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Guest Post: The Price of Growth
Submitted by ChrisMartenson.com contributing editor Gregor Macdonald
The Price of Growth
Growth. It's what every economist and politician wants. If we get 'back to growth', servicing debts both private and sovereign become much easier. And life will return to normal (for a few more years).
There is growing evidence that a major US policy shift is underway to boost growth. Growth that will create millions of new jobs and raise real GDP.
While that's welcome news to just about everyone, the story is much less appealing when one understands the cost at which such growth comes. Are we better off if a near-term recovery comes at the expense of our future security? The prudent among us would disagree.
Resurrecting American Export Strength
It’s easy to be skeptical that America could once again be a titan of global exports.
For a very long time, that role has mostly been relegated to countries in the developing world. America as an export economy? Somewhere along the 50-year transition from industrial manufacturer to voracious consumer, Americans have lost touch with such a remote possibility. Indeed, this phase of America's economic history is now quite settled.
A multi-decade outsourcing wave has left US workers to concentrate in the financial sector -- an over-weighting of talent we would come to regret after the crisis year, 2008.
Since 2009, though not well advertised, Washington has been pursuing a quiet policy to boost exports in nearly every sector, throwing investment capital at port and rail infrastructure, and getting the message out to regulators and state government. Now, after some very notable gains in which exports have advanced to nearly 14% of GDP, the President in his State of the Union Speech made it clear: The US would no longer cede a labor and manufacturing advantage to the rest of the world.
With that declaration, notice was served. It was perhaps not a coincidence when, the following day, the Federal Reserve articulated a zero-interest-rate policy that would be sustained for years. The US dollar reacted immediately and promptly returned to its downtrend. Has a new industrial policy now been unveiled?
(Painting: Alfred Bierstadt, 19th Century: Mt St Helens and Columbia River)
Rivers of Coal
The small city of St. Helens, Oregon sits astride the Columbia River, 25 miles closer to the Pacific Ocean than Portland. Over the past two years, a consortium of coal shippers and coal producers has been searching along the Pacific Northwest coast for a place to construct new export terminals. Coal, which is mined in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and which often travels long distances to power stations in the American South, would also find easy rail routes to Asian markets through the ports of the West Coast. Rebuffed already by Bellingham, WA, north of Seattle, and then rebuffed again by Longview, WA, north of Portland, the industry is trying once more -- this time at St. Helens.
To understand this persistence, one has to appreciate the current juncture in world coal markets. Global oil supply has been coming up against a ceiling for seven years now, since 2005. As a result, much of the world is trying to access increasingly more BTUs through natural gas and coal. Asia, which has built tremendous coal capacity, is a relentless user of coal. And US coal mines, older and with much higher extraction costs, are able to take advantage of rising world coal prices.
Moreover, as the US has been transitioning to natural gas for over 30 years to create electricity, that trend is only accelerating as its own coal plants age and retire. (see Regulation and the Decline of Coal, Smart Planet, January 2012, by Chris Nelder). The combined effect has caused a reversal in the long decline of US coal exports, which began to turn higher in 2002:
From a low of 40 million short tons at the start of the last decade, US coal exports have recovered and doubled to 80 million short tons as of 2010. One of the fastest growing subsets of our coal exports has been metallurgical coal, which has soared since 2008, climbing 60% alone in 2011, over the prior year.
More broadly, the US is already in position to become an exporter, not only of refined oil products, but of other energy products, too. For example, much of the additional refining capacity that was added to existing infrastructure last decade now serves as spare industrial capacity to export US oil products, such as gasoline, diesel, and other fuel oil.
The deep and sustained cut that Americans have made to their own oil product consumption is thus being converted to exports. And with such high levels of structural unemployment, it does not appear Americans will account for any new call on their own energy resources anytime soon.
Unless of course, we use those energy resources -- not for idle consumption, but for production.
New Energy Equations
As many are aware, the most gaping, yawning price discount found in the world today is in the comically cheap BTU found in North American natural gas. At less than $3.00 per million BTU, the energy content in natural gas can be purchased now at an 85% discount to the BTU content of oil. That is a value proposition and a pricing vacuum that -- save for the typically long time frame of energy transitions -- simply cannot stand.
Even if it takes 20 years to wean automobile-dependent economies off oil and back to electrified transport, someone, somehow, will find a way to perform physical tasks with natural gas that were previously completed using oil. As we know from history, it took Europe quite some time to transition from the Age of Wood to the Age of Coal, but the first country out of the gate was Britain, and the results were transformative. Something “like” this transition is happening today in the United States, because US demand for electrical power, produced from natural gas, coal, wind, and solar, is rising on a relative basis to our previous oil consumption.
