of those who bets against Musk. Frankly, I don’t think that is a good side of a trade to take, but your milage may vary.
Dennis L.
While I don’t always agree with Dennis I do appreciate and expect him to question my reality. Gail was talking utter collapse as early as 2017(Maybe even Earlier) and if one followed her prediction then they might have jumped off the cliff too early. She has been fairly accurate so far but timeline is what she will be first to admit that she does not know.
You can always skip the comments if you feel that they bother you that much.
No. Some commenters did. Gail was always a bit moderate.
My intention is to warn others who might find such musings interesting. This is not a blog to talk about nonexistant gizmos. He can make his own blog and talk about his delusions there and i am perfectly ok with it.
Tesla will pivot to robots and become the most valuable company on the planet by 2045.
your ‘value’ as a worker derives from the fact that you not only ‘produce’ stuff…..
but that you ‘buy’ stuff as well.
unfortunately robots only produce stuff…
they never buy anything…..
which is why an economic system entirely underpinned by robots cannot function
Good point!
Hmm, tough questions.
Economics does not appear to exist without biology, but the universe is not economics. We are moving to understand better and apply those lessons of the universe to our lives.
“which is why an economic system entirely underpinned by robots cannot function.”
Norm, of course, economics is biology, this is beyond biology and economic rules(whatever they are) do not apply. New game, new rules.
Dennis L.
dennis
a herd of cattle is biology, a hive of bees is biology….
but neither of them is dependent on economics.
economics is entirely the construct of humankind
Yes, seems likely. TSLA is not a bad bet, everyone, well most are looking at the cars and not the AI and manufacturing process behind those cars.
Life is a bootstrap.
Dennis L.
AI is not good for finding new things, despite of the claims of some cornucopians.
However, AI is quite good at maintaining what is already there.
It will be used to track inventory usage, material usage, etc.
It will also be used to keep resources out of peoples not ‘worthy’ enough to use them.
Any resistance will be crushed with the utmost brutality.
A lot of people misunderstand AI. It is not a key to the future but it is a good key to maintain what we have now.
AI can maintain nothing unless it has an energy source……
that source is us…..
if we go down, or even regress from our current level of existence….AI ceases to be…
unless you are addicted to repeats of Terminator…
how hard can it be to understand this???
Good point.
Let’s hope this thing never goes rouge.
“‘Cyborg 1.0’: World’s First Robocop Debuts With Facial Recognition And 360° Camera Vision”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cyborg-10-worlds-first-robocop-debuts-facial-recognition-and-360deg-camera-vision
From the article:
Maybe these robotic substitutes for policemen are not terribly far off.
I am not happy with the last sentence. Were one to have a surplus of robots, could come down to my robot can beat your robot.
I like the future, I like technology, but there are darker sides which should be thought through.
Dennis L.
I wonder if my 50 BMG Barret 82A1 can take them out, especially firing my pre-1984 legal black tip AP rounds.
Is Jesus coming back?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MjIdV-DIam4&pp=ygURU2FtIGtpbmlzb24gamVzdXM%3D
Hope this doesn’t offend anyone. Sam was raised in a Christian household and his father was a Minister and Sam himself preached the good word/book before doing standup.
At the scene of his car accident it is reported he talked to a Spirit…IT IS TIME…SAM OK THEN
Happy Easter..
Perhaps what is being pointed out in the book of Revelation and elsewhere is Overshoot and Collapse. It is taking 2000+ years for this to happen on a worldwide basis. The fact that it is taking this long seems strange, but it is true.
Yep, revelations was written, by the Pharisaic culture, on the heels of three regional civilizational collapses, and as a future psyop for helping to better control, with the Christian religion, the next collapse, whenever it was that it might come. And it came in the 5th century. And it’s come again. Rinse and repeat, while always aiming to improve the rinsing and repeating. They got themselves a printing press this time around. And video screens.
Ukraine – Russia
“West lost proxy war to Russia – Orban. EU states are “hesitant to admit” failure in Ukraine, while the US is in a better position due to Donald Trump’s policies, the Hungarian PM has said”.
“According to the Hungarian prime minister, the West has lost but “European leaders are hesitant to admit” failure. He argued that this outcome will have a big impact on the entire West, as “losing a war is a serious thing.”
“Orban went on to say that European leaders are “offering Ukraine to continue the war and in return receive European Union membership.” He argued that this would be problematic as Ukraine is no longer sovereign and cannot support itself.”
“Regarding the US, the Hungarian prime minister said Washington is in a better position thanks to President Donald Trump’s approach, having broken with the Ukraine policies pursued by his predecessor, Joe Biden.”
https://www.rt.com/news/615968-orban-west-lost-proxy-war-russia-ukraine/
I wonder when EU citizens will realize that they are going to lose their benefits also due to this financial black hole, expecially now that the economic forecast is negative.
P.s. this is not in the article, as it is not between inverted commas 🙂
Preparing the public .
https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-wants-to-count-investments-in-roads-bridges-as-defense-spending/
That would be an easy way out. one can certainly spend 5% of GDP in infrastructure.
They are losing their pensions secondary to falling replacement rate, Germany currently 1.54 per year. Germany has had more deaths than births since 1972.
Economics is a biologic phenomenon of sentient beings. It does not exist elsewhere in the known universe.
Looking at Copilot, Orthodox Jews have a positive replacement rate per Copilot.
Economics seems to lead to its own biological downfall and extinction. Odd. More is less in this case.
Amish have Sunday’s off, Orthodox have sabbath off. Coincidence?
Dennis L.
The US lost after 20 years in Afghanistan. The US lost after 20 years in Viet Nam. The newspapers here will gloss over the “lost” issue.
Did anyone really win? I don’t understand this win loss mentality. In the past there was a win loss now there is neither because of diminishing returns of energy…there was a lot of wasted energy on this war that will never be recovered.
Gosh I just read what I wrote! Let me add there was a lot of wasted lives on this war as well. Losing the younger generation in favor of the older generation is not a “Win”….
Speaking of Jesus, there is a children’s movie called the King of Kings.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7967302/
Based upon Charles Dicken’ story of Jesus, this movie features the voices of people below
Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens
Uma Thurman as Catherine Dickens
Mark Hamill as King Herod
Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate
Roman Griffin Davis as Walter Dickens
Forest Whitaker as Peter
Ben Kingsley as High Priest Caiaphas
Oscar Isaac as Jesus Christ
Ava Sanger as Mary Dickens
However its director and producer is a Jang Seong-ho, who does not sound like a Brit.
Obviously Mr. Jang does not know jack shit about Dickens. By that time Dickens was living with the actress Ellen Ternan and hardly had any time with his family.
Three of his children are featured – Walter, Mary and Kate.
Walter became a soldier, accumulated a huge debt while stationed in India, and died under bizarre circumstances at the age of 23.
Mary , who never married, was a heavy alcoholic.
Kate, who married Charles Collins, the brother of Wilkie Collins (who wrote the Woman in White and a friend of Dickens), began having affairs with an Italian artist named Perugini, Charles Collins probably being a homosexual.
So all the Dickens lived lives far from what the Bible was teaching back then.
If Mr. Jang bothered to check their wikipedias he probably would not have made this piece of shit being splattered to the Dickens family.
Again, if Chucky and the 200/400 Worcestershires didn’t do ‘their duty’, a Korean would not be mocking Dickens that hard; first, there would be no Korea to begin with (Korea was annexed to Japan in 1910, which USA foolishly liberated in 1945 and got a war for that useless piece of land in 1950 for its pains), and since the West would be so dominant that a Korean would not even be dreaming of doing something like this, especially when it is clear that Mr. Jang does not know anything about the Dickens at all.
woah. The English were deviant trash already 150 years ago.
Dickens saw all the good and bad of the lower classes and so when he had money he learned the good and bad of the upper class, as described in Little Dorrit, a seldom read masterpiece which nevertheless made the Great Books of Western World list from Britannica.
So he just followed the practice of the day.
“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe–until recently–have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning…I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
― T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)
Was T.S. substantially correct? Is Europe in 2025 an experiment in making Christianity disappear and seeing what happens?
Happy Easter everyone!
>Was T.S. substantially correct? Is Europe in 2025 an experiment in making Christianity disappear and seeing what happens?
You mean this hasn’t already happened?
At the heart of every culture is a cult. The west dethroned Jesus, but nature abhors a vacuum, so his chair at the center was quickly filled – and not by anything good.
Uh, no. The Jesus copyright is an agrarian Hidden Hand intellectual patent that turns gentiles into submissives to the Chosen Ones who own all the money. Industrial secularism is just a more productive update to the intellectual patent whereby the Chosen Ones get industrialized people to be submissive to money-changing consumer culture. It’s just that now we’re leaving industrialism, political Conservatism and Jesus are cycling back round again back towards its agrarian roots.
Make no mistake: the center has always been filled by darkness. The blackness of the full spectrum dominance that hides the Hand Believe that.
It’s been a while since ‘the west’ was known as ‘Christendom’.
People worship something different now.
May not be atavistically referred to as Christendom but socioeconomically it’s no less a judeo christian culture than it ever was and, as MLK was right to remind us, socioeconomics is all that really matters.