For now, let’s leave aside some of the problems we will eventually run into as we hit the natural gas resource base harder. There will be environmental pressures, and constraints on water usage and water safety. And though it seems unlikely today, with natural gas trading at decade lows of $2.75/million BTU, there will eventually be a move higher in price. After all, North America is also gearing up to export natural gas, with proposed terminals in British Columbia and the US Gulf Coast.
The question is: should the US use this incredibly cheap BTU for export, to catch the much higher world price for LNG -- or should the US use this cheap energy as a competitive advantage, to make cheap electricity as a manufacturing input?
It appears the US is going to do both.
Already a certain virtuous circle is developing. Increased natural gas extraction is driving the need for more drilling equipment and energy infrastructure. This has induced global companies to revive metalcraft and steel operations in the depressed American Midwest. An intriguing story in this regard is the investment Vallourec of France is making in Youngstown, Ohio, which will produce specialized steel tubing for the oil and gas industry. Surely the fact that the US has some of the lowest electricity rates in the developed world is part of the attraction.
Getting the Government on Board
Boosting the extraction of natural resources will not be without deleterious effects.
As I explained in the January 3, 2012 report A Punch to the Mouth: Food Volatility Hits the World, the massive increase in US exports of food is wonderful economic news for the US farmer. But it also means a greatly expanded use of fertilizers, and smooths the delivery of a world price for food -- which American consumers must begin to pay. In food prices, and now in oil prices and coal prices, Americans must now bid for their own natural resources in a booming world market for commodities. Equally, many communities are discovering that natural gas extraction, oil and coal shipments, and the prospect of new export infrastructure are either dangerous to the environment or simply not an industry wanted by local communities.
Despite public perception, Washington is hardly antagonistic towards increased energy production, except in the most superficial, rhetorical way. Meanwhile, many of the agencies in Washington have directed their attention towards a re-industrialization of the US, and exports in particular.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) has directed a lot of its spending towards rail and port infrastructure in the past several years. A review of the DOT’s Tiger Grants since 2009 reveals wave after wave of targeted investments in the national ports of Miami, Los Angeles, Providence, Vancouver/Portland, and many others, with special attention to rail connectivity. The upsurge in port infrastructure investment is not lost on the shipping industry either, which began in early 2010 to note the rapid growth from the first round of TIGER grants from the previous year.
When President Obama originally announced the administration’s goal to double exports by 2015, it was not taken very seriously. In a New York Times piece in January 2010, a former head of the Council on Foreign Relations was quoted as saying, "How will he perform this miracle? It really is a mystery." Indeed, if you attended university anytime since 1980, and studied economics while there, you learned that America’s industrial era was mostly over. The 1990s put a fine point on that lesson: The US would create products conceptually at home, and have the products manufactured abroad, pocketing the arbitrage of cheap labor. That equation only accelerated in the past decade as cheap coal powered foreign manufacturing centers, primarily in Shenzhen China, while oil costs rose.
But this past week, President Obama laid bare the country’s new intentions:
We can’t bring every job back that’s left our shore. But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in 15 years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity. So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed. So my message is simple. It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away. We’re also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements we signed into law, we’re on track to meet that goal ahead of schedule. And soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago. I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products.
No doubt a good portion of this rhetoric is election-year posturing. That said, the data shows us that exports as a percentage of GDP have soared since Obama came to office. And while part of that ratio is due to punk GDP growth, the US is stepping up its export of industrial machines, medical equipment, telecommunications and transportation equipment, civilian aircraft, and engines.
However, from its current hollowed out position, the US is still seeing its greatest growth in commodity exports. That is, in everything from grains such as corn and wheat, to cotton, and even gold. For example, by value, the petroleum products discussed earlier are now America’s largest export.
This points to a constraint: If the US is going to export mainly commodities during its long road back to the export of finished goods, then it will be even more important to cap any rise in the US dollar.
In Part II: Prepare for the Collapse of the Dollar, we discuss the growing clarity around the big changes that are afoot to create an exports-driving jobs 'recovery'.
But it comes at the cost of drastically weakening our currency and sending increasingly strategic and depleting domestic resources overseas. Essentially, inflation and scarcity will increasingly become the themes of the future.
We address the key questions concerned readers should be asking: is this a price worth paying? What does this future look like and how should I be positioning for it?
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
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@las vegas
The thread is on GROWTH...
The answer is THERE IS NO FUCKING EXPONENTIAL GROWTH paradigm in a fractional reserve banking, fiat, world... Here... fucking 'lineskis' said it (above)...
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett
That's IT... End of story...
Zuckerman (and all his buddies ~ guess who they are)... Probably mostly align with the PROBLEM (not the SOLUTION)...
Now ~ If you have ANY solutions of your own to add to that... I'm sure people around here would be all ears (or EYES, as the case may be)...
Oh... I just re-read the entire thread and came up with this...
How does your version of a gold standard work when the prior version was manipulated into something that looked as maleable as ...fiat?
FOFOA has done a fair job at considering this issue. So far his version on the use of gold in the economy stands up better than what I know of prior use of gold as a backing agent and certainly better than walking around with Au in the pocket.... Savings in non dilutable physical gold and fiat subject to the discipline of a market place with a physical gold option...
---
Look my friend... If you're looking for 'the final solution', you "ain't never gonna find it"... That's ACTUALLY THE BEAUTY (of it all)... But I applaud your effort in trying... That's WHY we all live and strive (then die & [insert AFTER DEATH EXPERIENCE HERE])...
- To attempt
- Then to FUCK UP
- Then to ATTEMPT all over again...
... it's time to EMBRACE the horror!
A colossal data mining source, all wrapped in a pretty 'face' - america's book of digressed privacy on the world's stage - how quaint - the maximus preemptive-package, designed by homeland security,... co-opted by free-capitalism, and given the "TBTF Stamp-of-Approval" - by, and from,... yours truly, Uncle Sam's, "Neo-Government Capitalism"?
Welcome to the 21st Century of "Orwellian's Nightmare" - it don't get any better, or easier does it?
No, The Count, you didn't close your facebook account, you merely de-activated your account. They save everything that was previously posted, from what I understand. I deactivated my account too. One thing I did learn from my short tenure on facebook is that The United States of America is in for a long hard slog judging by the quality of posts on their "social networking" site. I can't understand how 50 year olds can carry on a conversation about farmville or cafe world. The end is near
***I find it very interesting that on the main page of yahoo they have Zuckerbergs' friend that made the $400million mistake by 'walking away from it (facebook)'
And OH! would you look at that... IPO for facebook shares coming out soon?!?! Nice...how much?
Because i do not want to make the same mistake and miss out like Zucky Puckys friend.
Illuminati controlled mass media doing what they do best for the masters...condition the herd.
We're a great country:
The triumph of Facebook as "The Great American Success Corporation" lies in the fact that we've arrived at the ultimate: commoditizing chit chat and gossip networks.
Here's our current national business model: we tax productive workers and businesses so that we can subsidize chit chat.
Some of The extra trillions used to bail out Wall Street will be funneled into the Facebook IPO, having almost no where else to go. And with a mighty post-IPO cash reserve they'll be able to run. For a while. All those extra trillions ultimately are a tax on productive workers since the bailout cash generated a debt burden that needs to be repaid despite impaired growth.
An old man use to always tell me that "if you can make something for nothing, that's what it's worth, nothing".
Currency is an exception to that rule.
Why? Because laws force creditors to accept it as payment, and governments accept nothing else as payment (of taxes and such).
If those laws didn't exist, USD might have collapsed to zero when Nixon closed the gold window.
Laws requiring acceptance of a currency in payment of debts is what keeps a fiat currency alive within a nation.
On top of that USD is required as payment by many creditors around the world for things like oil.
Getting USD adopted as world reserve currency, then removing its gold backing, was the greatest accomplishment of American bankers, allowing them to steal wealth from all over the world simply by printing more currency. It's the greatest scam in human history.
Now they don't even have to print it. Just punch a few keys on a computer and they can create trillions more dollars.
Gold backing is meaningless. They can lie about how much gold they have in reserve, how much currency they have in circulation, and they can change the backing factor any time they want ...like Roosevelt did in 1933, and Nixon did in 1971, removing any gold backing.
Gold redeemable is the only thing that counts ...assuming the amount of gold is printed on the currency.
If the amount of gold isn't printed on the currency, then gold redeemable is worthless because they can change the redeemability amount any time they want.
What would happen if USD were put back on fixed-redeemability gold standard, i.e. 1 USD = 0.xxxxx ounces of gold, printed on the currency?
1) Fed couldn't print any more dollars unless they obtain more gold.
2) No more bank bailouts with newly printed currency.
3) Huge insolvent Wall Street banks would go bankrupt and shut down.
4) Everyone depending on bailouts to stay in business would go bankrupt and shut down.
5) No more lending to the government with newly printed currency.