I don’t think you can really have a Christian culture without Christ.
You can have something influenced by him, sure, but you cannot have Christianity without Christ.
Without him, like it or not, our culture worships something else.
Call it progress like Gail does if you like, but it could equally be called Moloch, Mammon, the Antichrist, Ahriman, the Technium, etc.
But whatever it is that’s being worshipped, it’s certainly not Christian – it’s the opposite.
Thanks Hugh appreciate the back and forth. I understand why, as a Christian, that you would see it that way. Every time someone takes out a loan in a privately owned and created currency at interest, that is a functional worshipping of the money changing culture of the Old Testament Capitalism. Every time someone draws a paycheck in a privately owned and created currency, that is functional enslavement to the same. Christ is just a vehicle for control as of course are all religious idols. The growing neotony that grows with time and civilizational complexity has become a more powerful, crossover vehicle. But the Christ vehicle is still important. Redundancies and all that.
Absolutely!
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Happy Easter to you and All too!
I think that JMG is correct in saying,
”blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world.”
With this faith, there seems to be no need for a religion. Pensions and the healthcare system will provide you, as long as you live.
Perhaps the changes we are seeing now will start some people realizing that they need some sort of religion. It may not be the current denominations, however.
It’s just the substitution of one faith for another? So really it’s no change at all. Failing reason, there always choice. Pick a card any card! Reason is the only thing that ever truly comes alongside what Creator gifted us. That intelligently coming alongside for 4B years is how we came to exist in the first place.
The US peace attempt in Ukraine has failed.
120 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt ended the Russo-Japanese war in Japan’s favor, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.
It was foolish, as the Japanese paid the Americans back by bombing Pearl Harbor 36 years later.
USA meddling with other countries’ matter usually ended up badly, since USA never really tried to understand other countries’ cultures and thought everyone was like USA.
The misguided US do-goodism tended to prefer countries which had nothing to do with advancing civilization and punish countries which tended to contribute on advancing it.
Now USA is becoming more and more irrelevant as far as the world is concerned. I think it is a good thing, as the world returns to its natural order and countries which only exist because of US recognition will disappear, as nature beats artificial rules with no basis on reality.
The US can no longer maintain its hegemony. Something has to change.
“One business owner from Qingdao, a major city in Shandong, described the situation as “dire,” and added that “If we don’t perform well here, the economy will collapse,” the businessman said, expressing frustration with the uncertainty of the future.”
https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/chinas-busiest-ports-see-a-steep-drop-in-us-bound-shipments-amid-tariff-war/
Tariff War Crushes More Chinese Factories, Rapid Decline Spreads Across Cities, Millions Unemployed
68,266 views · 5 hours ago#chinaobserver
…mor
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2PMyznDQgQ4&pp=0gcJCX4JAYcqIYzv
The US-China tariff war has affected every industry, accelerating China’s economic downturn. The bustling commercial and food streets in major cities have faded, replaced by empty shops and quiet streets. The closure of stores isn’t limited to restaurants but has spread to pharmacies, clothing stores, and other retail industries. The entire economy is struggling, and people are finding it harder to make ends meet.
Decades ago I vaguely remember watching a program on TV regarding a breakdown of trade with South Korea because of FX and featured a cottage industry where they were creating spoonware and couldn’t make a profit .
Don’t remember the details but the man was very stressed and upset
The tariffs will cause big problems at this end, too. Many goods we expect to find on the shelf won’t be there, if companies have not replaced supply lines. Replacement parts for automobiles could be a big problem, for example. Many appliances. Almost anything with metal in it will be harder to find.
china is just one of the details of reality—as is the usa
the world has reached the point where no further commercial growth is possible
this is what it looks like
we elect nutcases to tell us growth will go on forever……
it wont
Matt from Australia has emailed me a fair amount of material about what China plans to do in response to the tariffs. This is a 50 minute video explaining what China plans to do, in response to the tariffs. It is called, CCP master plan to counter Trump causes panic among Chinese officials. A lady gives what sounds like a complete plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz06fig9Q-I
This is a Reuters article called, How China went from courting Trump to ‘never yield’ tariff defiance
https://www.reuters.com/markets/how-china-went-courting-trump-never-yield-tariff-defiance-2025-04-13/
This is a short video in Chinese, with English subtitles (turn down the volume and read the subtitles). Among other things, it talks about a 104% surcharge on purchases by US citizens visiting China. It is titled China’s economic collapse? Beijing Airport is full of “unification” advertisements. I am sure the unification is with Taiwan.
How come the stock market isn’t freezing up yet? It seems like this is going to crash the system.
Faith remains that this is a temporary disturbance. Underlying this is “blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world.”
““blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world.”
You could easily substitute ‘progress’ for ‘antichrist’.
Sam , maybe some answers . The nothing really matters economy .
https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/the-lol-nothing-matters-economy-5ba095381905
The power of being a large market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-18/vw-ceo-floats-us-audi-production-to-skirt-tariffs-faz-reports
Perhaps move some Audi production to the US.
“Top car maker is planning to move some production from Mexico to America because of Trump’s tariffs”?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14405507/Top-car-maker-planning-production-Mexico-America-Trumps-tariffs.html
All is planning and talk . Trump has been promised $ 5 trillion of new investment . All to please his ego . Investments such as car plants etc work on 5 to 10year plans and can’t work with unpredictability and uncertainty . Not going to happen . File 13 also called the waste paper basket .
US doesn’t seem to have the energy supply in place to support much more manufacturing. At a minimum, would need to cut back private use of oil and electricity, to support manufacturing.
as i said in an earlier comment……
this is what the end of infinite growth looks like in real terms…..
despite the rantings of the maganuts
“this is what the end of infinite growth looks like in real terms…..”
Yes.
“despite the rantings of the maganuts”
Not unless 99% of all western populations are.
We’re all in this together Norman.
On a different subject, you might be interested in this
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/did-the-industrial-revolution-occur
The Cambridge economies past database(linked in the first paragraph) is a nice tool.
Fitz good conclusion by the author of that article. Mining is the only true measure of industrialization. The Cambridge study’s joke of a conclusion is just more evidence of how poorly functioning most white collar people are these days.
its how you mine….
and what you do with the outputs of mines that becomes a measure of civilisation.
Charge them with solar, run robotically at night.
From Copilot, Tesla heavy trucks:
“Tesla’s Semi truck program has faced multiple delays, with production now expected to ramp up by 2026. The company has built a dedicated factory in Nevada to manufacture up to 50,000 units annually. However, early customers like Ryder have reported “dramatic” price increases and further delays, pushing their deployment timeline to June 2026.
Despite these setbacks, Tesla remains optimistic, with CEO Elon Musk stating that demand for the Semi is “ridiculous” and that companies failing to adopt electric trucks will fall behind. PepsiCo, an early adopter, has praised the Semi’s performance, with drivers preferring it over traditional diesel trucks.”
One needs to separate cost going up from dollar depreciating in its ability to purchase items of use.
Dennis L.
Let copilot do tge charging
Puerto Rico is now blacked out. Near total collapse.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/power-failure-puerto-rico-infrastructure/2025/04/16/id/1207180/
Once again — an island area without fossil fuels of its own, doesn’t keep the power/transport going with such as wind/solar.
Island nations seem to have a lot of problems.
It takes a lot of oil to bring goods to the island, and transport anything that has been made away. This, by itself, tend to make the island poor, because oil is a high cost fuel.
Island nations often use oil as a fuel for electricity. This makes the electricity high-priced, and makes it hard to be competitive on exports.
Puerto Rico has had financial problems for a long time. It formally exited bankruptcy in 2022, but it is still in terrible shape. Its financial problems are part of what kept it from maintaining its electric grid.
I see a recent article says that the power is now back on.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/puerto-rico-blackout-power-restored/6230610/
From the comments:
rokechevy
I did a search on Google asking the following question: What is the source of power in Puerto Rico today?
Answer: In 2024, the main sources of power generation in Puerto Rico were petroleum-fired power plants (62%), followed by natural gas (24%), coal (8%), and renewables (7%).
Petroleum fired power plants are terribly expensive to operate, but most islands have at least some petroleum-fired power plants. This is part of what makes islands so non-competitive for manufacturing.
US will ‘move on’ from Ukraine peace talks if no progress soon ,
38 minutes ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20x5xn1g92o
It is pretty clear that neither side will give make major changes. Russia’s constitution seems to preclude giving in, as long as their is anyone in territory that Russia claims as its own.
HHH
Ignored
04/17/2025 at 10:45 pm
The CCP cares about one thing and one thing only. And that is to remain in power within their own borders.
It’s all about jobs to them. They subsidize whatever they have to in order to maintain jobs. They don’t care if what they produce isn’t needed. As long as it keeps people employed.
Then they dump their excess production on global markets. At prices nobody else can compete with.
If there was no coal left in China. There would be no industry for the CCP to subsidize to keep its people employed.
They can subsidize the mass production of solar panels and EV’s right now because they still have coal.
They will never even come close to replacing their coal production with coal imports as their ability to produce coal shrinks.