6) No more deficit spending, government would have to limit spending to tax receipts.
7) No more Euro - USD currency swaps with newly printed currency.
8) No more IMF contributions with newly printed currency.
9) No more foreign aid of any kind with newly printed currency.
10) No more inflation with newly printed currency.
11) No more stealing wealth from people with newly printed currency.
12) Interest rates would rise drastically, savers would be rewarded for saving again.
13) No more credit bubbles with newly printed currency.
14) No more easy-credit housing bubbles, stock market bubbles, nor any other kind of easy-credit bubbles.
15) No more pump-&-dump credit cycles.
16) No more fractional reserve lending.
17) No more need for the Fed. US government could shut down the Fed, seize its gold, and take over the currency job.
18) No more need for legal tender laws. People would gladly take US dollars in payment because they're redeembable for a fixed amount of gold that cannot be changed, it's printed right on the currency.
And yes they can do the same thing with silver
...which just happens to be what the constitution says, gold and silver.
These are 18 benefits I came up with just off the top of my head.
I'm sure you can think of more.
I agree with your sentiment. The thing that concerms me about gold is sourced to a FOFOA article that pointed out that more gold is held in private hands and uncirculated than is held by governments, It may be that a return to gold standards is the event that will permit these hands to continue the money monopoly.
I understand the flaws of fiat, and perhaps a combination of Au and Ag is a remedy, but what is lacking from the picture is a lack of popular understanding of the currents problems. Until populations awaken to the threat against them this shit will continue. I'm not optomistic. This game has been playing out for at least two hundred years and the truth is as depressing as living in the Matrix movie.
On the bright side, our passing on this planet is brief and any pain will eventually subside. No leaves this place alive or as the Tylers well put it: On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
So modern economics is about growth and more growth and moar, because moar, groath. That's not an economic system, that's the definition of cancer.
This guy is a propaganda mouthpiece.
Anyone who talks about global pricing of food, commodities, and energy in the same paragraph without mentioning EROEI, is a bit suspicious. Civilization took some time to transition from wood to coal? Coal to oil? Thanks, but we are transitioning down the EROEI, not up. The population isn't going to stop growing (on it's own). That predicament, all by itself, is worse than the coming collapse of the "petro" dollar... so I don't really want to hear about how the U.S. is doing a bang-up job of exporting resources and weapons (cuz that's all we got around this bitch, and not enough of the first).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRkq595NhD0&feature=related
A Short History of America by R. Crumb and Joni Mitchell
.
but at least we have diebold to modernize the election
process, bring democracy into the 21st century.
FACEBOOK = "do data mining to crunch all the election variables"... figure out all the results... Then create a story to "spin" the divergence variables from the "official DOUBLECHECKED" Diebold results...
win-win...
Good luck with exports as dollar fiat becomes the best little currency whorehouse in a worldwide neighborhood full of run down whorehouses.
BTW, Obeyme is talkin shit.
German whores were cheap in the 20s.
But all the the whips and black leather outfits were very expensive.
Price of growth : pollution, no rule of law, corporations taking over the government and the courts. Cops as always following orders even if it kills their kids down the line.
Things won't change with peaceful protests and boycotts. Why? Because the majority of people will just ignore it.
You think the founding fathers protested peacefully the British?
From Ten Tea Parties : Patriotic Protests That History Forgot :
In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, increasing numbers of Maine settlements were turning radical. Falmouth voted to ban the selling and drinking of tea in town, but since its merchants had 2,500 poinds of the stuff on hand -- a heavy investment -- they were not considered trustworthy enough to keep the resolve. A handbill soon appeared, produced by the local Committee for Tarring and Feathering, declaring that no one in town should doubt what would happen to those who bought or consumed tea. The notice was signed: "Thomas Tarbucket, Peter Pitch, Abrahan Wildfowl, David Plaister, Benjamin Brush, Oliver Scarecrow, and Henry Hand-Cart." Falmouth merchants got the idea and stopped selling tea. -- Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot by Joseph Cummins, pp. 138-139.
Most (present-day) Tea Party constituents have a good grasp of the events that occurred during the Boston Tea Party, but they would do well to understand the details of the other patriotic protests described in this book. All are remarkable, because each town staged its protest in its own unique way. Patriots burned tea in Greenwich and Wilmington and Annapolis; made it disappear (and reappear) in York; dumped it overboard in New York and Charleston; and rejected it in Philadelphia and Edenton. And all manner of people participated in the protests. The working-class laborers of Manhattan, the distinguished ladies of Edenton, the mysterious Swamp Men of Greenwich -- all were united behind a common cause. For the first time in the nation's history, Americans banded together AS AMERICANS. -- pp. 201-202.
Thanks for the interesting tidbid of history. MIlestones
"For the first time in the nation's history, Americans banded together AS AMERICANS"
They beat the native "Americans" banding together?
The day the FED either hints at tightening, or actually does tighten, is the day you see the biggest market crash in human history, both bonds and stocks.
Thus, you are more likely to see the tooth fairy than the Fed hint at tightening.
Very glad I am not the only one who sees 'growth' not as a good thing but as a fix to a debt junky world? When India or China have a year with 7% growth the economists have an orgasm. But who realizes that 7% per year of anything means doubling in 10 years? Where are the resources going to come from. How is infrastructure supposed to keep up? Remember 'overpopulation' which was a big deal back in the 70s? Now you hear zippo about that. Why? Because the entire world's economy is build on the fallacy of growth, in order to pay back debt. And unofficially the US wanted all the illegals to come in because us gringos weren't making enough babies to create demand/growth. The root of all evils is our finance system dear friends. And those exact people have successfully infiltrated our government. There is no way your are going to get elected to any position of power without the bankers financing your campaign. And then they expect a whole lot in return. Do not even think for one moment that we all can vote ourselves out of this mess.
India and China are time bombs. Yeah there's growth but it's money concentration.
At some point, it will break and there will be massive revolts if not civil wars.
there's a buffer zone about to ex'plode, called pakistan - this is the catalyst
Problem is that nobody understands the exponential function. Permanent growth (what every modern economist wants) is unsustainable. So a few posters above were right, it's like a cancer.
Albert Bartlett used to explain the exponential function very well but I'm sure there would be a lot of denial today if people listened to his lectures.
You're absolutely right, NO ONE, not one single human who ever lived understands the exponential function, not even Albert Bartlett.
Besides,
Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of. - Werner von Braun
So, in our quest to escape we fuck up the planet. What if we don't get off? Oops?
Sorry, humans are going to vanish. Get over it.
Clearly, the extinction of an ever growing number of species, all the pollution, overpopulation, urbanization, desertification, and all the rest of the problems on Earth are all caused by the Space Program.
No you fucking idiot. It just means if a civilization does not manage to "make it" in an "optimal environment", it sure as hell won't make in suboptimal environments, without spreading and surviving with the same pattern, as a pandemic.... a virus incapable of sustaining itself even just SHOT-TERM (evolutionary-scale), unless it already is sucking from another new teritory.
I for one (but hey, from a cultural POV, i'm an alien, so my opinion morally may not mean much) do NOT wish the "human species" to survive, as an aggressive expansionist virus, but as something else. Something that is closer to an "efficient and responsible farmer", than a sickness.
The "good thing" (from my POV) is that opportunities out there are SO BAD, that humans indeed won't expand even interplanetary, without solving their sickness. Opportunities out there.... especially the further you go... aren't just a little bit worse than earth.... they are iron-fist "unless you evolve, you can't do it"-style..... so, this isn't even a matter of taste.... evolve or stay here... and if you cannot sustain here for the next few MILLION years (a LOT (lot!!!!!!!!!!!!) of time to evolve/change), go fuck off, slacker on a galactic scale!
I'll lay you 2-1 odds that "Werner von Dinosaur" was thinking the exact same fucking thing...
In fact... he was probably even giving a research study paper on it just moments before a 6 mile wide comet from the Oort cloud entered the atmosphere...
Negative one on writing us off, assuming no interest in your recommended reading material AND being too lazy to post a link to boot: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4364780292633368976 . Will you or will you not let this happen again Superfly?
Love hopium talk and more saving Greek deals. Obama will have no problem with getting debt over 20 trillion soon. Then onward to 30 trillion. Bernanke and the Federal Currency printers is behind them with the magic money that appears out of nowhere. The best things in life are free.
Amwaynomics!!!
Pursue nat gas at the perils of feeding right into a central planners' wet dream: scarcity of resources (the one that really counts) water.
If we want to export our way into a recovery we need to come up with stuff people want to buy that's actually made here-- everything about currency manipulation is debt related which happens to be the onle growth we've actually seen.
Try central planning or destroy debt and allow regional growth based on regional competencies to begin? I'd prefer the latter.
"we need to come up with stuff people will buy"
Ya mean like this:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/self-guided-bulle/
So that's how JFK got shot, one shot by Lee Harvey Oswald using an EXACTO bullet sent back in time. It all makes sense now.
Will America be able to go back to exporting finished goods without first "killing the banks"?