How many countries are depending on China for cheap solar panels and cheap EV’s?
Currently coal prices are low in China and production is down due to a lack of demand. New orders are down.
Only real thing that will slow down their use of coal is a global depression where the demand for Chinese made goods collapses.
If everything ran smoothly globally over next 20-25 years. And demand for Chinese manufactured goods remained strong. They’d be out of domestically produced coal.
We can sit around and speculate about what that means and what it would look like. But there is no scenario where life as they know or business as usual continues.
And the fallout will be widespread. All the countries who export raw material, minerals and parts into China. Depend on that Chinese coal consumption to keep their people employed too.
Without China burning all that coal. Oil demand globally would fall 30-40%. Really think about globally how much business activity revolves around Chinese manufacturing.
The global reserve currency flows into China mainly via Japanese banks who know the local markets and businesses in China.
Global trade is apart of how dollars get distributed round the globe. But global finance is how most of the dollars get created and distributed around the globe.
It’s not as simple, nor is it accurate to say dollars leave USA through trade and that is where all the dollars come from.
Most of the dollars that reside outside the USA weren’t created in the USA. Which is a fact that most people don’t know or comprehend because they have been told all their lives that the reserve currency is the US dollar and only the US can create dollars.”
Gail has always pointed out the coal factor in China’s story .
Follow up .
Jt
Ignored
04/18/2025 at 7:10 am
HHH
That’s what no one understands the World needs growth in China. But China is in deflation and is selling anything that isn’t nailed down which are treasuries. They can’t sell real estate or manufacturing they’re collapsing.
Energy consumption is directly connected to wealth and money creation. Tim Garrett expresses it this way (excerpt)
“What was found is that, when expressed in inflation-adjusted US year 2005 dollars, λ has maintained a steady value for each of forty-one years of observations. Effectively, what sustains the purchasing power embodied in each one thousand dollar bill, and distinguishes it from a mere piece of paper, is a continuous 7.1 ± 0.1 W of primary energy consumption.
For example, in the year 2010, a global wealth of US $2352 trillion was supported by 16.9 terawatts of primary energy consumption; and, in 1980, $1300 trillion 2005 was sustained by 9.6 terawatts. The ratio of these two quantities remained essentially unchanged in each year between 1970 and 2010, with a standard deviation of just 3% over a time period when wealth increased by 111% and GWP increased by 238%.
The implication is that economic wealth can be considered to be a human representation of the magnitude of the associated circulations that power consumption can support. The identity a = λC is important because it presents the possibility of using the tools of physics to evaluate and forecast economic growth.“
Per capita energy growth of all forms peaked in 2007 so basically there has been no material growth since then only financial growth from unprecedented debt that can not be repaid. That debt has eroded any store of value that money hoarders had. They don’t know it yet but they will soon realize everyone is broke.
I am afraid that HHH is right. We need China to grow.
I’m not sure that this is precisely right.
“Per capita energy growth of all forms peaked in 2007 so basically there has been no material growth since then only financial growth from unprecedented debt that can not be repaid.”
It is close. I expect it depends on who is calculating the energy consumption per capita. Different agencies include different things, including a lot of local biomass, and burnt waste. Also, the Energy Institute overcounts wind and solar much other electricity, relative to other organizations.
Always the optimist:
Optimus-3. Not self replicating – yet. Does not need oil to drive to and from work, can work in dark?
Solar is currently $.07-.08/watt, back of envelope calculation suggests a container of panels less than $30K sans transportation. Does one get to keep the container?
It is a hot topic now, H, but it seems to have some promise. Store the H and one stores solar, use H and minimal pollution.
I have no idea of employment except finding employees is very difficult now, this assumes they can and will work and can add and subtract. Give kids pencil(remember the really fat ones?), add and subtract in second grade, divide/multiply in 3rd and memorize multiplication tables up to 12×12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXl-oGZv4fI&t=1221s
At fifteen minutes describes his experiences importing directly, similar to mine. Think I posted this a bit ago.
Make the shoes in the US, give the jobs to the US, pay less to the marketers, the large corporations. This is simple. You can’t buy who you want to be and an expensive pair of sneakers will not make you jump higher. Market pride, market helping Americans.
We can employ our people, give them a sense of self respect, skip the coal, go solar, go H, and of course, go Pt.
Dennis L.
Always delusional
Shoes are not made with thin air
The rest of this babble merits no response
Thanks for noticing.
Looked at per capita oil consumption from the 1960’s to today. Gail nails it again.
1960 23.4 barrels per year.
today 20.8 barrels per year.
So, we need an H economy, plenty of sun, plenty of water, short on Pt.
Dennis L.
(RT – Vzglyad) “A chihuahua that thinks it’s a lion: The decline of Britain”
“In practical terms, Britain remains dangerous to Russia in two ways. First, by supplying weapons and mercenaries to Ukraine, it increases our costs and casualties. Second, in a moment of desperation, it might try to manufacture a small nuclear crisis. If that happens, one hopes the Americans would take the necessary steps to neutralize the threat – even if that means sinking a British submarine.”
https://www.rt.com/news/615888-chihuahua-that-thinks-its-lion/
https://m.vz.ru/opinions/2025/4/10/1325027.html
Regarding the first link, the line after the title is, “London’s global influence is dead – only the bluster remains.” It needs to keep telling its people how important it is, even if it isn’t any more.
The second link is to an article called
Britain is degenerating into a ‘Singapore on the Atlantic’
The aim of British policy in Europe has always been to destroy any signs of cooperation between other powers. But this has not saved London from losing its foreign policy power. And today Britain’s position in the world can be described as “Singapore on the Atlantic”.
Maybe this is always the role of the hegemon. But, it an island nation stops being a hegemon, it has a major problem.
with all its affiliations to Britain and the last vestiges of evil empire, I’m amazed that all those nice Canadians are not leaping into their cars, driving down to the 49th, dumping them, and climbing over the fence to get into trumpland any way they can.
by all accounts though—the traffic is the other way.
most odd.
I’m not sure I can speak for all Canadians on this, but … the election heading our way in the next couple weeks might in part be an assessment of whether we want to be closer or further from the US.
We are going through a very weird moment in time where even just hanging the Canadian Flag seems like a provocative form of propaganda. Not in a nationalist way, but as if its meaning has somehow be subverted by a foreign power.
I’m not sure if the links work in the same way in Italy and in US.
Anyway, just to give you complete background from my side:
from what I saw and what I read from here (still now, after my check), the first link is to an article by RT intitled:
“A chihuahua that thinks it’s a lion: The decline of Britain
London’s global influence is dead – only the bluster remains”
from which I took the excerpt.
The second link is just the one quoted inside the RT article itself as the original source of the article, which translated into English (from google tranlsator) should be:
“Britain is degenerating into a “Singapore on the Atlantic”
“The goal of British policy in Europe has always been to destroy any signs of cooperation between other powers. But this has not saved London from losing its foreign policy power. And today Britain’s position in the world can be described as a “Singapore on the Atlantic”.
So it seems that in the passage from Vzglyad newspaper to RT newspaper, they decided to change the title of the article and maybe they didn’t the presented literally the article in RT.
Then, I haven’t gone word by word to verify if both articles are equal.
I just added both articles as a possible broader background in favour of those who wanted to go deep in this Russian’s position.
As always, when I suggest articles, they don’t represent my position, but I suggest when I think they can be useful to form a better understanding of what is happening.
London based, Alexander Mercouris doesn’t spare words at the 7:07 mark regarding Keir Starmer’s leadership. Starmer is willing to send war-chest money in the tune of 4.5 billion pounds each year to Ukraine while cutting back benefits to its rightful citizens. I doubt the British voted for that.
The situation in the EU is somewhat crazy now.
EU members, when it was formed, originally believed that the EU would take the place of the US, as the world leader.
Ursula talks about putting Ukraine in a place where Ukraine could achieve a victory, so it has a better chance in negotiations. Rhetoric against both Russia and US are increasing.
There is a budget crisis going on in the UK now. As Rodster says, “Starmer is willing to send war-chest money in the tune of 4.5 billion pounds each year to Ukraine while cutting back benefits to its rightful citizens.” People who are unable to work are being cut off from benefits.
” The EU Commission is the Soviet Politbureau steering the EU into a dystopian dictatorship with total control and suppression of freedoms. Germany is making plans to implement this. They are coming for your assets!”?
https://x.com/DrRichardWerner/status/1913281871972032600
I found this noteworthy….
Bay Area solar panel owners upset over potential cuts to incentives
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yKeIeHpk4_s
Solar owners should never be exempted from the cost of the grid and wildfire prevention in the first place. It’s a misconception solar owners don’t use the grid. They use the grid when they export excess power. And they use the grid when their panels aren’t generating enough power. It doesn’t matter the reason, the frequency and duration they use the grid. Fact that they use the grid means they must pay for it like everybody else. Wildfires don’t care if the electricity in the cable is generated in a power plant or it is solar power fed back into the grid. You use the transmission line you pay the cost to keep it safe from wildfire period
Hehehe…I would be pissed off too if I put those panels on my roof because they bugged me to helping to save the planet.