Growth -> Saturation -> Conflict
Yeast cells, mindless single-celled organisms, when put into a suitable medium, will initially grow without limit, exponentially multiplying and expanding until their environment is choked by their very numbers and poisoned by their own wastes. Thereafter their numbers plummet, as all or most of the yeast cells die.
Is this an appropriate and desirable pattern for humanity to follow? Are we not more intelligent than yeast?
Are we not more intelligent than yeast?
NO.
it could be YES, if you let it grow on ya
Nice.
Yes, we are not.
lol, self evident answer. Touche!
Fucking 'funniest' exchange I've ever read around these parts... Keep it going! By all means!
Are we not more intelligent than yeast?
Are you talking about human beings in general? Or just about ZH posters?
If yeast limited their reproduction rate or perhaps practiced zero population growth, then some other organism that was less 'politically correct' would come along, overwhelm the yeast in terms of population, use up all the resources, and quickly drive the yeast into extinction. Can you propose a better strategy for the yeast to follow?
No, I cannot propose any such better strategy --- because yeast are mindless, unicellular organisms, and can only act as their DNA directs them, like a newborn baby crying, breathing and shitting, with no self awareness nor volition of its own.
My point was, must we as supposedly intelligent being follow the EXACT same doomed and deterministic path as a clump of yeast?
That is a very interesting question. For billions of years, all kinds of organisms with varying degrees of intelligence have multiplied exponentially whenever possible with little or no consideration for the future. Apparently because this was the best survival strategy the evolution could devise.
Is there a better strategy? Or is there something about intelligence which fundamentally changes the rules of the game once a certain threshold is reached?
I wish I knew.
To judge from most of human history, the answer would appear to be "no".
To be or not to be? Tell the Undertaker we are, as we are choice. Light and darkness just IS
Of course we are smarter. We can adapt our medium to continue growing beyond the normal limits imposed on lesser lifeforms. Someday, we may be able to expand beyond our jar into other jars.
I get it... In the end... SOMEDAY... With our unlimited brainpower... we may all become "Jarheads"...
We need to stop going after ``jobs``.
What do we really need? Food, shelter and amusement.
We already produce more food than needed.
There's already enough shelter for everyone, but a lot of it could be fixed/improved.
Amusement, there's the internet, which has all the amusement you need.
Really, most people don't need a job.
End the fed, write off all the loans on the books.
And the most important of all : ENFORCE THE GODDAMN LAWS.
"We already produce more food than needed."
What's that disclaimer on prospectus? (how do you pluralize?) "Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance." You assume that this condition will continue. Might want to peek behind the curtain and see how massively unsustainable our modern food system is.
The overwhelming numbers of humans on this planet are engaged in manual labor to produce food. Really think that we'll be different? without cheap energy?
The SYSTEM is incapable of functioning in anything other than growth-oriented. That's what debt is about. TPTB ain't going to give up the debt model because that's what keeps us all enslaved (and them, carrying forward their inheritances, in power).
100% of the time overshoot leads to a massive dieoff.
There is no need to "secure jobs".... there only is a need to secure the mandatory costs of the workforce (if they aren't covered, then the green shots kick in, because it kinda looks bad and is risky to just let millions of people die).
Applying green shots, and discounting the workforce below sustainable pay (wage dumping), doesn't exactly achieve that.... more like the opposite.
"The solution" is so simple and "(un-)common sense", that it is illegal: Just ensure that wage levels are high enough for the population to be almost fully employed at reasonable weekly workhour levels per individual, yet low enough to not overly cut into profits of employers.... and anyone who rejects that, or tries to circumvent it - show him the door out of the country. The same goes for imports of countries who "try to boost exports by dumping wages and a few other things".... tax the imports! Shield the nation from parasites, instead of engaging in a race to the bottom, of which nation provides the lowest slaves! Actually, you can even go one step further.... tax parasitary importing corporations via their imports (basically saying: "we don't want your imports!"), and then redistribute that income, to give corps who produce AND sell in your country, a little bonus. Why stay in the defensive? Go into the offensive.
What is done right now instead? A wealth transfer from the workforce and domestic market, towards multinational overlords.... both on the production (pushers) and on the sales (junkies) side.... and that is supposed to be......... good for the involved nations, rather than those who profit from it.
In other words, working as intended.
truly enlightening - bravo!
thankyou chris
Bonds and FX setups
http://capital3x.com/trades/bonds-and-fx-setups/
A resurgence of US industry is a given. Question is, will it be US of the 40's and 50's or will it be China style? The thrashing of Unions (and it's not all good) and major deterioration of real wages has set the Industrialists up with a prime slate to retool dilapidated factories and capitalize on them.
I will embrace any administrative, congressional or state plan to pump manufacturing in the US but I just don't trust the terms it will be delivered with. My suspicion is that any grants or tax breaks will be directed towards companies who need it the least. Why am I so suspicious? Here's why.
I once worked for a company that received massive DOE grants. What did they do with the money? 30% went to VP's and above as bonuses. The rest went towards perpetual motion machines. I personally knew of many start ups that could have used that money more effectively and had no chance and that was the point. Corps use your tax money to collude with the gov. to eliminate competition.
For whatever reason, exports are associated with "good"....
Reasons:
- exports are associated with production
- production is associated with jobs
- production is associated with a trade surplus
Question:
- Can only exports create production?
- Can only exports create jobs?
- Why would a corp have an export-bias anyways? Why would a good primarily sold in other nations, and less so in the own nation? Let's start with the pro-arguments: The own products may be superior. The own nation may provide an oversupply of ressources needed for the products. Question: How often does do those reasons apply??? Question 2: How often is the reason instead, to produce at prices (wages) lower than for the workforce sustain itself.... and then sell to other populations which's purchasing power gets pumped with debt (thus, ABOVE sustainable sale prices)? Greenshots to produce AND greenshots to sell? How often is the reason for the import/export shism, simply to let corps produce below fair price, and sell above fair price.... basically a cartell arangement? Basically, just a forceful wealth transfer from populations to large corporations? Ponzi anyone?
- Regarding the above point: Is it in the populations interest, to strengthen the above? If not, is it in the populations interest to strenghten import and export biases? Or do they instead represent the symptoms of everything that is wrong with national economies and finances?
It's interesting to note that under the classical gold standard, NOBODY obsessed over, or maybe even talked about, trade imbalances, exports vs. imports, or national trade deficits --- because the monetary system itself automatically handled such imbalances. It is only after the death of the gold standard that this revolting, reactionary re-emphasis of mercantilism reappeared.
@akak
You have ZERO understanding of American banking history under the gold standard.
There were MASSIVE imbalances in our own country, where gold was hoarded in select NYC banks causing other banks throughout the US to get liquidated for no good reason. JP Morgan, the man, and a few other bankers were able to singlehandedly determine which banks survived and which didn't based solely on their access to much of the gold in this country.
Time and time again, you display ignorance on very, very simple matters.
Max Fishcer.
Your ongoing hateful campaign against libertarians and sound-money advocates has been abundantly apparent to every honest, truth-seeking member here for quite some time now. However, I refuse to be goaded into responding to your lies and willfully antagonism merely to feed your perverted lust for revenge against your intellectual and moral betters after having been trounced by them time after time, only to repeatedly return under yet another alias here to continue your sick pattern of pro-statist trolling.
Now, go tell me again how wrong I am, and amuse me that much more.
And, once again you refuse to defend your position.
Here's the plain stupid defence of his "position":
Under a sound money doctrine, you can run imbalances, until you run out of wealth.
Under fiat, you can run it much further than "(un-)common sense", until even fiat capitulates to the by then gigantic imbalance.... at which point lot's of upper-pyramid parasites will have had plenty of opportunity, to exploit the added "anti-truth"-buffer, to pump their wealth via fear-propaganda.
The imbalances and concepts on their own, aren't specific to sound money.... it's just that sound money makes imbalances more imminent.... which someway is important in a society, that reacts more strongly to short-term dangers, than longterm dangers.
Or in short: Fiat let's one ignore defects for longer, and abuse the added time-buffer, while discouraging intentions against the imbalances, for a longer time. Fiat just let's such imbalances grow bigger, than sound money.
gold was hoarded in select NYC banks causing other banks throughout the US to get liquidated for no good reason
...and the problem with that is???????
See... The PROBLEM (as you seem to allude to), has NOTHING TO DO WITH JUSTICE...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg
You think you can FIX everything...
YOU CAN'T... You'll learn that in time... But thanks for playing!
That is not true. Mercantilism, was born and flourished in an era of PM backed currencies. It is true that trade imbalances are self-correcting under a gold standard, but the mechanism of correction, deflation, is unpleasant for the country running the trade deficit. It means that money becomes scarce and people have problems paying their debts. This was the main reasons why the British initiated the Opium Wars.