Yeah, right, betcha the insurance companies will refuse to give you home owners insurance now with them on the roof…it’s a hazard and my blowoff in a storm…too funny
I agree with you Mike. The wildfire problem is a big one. It was not considered in the cost of permitting solar on the grid.
Sad news about UK national TV icon Dame Esther Rantzen.
Some of you may know her from the long-running programme That’s Life.
Others from that famous “it was only greenroom gossip” quip, when she was asked why as the head of a charity charged with protecting children she didn’t act to protect them against the predations of Sir James “Jimmy” Savile.
And yet others may remember her for her suggestion in November 2021 that those who don’t get the third jab or any at all should make the personal choice to refuse “resource from the NHS” and “stay at home” – however ill they get – to reduce pressure on the health service.
Well, a year after that rant, the several-times-jabbed Dame Esther was diagnose with stage-4 lung cancer and has been making ample use of the NHS’s facilities ever since, poor woman.
And now, the Daily Express reports:
Esther Rantzen ‘no longer responding to new medication’, daughter reveals.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2033595/esther-rantzen-cancer-update
Has nobody told her about things like ketogenic carnivore diets, Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, curcumin, matcha green tea, vitamins A, B, C, D & E, and our new friend DMSO?
For those who are curious, or nostalgic, or just fancy a laugh, here’s an episode of That’s Life from the good old days when Norman was barely into middle age, and if Englishmen could no longer be proud, at least they displayed a healthy sense of humour. It shows Esther radiant at the peak of her performing prowess, in all her classically conventional semi-detached suburban glory.
From 1981:
Everyone likes a good ending, Tim. I am hoping Ursula is next.
Thanks Tim. I’ll show this to my Mom later as she loves British romantic comedy. She often watches As Time Goes By before bedtime.
What you people think of this?
https://www.unz.com/ishamir/unravelling-the-mystery-of-war/
I always thought that the EU countries would be the only ones losing, and his thesis seems to corroborate that.
The US being serious about Canada and Greenland is something I agree as well. Also, that the US will project more of its influence in Latin America.
The most wished divorce of Russia and China is also the most desired outcome for the US.
Now, that there’s a secret deal between the US and Russia is just harder to access.
And the Mexico unification also seems ludricous.
This is the go-go group that is having trouble with its dealmaking, because interest rates are too high and because of the uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs .
WSJ says,
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/private-equity-world-engulfed-by-perfect-storm-2a2da2ad
Private Equity World Engulfed by Perfect Storm
Tariff turmoil dashes investors’ hopes for payouts; dealmaking grinds to near standstill
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-admin-orders-halt-offshore-wind-project-near-new-york
Trump Admin Orders Halt To Offshore Wind Project Near New York
A Reuters article says:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-orders-halt-construction-new-york-offshore-wind-project-2025-04-16/
So perhaps stopping it now will be a mercy killing.
I’m sure the Greenies will be calling Greta. Btw, it appears Greta has been set to pasture since Klaus Schwab no longer has any use for her.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-admin-orders-halt-offshore-wind-project-near-new-york
Looks like the Trump-Powell business is the beginning of the long awaited End of the Fed which itself, when it finally comes, is the culmination of the Hidden Hand’s great disappearing act. Looking like they’ll feather it over the coming year with Powell’s early exit and replacement with a nationalist-minded plant which would usher in a more formal State Capitalism. Then rates will go negative and commercial banks will be instructed to lend to Made In USA like there’s no tomorrow, because there won’t be one, until the great sucking sound of the deflationary spiral becomes deafening and we pass through the event horizon of the systemic banking crisis and bond market dislocation. Then at some point the Fed’s functional obsolescence will be at hand. Trump probably won’t be around for that though.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I just put myself in the Hand’s shoes or am I just pulling them out of my rear?
you seem to imply an end to private ownership of the US central banks. Not that it matters anymore of course, but this would still be a major event.
Info only . Powell’s term as chairman ends in July 2026 and will be on the board of governors till 2028 .
Challenge to Trump — go ahead do it . I guarantee it will be Trump who will be fired . In the end the bankers always win .
Trump is doing the bankers’ bidding. Powell is expendable. Trump is also expendable. Powell can also just take rates negative on his ‘own’ terms as the bankers see fit but I think making a show of politically jettisoning the Fedjust as it’s hitting its structural expiration date is part of the the fundamental political calculus of the DA: far exceed anti establishment political expectations in order to help contain the negative fallout from collapsing standards of living. That’s the Trump administration dynamic in a nutshell. Mostly it’s a Conservative dynamic now but MAHA is slated to unify that dynamic further across the aisle when it takes and exercises power more sensibly in a year or two.
OK, reante, I am willing to listen and in fact interested. If you had asked me 3 or 7 years ago, I would have said that we would never see the end of private central banking. at least in the west. But you say it is slated for closing and will be closed (by the usual suspects). but what replaces it? I doubt that they ride into the subset, willingly relinquishing such a power lever.
drb right on. FTR, three years ago here at OFW I said as much would be happening. said so ad nauseum in fact. But I didn’t ask you. 🙂
National socialisms will be replacing it. Public banking led by restored national treasuries. For all countries. Then the DA will have run its course and total industrial collapse will be replacing that.
The Hand has no choice but to successively relinquish more and more control to Collapse until there is none left. Nature bats last. Them installing Trump at this juncture, by stealing the election with broad based manufactured dissident consent and a fake assassination attempt is ample proof of that given that he is providing political cover for them now relinquishing globalized control in order to try and reverse engineer collapse as best as they can.
They’re not doing it to ride into the sunset they’re doing it in order to maximize their own chances of surviving the collapse of a nuclear civilization.
You may be right but I do not believe it. standard feudalism is a far more likely hypothesis IMHO, than a strong central state (covering which landmass, incidentally). The elites (the Hand) giving control to all of society to some strongman is a mistake they are not going to do again. they are also quite factional so numerous nice spots will need to be provided.
drb I am a fast collapsenik and I give the national socialisms about 5 years to run once they arrive in the next couple few years. After that period I expect even the developed nations to start disintegrating. By national socialism I actually mean the best politics you could ever hope for Conservative left libertarianism. Like if MAHA held the reigns. Public banking, antiwar, environmentally minded, anti-finance capitalism, anti-Marxist.
The Hand needs to give the people as true an egalitarian populism as it can muster because it needs to create and maintain both the international political will and the goodwill of common folks while the nuclear power industry is decommissioned and probably the nuclear warheads defused, too.
After that singular mission of the DA is finished and all states break apart, then all manner of adaptations will emerge, including localized feudal arrangements.
In such a deflationary scenario the entire banking/financial system would become completely insolvent and have to be “nationalized”, so I can see your point.
👍
“Economist Yanis Varoufakis says we shouldn’t underestimate Trump – he has a plan to shock the global economy, force foreign countries to buy crypto-currency in return for a deal on tariffs, and ultimately pay down debt and keep the US dollar at the centre of the global financial system. But it’s a high risk strategy that also paves the way for the “tech bros” to make a lot of money.”
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/04/16/discussing-trumps-economic-masterclass-with-david-marr-on-abc-late-night-live/
>> force foreign countries to buy crypto-currency in return for a deal on tariffs
Varoufuckis is spouting fanciful nonsense
I am afraid we don’t know what Trump’s plans really are.
How would foreign countries buying crypto help the U.s debt burden??
The buying power of the crypto currency might in theory help hold commodity prices up, without the US government needing to keep issuing more debt to do this. I am doubtful that buying crypto currency would add more US jobs, however, except for those making crypto currency.
Crypto currency making uses electricity. This is usually stranded electricity–too far away from users to build transmission lines. I suppose this would be a use for excess electricity from solar/wind when unneeded.
This could only work if the idea is for them to buy “stablecoins” like tether, which are backed by USD-assets like treasurys, thus creating demand for US debt.
Yep – Varoufakis discusses the USA getting Japan to spend their USD on tether, which in turn buys US debt/bonds.
As if the Japanese couldn’t see it’s even worse than buying Treasurys, because Treasurys at least have a yield.
“Hey, you don’t want Treasurys? Let me sell you something even worse!”
ivanislav, you think that’s crazy?
Maybe it is.
But then the whole of capitalism is lunacy, endlessly pushing for infinite growth on a finite planet, and yet here we are. . .
my question also
Thanks Hugh. I didn’t click on the link but that makes sense. The Hand using mandatory crypto to partially unwind the Eurodollar market. The structural reason for needing to unwind the Eurodollar market is peak everything. The political reason for tariffs is to partially unwind the Eurodollar market now that the negative side of Triffin’s Dilemma, on the US, is being laid bare for all to see: for the last 50 years the US got to borrow money beyond its wildest dreams but the negative side is that the US gets hollowed out and hyperindebted. And at the same time that downside is a monetary upside for everyone else, hence the universal, political grievance resulting in universal tariffs. Treasuries, for example, get bought, sold on the secondary market, and fractional reserved at lower interest rates into nine times Eurodollars outside of the country – and nine times again! Buncha fuckin mooches lol.
Brilliant!
Get the suckers exporting to the US to accept a “new & improved” version of fake money for their goods.
And it’s “electronic” and only goes up in value, so the morons are bound to fall for it.
Ha, ha!
It’s absurd, but that’s capitalism for you.
You have to admire the gall of it.
It’s a rehash of the same scam wherein the USA can run an ongoing trade deficit, and maintain dollar hegemony at the same time, because nations invest the profits they make from selling to the USA back into the USA.
As Varoufakis said, the trick for the USA is to increase its deficit and get others to pay for it, and this has been working for the last 50 years, so they want to reboot it.
And as you say, the morons are bound to fall for it, because they won’t want their existing investments in the US to fall in value, plus there’s the promise of more gains.
Part of the Trump team’s plan is also rebalancing the US real world (manufacturing) with the dollar world and bringing down the value of the USD by 40% to improve US competitiveness.
So, there are a few different aspects to the Trump team’s plan.
If they have a plan and they’re not just chaos monkeys unleashed by the capitalist crisis (although causing a bit of chaos does provide room to move, so that could be part of the plan. . . ), and/or the system isn’t self-organizing itself into a new and ‘better’ adapted form (no planning or even rational thought required) like Gail suggests from time to time.
“bringing down the value of the USD by 40% to improve US competitiveness”
Sorry, make that bring down the value of the dollar by 30%, then add 10% for the tariffs, so an overall 40% increase in competitiveness.
No need to panic 🙂
Do you really think that whoever killed JFK and RFK with aplomb before globalization ever even started, and these days has ratcheted all the way up to bringing down the twin towers and DEWing Los Angeles, again with aplomb, couldn’t make a chaos monkey’s heart stop anytime it wanted?
Do you really think that the very existence of whatever organized Hand that can pull that off leaves any room for primary self-organization dynamics of the whole?
It’s a managed system.
As to this discussed stablecoin business, see again my comment on unwinding the Eurodollar mechanism that’s fundamental to globalization. Understand that you are mischaracterizing the Treasury market as being only a US hostage crisis. In whole, the Treasury market is a hostage situation in service of a global financial architecture: the foreign funds go to the center of Empire in order to be laundered back out into Eurodollars. The US doesn’t get to keep those funds and leverage them with the domestic banking system like you are making it seem. It just gets the unlevered debt to spend. All the fractionally reserved leverage gets transferred back out into the rest of the global economy, to the international subsidiaries of the US-based banks. Therein lies the nationalist political beef with the Eurodollar market. The Hand, indirectly via the Trump administration, is effectively saying that Triffin’s Dilemma is now no longer a dilemma – it’s a catastrophic predicament. The US — the Mack Daddy that takes all the weight — will financially collapse if the Eurodollar market is not restructured such that there will be no dollars of any kind. Maybe the name Tether is an insider name referencing the STABLEcoin as a financial mechanism for tethering Eurodollar leverage, as necessary, to the US. A zero-sum backdoor bailout for the global Mack Daddy. We’ve been seeing backdoor energy bailouts for China and India and Turkey for years now. Now we’re seeing the Mack Daddy getting bailed out under political cover. But bailing out the Mack Daddy means also breaking the system. They’re breaking the fall.
Highly recommend that you check out this excellent overview of the Eurodollar market. Note in particular Milton Friedman’s explanation of the dynamic:
https://www.macrovoices.com/podcast-transcripts/301-jeffrey-snider-eurodollar-university-part-1
>Do you really think that the very existence of whatever organized Hand that can pull that off leaves any room for primary self-organization dynamics of the whole?
Yes, I do. But then I don’t believe that society is completely subject to rational human control.
And I’m absolutely certain that there’s a lot more going on than fits inside my head.
Who said anything about completely subject? Managerial endeavors only ever seek control the things that they can control which is no different from any other endeavor. You apparently don’t believe that Trump is assassinatable. New word. Even though he poses way, way more of a threat to the status quo than any person in the history of industrial civilization. That doesn’t add up and I think you can add. The minute any truly threatening, self-organizing political phenomenon arises it gets nipped in the bud. The list of assassinations and violent suppressions and institutions of martial law is endless.
From the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-comes-for-clean-energy-putting-exxon-and-occidental-projects-at-risk-565bd42f
DOGE Comes for Clean Energy, Putting Exxon and Occidental Projects at Risk
Thousands of Energy Department jobs are expected to be eliminated as Trump goes after a favorite target
The stock of both companies went up on this news. Zerohedge has an article
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/exxon-shares-post-second-largest-gain-2023-after-doge-seeks-cut-clean-energy-projects
Losing these money losers is no great loss!
They’re all money losers! 😁 As Steve From Virginia used to say, if the oil paid for itself there wouldn’t be any debt. That’s deep. Welcome to civilization.
“If oil paid for itself, there wouldn’t be any debt.”
If oil were $20 per barrel, debt would not be problem.
AI says that oil was $22.50 a barrel inflation adjusted in 1928…pop! It was nearly as cheap in 1999…pop!
Now those years don’t exist in a vacuum but neither does the $20 barrel price. The cheaper oil is in real terms the better lending collateral it is for speculation. It never pays for itself because of how it is leveraged by industrial culture. Jevons paradox. Debtonomics.
The US debt to GDP ratio is shown as a chart on this website:
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/debt-to-gdp-ratio
You can see that the ratio of US debt to GDP was falling near the year 1999. The debt to GDP ratios given are
1996 46.74%
1997 44.12
1998 41.13
1999 37.73
2000 33.27
2001 52.44
2002 42.06
These are the corresponding oil prices (in 2023$).
1996 $40.15
1997 36.24
1998 23.77
1999 32.87
2000 52.42
2001 42.06
You can see that government debt levels were low and falling during the 1996 to 2000 period, and that oil prices were low. The economy was growing pretty rapidly (over 4% per year), with the low oil prices (and the dot com bubble). It wasn’t until 2001 that the growth rate dropped to 1%.
https://www.britannica.com/money/dot-com-bubble
I looked at the above link to see what, besides the low oil prices, was going on:
It sort of reminds me of the AI bubble we have been seeing lately.
Jevons paradox explains why if oil was as cheap and accessible as tap-water, people would find ways to waste it like they do tap-water.
https://media.makeameme.org/created/so-youre-telling-wxdz1b.jpg
If we don’t find ways to waste it like tap water then 95 out of 100 people will die lol. Welcome to civilization.
Strongest hints yet of biological activities of the Solar System
https://www.youtube.com/live/yc0757j2R8s?si=ZIAdDpq5UIWYQ74h
Presented by the British professor Nikku Madhusudhan .
His birthplace is scrapped from Wikipedia, but appears he attended a university in Benares.
That is the end product of years of the British ‘salt of earth’, i.e. scum of earth by the Duke of Wellington, doing ‘their duty’ and a Hindu acts like he is the leading figure of British Science.
His assistants for this presentation were Savvas Constantinou (appears to be of Greek origin), Mans Holmberg (somewhere from Europe, I guess), Subhajit Sarkar (no explanation needed), Anjali Piette (probably someone from the Subcontinent having married a chap named Piette), and Julianne Moses (probably played a minor role).
The British Patriots still curse Napoleon and the ‘Huns’ but have no problem being ruled by the Hindus, who will make the Olde England like West Bengal.
The write up of the video says:
I feel exactly the same way about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, England’s greatest ever engineer and the son of a Frenchman, albeit a Norman!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel
A lot of Frenchies moved to UK during the Revolution
Interestingly Marc Brunel did go to USA before moving to UK. Things were not too great in USA back then.
But there would have been quite a lot of people with a similar surname as Brunel. Not comparable to Madhusudhan.
Carlo Cotterelli today:
the US debt is like a ‘Ponzi scheme’.
(Carlo Cottarelli, former director of the International Monetary Fund’s fiscal affairs department. ref https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Cottarelli )
Reading this article it will appear a little bit clearer also to mainstream media the US need to cut expenses which are heavily criticized also here by Italian media.
Excerpt from the Corriere article:
” The US debt bomb
On the other hand, Trump has to deal not only with the hostility of the countries affected by the duties, but also with domestic pressure, exerted first and foremost by the financial markets. ‘The swings in US government bonds in recent weeks were probably behind the postponement of the duties decided by Trump,’ noted Webuild’s Ferrari. ‘US debt is worth more than 36 trillion and has always been considered safe,’ he added, ‘if it became high-risk in investors’ perception, the consequences on the markets would be disruptive and would soon propagate to the real economy because a credit crunch, a credit crunch, is around the corner.’
‘A Ponzi scheme’
The turmoil in the US dollar and government bonds, however, is not only related to Trump’s volatile policies. ‘The state of US government accounts is indeed worrying,’ Cottarelli warned. ‘Twenty years ago the US debt-to-GDP ratio was at 50 per cent, today it is above 121 per cent and the deficit is travelling at around 7 per cent,’ he continued, ‘we are in the situation where the US government is borrowing money to pay interest on past debt: in economics we would speak of a Ponzi scheme and, if the US loses the confidence of the market, it would be a very strong earthquake for finance and the world economy.’ ”
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
https://www.corriere.it/economia/finanza/25_aprile_17/cottarelli-debito-usa-preoccupante-e-l-unica-minaccia-che-puo-fermare-trump-sui-dazi-15275ce7-d5cd-4436-8463-e314f7a6dxlk.shtml
https://12ft.io/
The Italians (or this particular italian) discovering suddenly the US debt trajectory is as little bit like guys discovering the US moral decay only after Trump gets elected. Being an IMF guy his loyalty is most likely with you know who. and it still does not matter anyway.
drb, Europe is desperate lately…
This is, in my view, part of a double strategy of sorrounding Trump by fair means or foul, to have him seated again at the EU table.
From one side Meloni and others try to seduce Trump, saying that West needs to become great again with US and EU together, on the other side people like Cottarelli, tries to softly remind to US (with an article under paywall, only for professionals) that US needs market trust and people like Europeans who help to keep the dollar strong.
In my view Trump doesn’t care about either fair means or foul and he will pursue his plan.
I want to wait and see EU to cry and to stop pumping Zelensky with words, money and weapons against Putin.
Because, if anyone has not clear yet, we don’t have peace in Ukraine thanks to EU.
Just below i mentioned Charles Ponzi, born Catlo Ponzi in Emilio Romagna.
All these talk about space growths are another examples of Ponzi schemes.
Minor nitpick, but Ponzi is in fact romagnolo, being from Lugo. He is not emiliano. different lands with vastly different history, which were joined administratively, as Emilia were mostly city states which ended feudalism early (Bologna in 1256), and started industrializing in the 1400s.
Romagna, regrettably, remained a possession of the church (Roma) for far longer and is not as advanced. It is normal that Ponzi would come from Romagna as migration out of Emilia was unlikely. during Ponzi’s time there was a lot of internal migration into Bologna as it was seen as one of the better places where to be during the fossil fuel revolution.
I appreciate your explanation, I would add this:
“While the Ponzi scheme would be named after notorious scammer Charles Ponzi, and Bernie Madoff perpetrated the most notorious Ponzi scheme, the Ponzi scheme was not invented by a man — it was invented by a woman.
The first documented use of the Ponzi scheme, at least in America, was from a woman named Sarah Howe. Howe first perpetuated the scheme in Boston in 1879, when she created a bank to invest money for widows, according to Steve Weisman at TIME Magazine.”
https://medium.com/crimebeat/the-woman-who-invented-the-ponzi-scheme-115888be8666
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Howe_(fraudster)
The figure often given is that government debt should not exceed 90% of GDP.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7541/debt/does-government-debt-lead-to-lower-economic-growth/
The link is to this paper.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w15639
At 121% of GDP, interest on debt gets to be very high, relative to what citizens can afford to pay in taxes. In fact, if inflation is high (because the economy is running on added debt, rather than cheap-to-extract resources), there is an extra large effect of the need for high taxes, just to cover the interest on debt. Governments desperately need money to pay interest. This is where the US is now.
Here Kevin discusses the agricultural implications of tariffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nADbVedF7xw
Of course a lot of corn and soy were going to fatten chinese pigs. It seems to me that Russia, Argentina and Brazil will get into the act more. It will also be good for bartering.
a note on Russia’s outlook: after the driest and mildest winter in Russian history, a very dry season expected. My guys bought some millet (a plant of semi-arid climates) to mix into the grass mix to make sure we get a hay crop. But while I was in Arabia a major storm dumped 60cm of snow, and now the soil moisture situation is average, with seeding time still expected to be 15 days early (it is 20+C, and the snow is already all gone except in deep forest). so i expect an average year.
It sounds to me as if our agricultural problems has been building up over a long period. The new tariffs are just pushing production in the direction it had been going previously.
Farmers in the US have been depending upon exports of soybeans and wheat to keep prices up, but this has not been happening. The video says the price of soybeans has fallen from $17 per bushel 3 year ago to $10 per bushel today. These prices are below the cost of production.
China has been a big importer of wheat and soybeans. But now it is growing more itself. It is also buying more soybeans from Brazil.
Wheat exports for the many countries that import wheat are now being dominated by Russia. I would guess that the imported cost of wheat from Russia is lower than that from the US. Shipping costs are clearly part of the total cost.
I am guessing all of East and North Africa and Middle East now buys from Russia. It is also non GMO, so probably less toxic for a population that consumes a great deal of it in its diet.
Looking at change, had Copilot do a summary of the Thirty Years War.
– Massive Population Loss: The war led to millions of deaths, with some regions in Germany losing up to 60% of their population
Economic Collapse: Trade routes were disrupted, agriculture suffered, and cities were destroyed, leading to long-term economic stagnation
Spread of Disease: Typhus and plague outbreaks worsened the death toll, often exceeding casualties from direct combat
Political Shifts: The war reshaped European borders and power dynamics, leading to the rise of new political entities and the decline of older ones.
Religious Transformation: The conflict deepened divisions between Catholics and Protestants, influencing religious policies across Europe.
Birth of Modern Diplomacy: The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the concept of state sovereignty, laying the groundwork for the modern nation-state system.
We are building new narratives and it is interesting to see the great resistance on this site to the death of the old and the birth of the new. The end of affordable oil may not be very relevant to society going forward. Were infinite growth of oil possible, earth could well cease to support life in which case economics ceases.
Interesting the differences between Calvinists and Lutherans.
Dennis L.
Whoever the ‘we’ might mean, I am not one of the we and I refuse to join it.
Imagining more and more crazy stuff does not change the narrative.
Columbus actually paraded slaves caught from Hispaniola island, the kind of which the Westerners never saw before, to make the King and Queen of Spain believe that they did not waste their money.
Musk has not shown anything, other than whatever is in his informercials, which you believe and I don’t.
The end of oil may not be relevant for society going forward, since there will be no going forward for homo not-too-sapiens sapiens. Maybe the dolphins might have a shot in 100 million years.
Why invest in a wedding? A 260k mortgage is a bigger commitment. Five stories of young Slovaks
Read more: https://closer.sme.sk/c/23478531/svadba-hypoteka-slovaci-slovensko.html?ref=mnt
“Overall U.S. imports at -64% has got to be one of the most insane numbers in economic history.
I don’t think people quite comprehend how disruptive that’s going to be. ”
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1912693260256170349
This is from a week over week change in ocean bookings! A lot of things will be disappearing from store shelves in the next six months. It will likely take a long time to replace them with locally made goods, if it even can be done.
Maybe. electronics parts will continue to come, I do import some(like in envelopes) from China, still no problem. We can do without a few Mercedes; had a fellow at a truck stop, no upper teeth, wait on me, Trump supporter. I don’t think his portfolio of stocks will be much affected. A very small percentage owns 50% of the stocks, they may be hit, well, that is the game of life.
If our tennis shoes are now $200/pair, simply using US made shoes will be beneficial and no one will ever notice they are not the latest.
We are going to mine space, that will not require ocean shipping. Incoming!
Dennis L.
Obviously from someone who was never in the import/export business.
Your small scale imports are blips which won’t even register.
But then you extrapolate big things from small hints in the informercials so not so surprising.
Again, condescending. Small experiences are a cheap way to learn.
Looking at Alibaba now, solar panels $.08/watt, minimum order 100,000 watts. I Cheaper if one purchases a container load and has it delivered directly to the farm. That is by the way a heck of a lot more than 100K watts.
Per Copilot, at my latitude over 10 years gross revenue is $116,800 at $.08 per WH. This is for a cost of $8K. I am ignoring the support cost, electrical control, etc.
If I were to use this as direct current, had some Pt, I would be able to make H and run farm equipment as JBL is currently going. Skip the inverters, when want electricity use a fuel cell.
So, this from importing directly small electrical parts.
Back of the envelope calculations suggest the economics are compelling and getting better.
Now, if Starship can find a cubic mile of Pt, it is an obvious solution, we of course import Pt from space, where else? Not sure how the USPS would deliver from orbit, ideas?
Ni will work, the chromate problem is real and a very toxic substance.
Dennis L.
I guess the Pt and Ni developed foot and learned how to walk to your farm without spending any energy.
Silly postulates yield silly answers.
Decay and decline .
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/birmingham-bin-strike-waste-bags-b2733564.html
Warning bin strikes could happen across UK as union talks collapse
Rubbish has been piling up on the city’s streets for several weeks as union pay dispute continues
Union strikes are a sign that the economy is not producing enough for everyone. Someone, or some services, needs to be squeezed out. Will trash pickup be one of those things.
Optimus-3 is supposed to increase numbers by an order of magnitude each year.
We may be experiencing a multi generational change in less than 10 or so years. The Reformation was monumental and very stressful taking place over some 80 years and including the thirty years war.
Humans seem to live their lives by narratives and those narratives in many cases may have lifetimes similar to humans. Data Centric is a problem when the narrative no longer matches ones’ “lying eyes.”
Data is now moving very rapidly, even in depletion rate estimates in oil. Past estimates have not been very good in the time frame which counts, the productive span of a human life.
Too much gloom and doom and the most productive years are wasted waiting for Godo, or waiting for one narrative to end and another start.
So, not able to resist, “Garbage in and garbage out?”
Dennis L.
A torrent of ‘may’s.
Your logic that Optimus 3 will exponentially grow was some logic used by a Charles Ponzi a century ago thinking his scheme would grow indefinitely.
It is not new. The notion of infinite growth existed from time immemorial, and nowdays believers of it are called flat earthers.
All of your many increasingly irrational musings can be summarized into one single sentence, “I don’t want to die”.
The world does not care whether you want to die or not. It will proceed, towards greater entropy, another scientific law you refuse to acknowledge but nature does not care about that.
One day they will not be able to afford the bags anymore.
I’m old enough to remember the roll-out of garbage bags. People used to put their loose trash in metal cans that were dumped into trucks by garbagemen. Most people in our suburban area would also burn certain types of trash in barrels or pits in their backyards.
At one point, gas stations started selling plastic bags, and that’s where one would buy them (rather than at the supermarket). When I cleared out my mom’s house after she passed, I still found boxes of “Exxon” labeled garbage bags, which she had hoarded during the inflationary period of the late ’70s.
Garbage bags are just one of the things that seem ‘normal’ now but may be retired. I can see how it was a clever use of petroleum residual, but they may find better uses for that as it becomes dearer.
‘President Donald Trump suggested at a Cabinet meeting Thursday that undocumented people working on farms and in hotels would be allowed to leave the country and return as legal workers if their employers vouched for them.
Trump said at the meeting with reporters present that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people.”’?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-farmworkers-hotel-workers-undocumented-legal-rcna200722
This sounds like something that would be hard to implement. There are an awfully lot of undocumented people with similar names.
“Int 1026 with Colonel Towner Watkins on CIA Overthrowing 90 Govts “?
https://www.brighteon.com/75565384-38c6-4d1a-871a-16c4cc92727d
A lady “Colonel Towner-Watkins” describes what she has seen in an over 2 hour interview. “Things are not as they seem.” The narrative the American people are told, and the people of the world are told, is not the way things really are.
Humans are facing cognitive decline: they eliminated other species, believing that another world would provide for all their needs.
Instead, they made themselves prey to species that were previously hidden or had not existed here before.
The current world is collapsing right now: the rich believe in their worthless assets, the poor believe in some higher power.
All that has become unsustainable, is being eliminated.
The power of money? If you do not have them and when it is concentrating in the hands of the consumers, it means that it has no value. Because only money that is evenly distributed as the means of exchange, has any value. There is no such thing as storing the value in money when the economy is dying.
I agree. It is a sad and unexplainable finding but there is no sense in denying reality.
Cognitive decline is not entirely inexplicable, as we’ve recently tended to increase populations which aren’t particularly gifted, actively favoring them over populations with higher intellectual capacity. This may not be coincidental.
A low-energy future may not reward certain kinds of talent to the same degree as our higher-energy present and past, so a great number of intellectual pursuits will simply fall by the wayside. There won’t be a market for mini-Mozarts or Berninis if no-one has the raw materials with which they can work. Other characteristics will be valued, instead.
The species for which any group of humans is the greatest prey is, of course, other humans.
I have watched gold’s 25% nominal increase in US dollars over the past few months. I always hear the mantra that gold has been money for millennia and always will be. Some attribute the Bronze Age and the Roman Empire collapses to the massive deforestation required to create charcoal needed for smelting of metals like copper, tin, zinc and silver.
But even if there were a regional or local shortage of wood, people always knew that it could regenerate and therefore justified the belief that gold and silver would always be useful as true money in the future when civilization was restored, but this was always around the 500,000 people carrying capacity based on biomass (wood burning) regeneration.
In short, gold and silver were always valued as true money- a medium of exchange and a store of value. But they always assumed there would be something to buy with their gold or that they would be able to make things for which gold would be needed as payment.
If there are 8 billion people on board right now, without the benefit of easily accessible fossil fuels for agriculture, this obviously exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet. So what will gold be worth if there is nothing to buy?
Today, there are a few people who are starting to realize the realities of depletion and that gold has been valued on its past performance in the context of a renewable world with only half a million inhabitants. In the end, it may come down to that tired old cliche “you can’t eat gold.”
In the same way, the “laws” of economics 101 were always drummed into us about the supply and demand vs price. One could always make more product if the price increased, or one could find a substitute. But what if there is no viable supply or substitute on a scale needed for 8 billion people?
Money has always assumed that there is the existence of a service or product for exchange.
Forests regenerate, but unless you are in the abiotic camp, fossil fuels are a one and done for humanity.
I agree with you:
“what will gold be worth if there is nothing to buy?”
In any rational world, if we can produce food and a few other goods, the things that are produced should first go to the workers and their immediate families. It is only the leftovers that should go to everyone else. The many old folks should expect to go back to work, or get left out. The total quantity of goods will decline rapidly. We will likely be using the machinery we have, including cars, washing machines, and refrigerators, as long as we can maintain electricity and oil supplies.
A bit of humor. As long as there are women, gold will work; they like glitter.
Dennis L.
And such women will easily leave you for those who have more gold.
all a matter of whether you can calmly watch your grandmother starve to death……
can you?
Put it this Way if you wish. As long as there are any people left…gold will have value. There will always be someone with more than others. There will always be The Lord of the Manor and the subject serfs or peasants. Always. It is human nature.gold wall always have value to that top dog…always.
And yet farmers seem to be among the poorest in every era, despite being the ones who provide for most everyone else.
I agree to the idea that money can just buy what is available. But of course it could outsmart poorer competitors as long as it has any value. In WW2 in Vienna, Austria, people paid a bucket of lard, perhaps 10liters, with a set of silver spoons.
The value of gold is in a crashed society what you possibly could make out of it. While you have to invest a lot of energy to get metals out of the ground and process them, physical gold in a pure form can easily and without much energy formed to spoons, watches, needles, wire, coils, printing plates, teeth, bottles, buckles and fibulas. And it does not rust away like iron or changes pharmaceutical preparations.
Faith is faith in continuous progress. As JMG says,
” blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world.”
The stock market will always go up. The value we see in our financial accounts will be there, when we want to go buy goods and services 10 or 20 years from now.
It has worked so far. If one purchased a sound house in the 2008 period at the most ridiculous price, with a 30 year mortgage, one has a house and now a better mortgage and more value in nominal terms.
This is a finite earth, there is only one we know of so far; it will hold its value no matter how denominated.
Without biology, there is so far no economics(self replicating machines could change that). Invest in your children, 2 out of 5 will not disappoint.
Dennis L.
“2 out of 5 will not disappoint”
Interesting observation! Is that an eternal law?
It is called the Pareto Principle. Around the end of 19th century Vilfredo Pareto said everything is divided 80/20, but it was a Romanian born engineer named Joseph Juran who popularized the idea in the 1920s.
That aside he thinks if something works 1 out of 5 times it is a good thing. I have never seen any attitude like that
I think you have said that the past is the past the future might be different many times.
we of the intelligent ”west” have had it drummed into us that capitalism was the only ”way” for humankind to progress……
unfortunately no one pointed out that capitalism requires a constant input of fresh capital…and not the printed variety.
Good point:
“unfortunately no one pointed out that capitalism requires a constant input of fresh capital…and not the printed variety.”
We need a growing supply of inexpensive-to-extract resources for capitalism to work.
thats where the system goes down
theres plenty of resources===but its all expensive to produce…….
this is what the maganuts cannot grasp…and a few ofwnuts as well
In order to have new growth, often it is necessary to have quiescence in winter.
We have had ice ages, man is still here and doing better than ever, or at least not shivering in a bear skin.
Man, thinking of a movie where a protagonist says something like, “There you go again, bad vibrations.”
Dennis L.
“Lords of the Fall” by JMG. It’s a really good read on how civilizations always meet their doom as IC is meeting its eventuality.
https://www.ecosophia.net/lords-of-the-fall/
One excerpt:
“It’s why so many of our allegedly secular ideologies insist that everyone in the world ought to accept a single belief system, adopt its moral rules, and obey its taboos—all this is simply following the template of Christian evangelism.”
Or on the other hand, one could see God looking down, shaking His head with thoughts approximately, “Arrogant human, set him up in paradise and he makes up the wrong narrative.”
Diminishing returns? Things are in many ways getting better, not worse.
One could well be skeptical of an overweight philosopher living in an apartment writing about less is more. What is very hard are narratives which no longer match a data centric reality. We have narratives to explain to the best of our ability what “reality” is around us. We explore reality and change the narrative, even in physics. The future is before us, not behind.
Dennis L.
Can you show examples of things actually getting better? Not from informercials, but actually getting better physically.
Another excerpt:
Look mate, focus on the cheeses not the nonsense about cats.
JMG wants it both ways. On the one hand, he has this theme of writing that the collapse is coming (and here that there will be an inevitable “pruning” of the population) and people need to prepare by learning how to garden and to develop old world skills etc. On the other, he pokes fun at people who think the collapse is coming sooner rather than later as he maintains that the collapse is going to be slow and grinding over a very long period of time, so there’s no need to overly catastrophize or be alarmist about it and people who do have those concerns are merely fantasists. So, which is it? Is it coming and there’s a need to prepare, or not? The fence sitting is irritating, convenient for selling books, and more than a little smug.
I suppose he doesn’t want people to worry too much, or to give up hope.
He finds his sweet spot in triangulation, denying the existence of either black or white. (But sometimes there really is a black thing, or a white thing!)
I take it as just a temperamental defect that can’t be reasoned away. He’s written a lot of stuff I have appreciated, but he also has a boring and typical “intolerance towards intolerance” sort of game going on at the same time. If “pruning” of the population is inevitable, it’s also inevitable that certain groups or individuals will seek to be in charge of said pruning in order to avoid being the ones pruned.. but that’s too gauche a conclusion for his refined sensibilities.
Here’s an app that seems to be working currently:
https://x.com/CartlandDavid/status/1889025742958391404
“Germans have developed an app that allows you to scan products, identifying insects, which are in all EU stores from today.”
Insekten Gefunden!
That this would ever become necessary is absurd
Art Berman’s latest and while the subject is about the unraveling of the current world order, he finishes his blog by saying: “Too many experts today are stuck blaming the obvious—politicians, social decay, nostalgia. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t help. The geopolitical order is being reshaped by deeper forces we rarely talk about. Energy is one of the most critical, yet it barely registers in mainstream analysis.
This isn’t a clean transition to a new order. It’s a slow unraveling. And what’s emerging is more unstable, more contested, harder to decipher. Eventually, we’ll have to move past denial and start facing what’s really happening—with clarity, not just judgment and commentary.”
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-structure-of-geopolitical-revolutions/
That sounds like an improvement on what Art has said before.
remove the relevant energy from anything that is growing or moving, and it stops.
yet the belief persists that ‘higher forces’ will change that simple law
Norm, quantum mechanics is “higher” and it works and can be applied; the universe may well be quantum and sentience may well be quantum.
Dennis L.
And all of them might all exist only in your increasingly warped imagination.
a……when i figure out you you are on about….
and b…if i figure out whether you know what you are on about
i’ll get back to you dennis
true! bring back Biden in lieu of the orange man and things will improve incredibly. I read it on OFW.
biden was trying to engineer a slow let down…he was fully aware of what the future held.
the maganut in chief is offering you wile e coyotes cliff
Since he started a war against a military superpower, I beg to disagree. But generally, I see the US as declining at an almost constant rate, which is the resource depletion rate. I have said it many times. I think that destruction of supply chains would have happened also under the leadership of the wonderful Kamala. You think that personalities matter.
you judge me incorrectly—nithing new in that.
personalities matter in easing us into a unpleasant future
the don is only interested in the usa as his personal atm machine
It doesn’t matter to the self-organizing system what Trump’s motives are.
agreed—–you are correct in the long term
but in the short term the don is milking the system for all its worth, and that is causing problems to the maximoum number of little people
This is also incorrect. The little people are clearly behind Trump, they don’t own stocks, and their situation will be slightly improved by the reappearance of some jobs. Like in beer making, as we were discussing the other day. It is more about Trump favoring the little americans over the little europeans or mexicans.
”biden was trying to engineer a slow let down”
Reminds me of the George Carlin quote ;
F***king to save virginity .
Biden was a waste of time . His term was Obama 3.0 co-ordinated by Susan Rice from the back office . Both Biden and Trump are sleazeballs — the former ” sugar coated ” the latter ” bitter” . Not much of a choice between tweedle de and tweedle dum . 🤣
What is the difference between unraveling of the old and birth of the new? Both can be quite messy. We are all unraveling, biology is cyclical, dust to dust is a narrative which still seems to hold, give it time and that too may no longer be the case, sentient beings are poorly understood.
Dennis L.
What is the difference between believing in reality or falling into delusions?
Both can be uncomfortable, but at least the former is based upon reality while the latter is based upon, I have to say, nothing.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bessents-grand-strategy-use-tariff-negotiations-isolate-china-rest-world
Trump tells everyone to choose who they would rather do business with: USA or China. I think this could backfire. Most of the world does more trade with China than USA.
This site has a world map showing which countries do more trade with China vs the US, at two different dates.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-china-overtook-u-s-in-global-trade-dominance-2000-2024/
There is a huge difference between 2000 and 2024. China is ahead in a huge share of the world.
Looks like Bessent’s plan is in serious trouble.
That map is also in the below. The article begins by charting goods produced and energy consumption, so a good start.
“GDP rankings overwhelmingly place USA as the leading economy with a GDP of $30.3T followed by China at $19.5T.[13] Back in 2023 it was shown that GDP data obfuscate reality of economic power and that as a matter of fact Chinese economy overtook the USA in 2011 and by 2020 China overtook the G-7 economies combined”
https://fadilama.substack.com/p/trumps-tariffs-anti-china-or-anti
I agree that China overtook the G-7 countries years ago. We are not in a good position now.
The US should never have sent their factories to China or Mexico. Ross Perot called it, “the giant sucking sound”. Hollow threats by the US.
In Italy there is a way of saying:
“chiudere la stalla quando i buoi ormai sono scappati”
It translates into English as well.
people want high wages and cheap goods
unfortunately you cant produce both in the same country now
Norm,
Perhaps a corollary: the very rich want high profit margins and cheap goods. More is sometimes less and wealth cannot purchase who one is, only an appearance.
Give me a 160+ IQ or a billion dollars and the choice is trivial. The old man in one of the Harrison Ford movies, ” Chose wisely.”
Dennis L.
The very rich want power, not cheaper goods.
I have read about that. I don’t know what copilots will say but they have their own way of doing things which cannot be learned from informercials.
“People want high wages and cheap goods”
Not quite – first and foremost, capitalism wants profits, which have a tendency to fall.
From there we get periodic crises.
“The U.S. dollar’s role as the de facto global reserve currency is looking increasingly uncertain
“The dollar’s safe-haven and reserve status may be in jeopardy after Trump’s April 2 tariffs”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-tariffs-are-tarnishing-the-dollars-global-appeal-the-damage-may-be-hard-to-reverse-bdbf5847
I’m sorry, the full article came up for me from Google News, but then was behind a pay wall when I followed the link above.
No kidding:
The de facto global currency has changed several times in the past. The US has had its turn as long, or longer, than it theoretically should have. Countries with this role are in some sense the “first borrowers,” but they tend to run up too much debt in this role. Their currency tends to rise too high, relative to other currencies, making it impossible for them to sell very much goods to other countries.
Is it necessary to sell stuff to other countries? Who does that benefit? This is a different world now, scale does matter, but it is such a different game. Optimus-3 is coming, two battery packs, one charging with solar, one in use could be a game changer. Renewable energy used locally.
Think a universal skill set, think mining in space. A pollution free environment may well be worth much more than a polluted landscape secondary to processing “rare” earth elements.
Dennis L.
It is a whole lot easier to make complex goods with inputs from around the world compared to using only local inputs. With local inputs only, a person is likely to run short of some needed input, very quickly. This is especially the case if population is rising, so food production needs to rise, as well..
Trade existed from ancient times. Caravans lining up for miles at the oasis.
Optimus 3 is only coming to your imagination. It won’t ever be useful.
And the two battery packs would be made by rolling the excrements of Elon Musk and his many children, I guess.
NVIDIA unwinds . Riders in the storm — The Doors .
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/04/15/nvidia-makes-mess-afterhours-discloses-5-5-billion-in-charges-due-to-us-export-restrictions-on-its-h20-chip-for-china/
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2025-04-16/trade-wars-just-claimed-their-first-major-victim
It looks to me as if NVIDIA stock hasn’t done well since August 2024.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/?.tsrc=applewf
Its peak price was $148.34. It now seems to be $103.84 (after hours).
Norm , thanks for educating me on the importance of steel , I think all UK based readers ( David Butler etc ) will love this . Why British Steel had to be saved ?
”The reason why virgin steel is essential, is because it is a key component at the very base of any complex industrial economy. So that, while there are many applications which can use inferior steel grades and recycled steel, much of our critical infrastructure cannot (although, for now, we are able to import virgin steel at a cheaper price than we can make it at home). For example, we cannot manufacture and deploy wind turbines without virgin steel. And good luck keeping the Severn Bridge going if you intend using recycled steel in those essential suspension cables which are coming to the end of their expected life.”— Tim Watkins
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/04/13/thats-a-mighty-big-assumption-youre-making/
Later in the post, Tim Watkins says:
as has been universally pointed out….
the don is incompetent, whether in the business of business—or government.
to disguise this reality, he has surrounded himself with incompetents
Yes, but they are MY incompetents, better than YOUR incompetents last term. The ship is going down either way, but at least I won’t be lectured by DEI hires while it does.
Amen
Self-organizing systems don’t seem to care whether those operating within them are competent or not, or whether their motives are the “right” ones, based on someone’s view of the situation. There are many people making decisions, based on their perception of each situation.
Somehow, survival of the best adapted, perhaps helped by hand of the Creator, leads to an outcome that seems to work out less badly than most of us would assume would take place. The outcome is related to Odum’s Maximum Power Principle.
We saw the Don helping out at MacDonald’s.
He’s the Lord of the Fries!
Good one Tim.