True enough, but engaging in the Opium Wars (one of the truly ugliest and most shameful episodes of the 19th century by any so-called "civilized" power) was only an effective repudiation by the British of the discipline of a hard-money standard, by refusing to cut their imports of Chinese goods as their funds to pay for those goods grew scarce, as well as a short-sighted, xenophobic, mercantilist response by China in refusing to allow the widescale importation of British goods into China.
I agree with your main point that the classical gold standard had a much better method for addressing trade imbalances than what we have with now with fiat currencies. I was just pointing out that it wasn't completely painless.
It's funny that in ancient times countries would fight wars and the winner would demand tribute from the loser. For example, the Romans would force the Egyptians to send them grain. Whereas now, if a country tries to send us low cost agricultural products, we consider it a hostile act.
What little I know of the Opium Wars seems to suggest otherwise.
[edit- must.type.faster.]
A resurgence of US industry is a given. Question is, will it be US of the 40's and 50's or will it be China style?
_______________________________________________________
Absolutely. Given as given is.
Not like concentration of wealth has not rendered the US so expensive that thinking to live on Chinese wages should be out of order...
Admit it --- YOU are the one who is responsible for translating all those cryptically-written product manuals for Chinese-made products into (mangled) English, aren't you?
Maybe part II includes the missing pretense - a systematic approach to restoring law and order within the ruling class. Nah, this article reads like it was paid for.
Probably within the next 10-20 years we won't have to worry about growth - the likelyhood of a supervirus or plague which would wipe out massive portions of human life will allow us to regroup as a species and potentially get on the right track.
everyone is a ZEROTOHERO in their own mind (& in each instance)...
Then, they find that 'going it alone' is not feasible...
So... they form themselves into CLANS & attempt to succeed thru aggregate numbers &/or coercion (sometimes referred to as 'the squeaky wheel')... Some even know how to spell 'likelihood'...
THANKFULLY... There is 'nature'... which then... WIPES OUT "massive portions of human life [sic &] allow(s) us to regroup as a species and potentially get on the right track...
There... FIXED IT...
One little problem, there won't be an "us".
Why is it that people who envision a massive die-off always think that they will be among the survivors?
It might be a small tribe in Africa or Brazil that escapes the carnage...
The onion, besides reporting the election results, has also reported the answer to growth has been found.
http://www.onion.com/articles/scientists-look-onethird-of-the-human-race-has-to,27166/
We have a word for something that just grows and grows, it's called a tumor.
Or Bernankes' ego.
The universe.
The universe is not growing, the universe is expanding.
It's the nothingness between stuff that is expanding, like our economy.
Why are the nitpickers so often blind to their own inaccurateness.
Go back to Correctingeveryonesgrammarland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZUOG2EHh-o
What a piece of drivel this article is. Exporting raw materials is for the third world. All the U.S. has to do to get all the jobs and wealth back is to enact a tit-for-tat trade policy. China, Japan, Korea, taiwan, Germany all block U.S. exports through a myriad of stifling rules and currency manipulations. Respond in kind and the jobs would soon reappear. The more we deal with mercantilist countries the more we lose. Only the billionaires in America benefit from globalism.
Uh, that sounds as if the USA is not a "mercanitlist"-ruled nation..... and if your answer is "it would still work", then my answer is "yeah right, and it would work for ANY other nation rejecting the current popular bipolarity, and instead focuss on selfsustainability, fairness and efficiency".
The more we deal with mercantilist countries the more we lose. Only the billionaires in America benefit from globalism.
_______________________________________
So there are only billionaires in the US. Because the US of A is a product of globalism...
The coal industry is crap really. Make it way cleaner or end it totally.
I keep seeing ads for "clean coal" on TV, so it looks like they already took care of it.
It's pretty clean, as long as you don't actually live near the mountain top that they're pulverizing (and leaching shit into your water).
The wealthy never live next to shitting conditions. They just beat the drums for "betterment," which, as we know, makes things "clean" for those who don't actually have to get their hands dirty...
And can you quantify, for me, the difference between a 'scrub a dub dub' job for an "x" output compares to a years aggregate spewing of the worlds volcanoes... for instance?
That might be interesting...
"There is growing evidence that a major US policy shift is underway to boost growth. Growth that will create millions of new jobs and raise real GDP."
No comprendo, Sir.
Why would you write such a thing?
WOW, a half way sensible article has sneaked in.
People, start to look at the bigger picture.
"Growth" is the idealogy of a cancer cell. A quick look at history shows that empires, governments, systems come and go. They never grow forever. A quick look at biology reveals that people don't grow forever; they have a certain mass and height they attain, a certain peak of intellectual and physical vigor, and then a slow decline, and then death.
The human population did grow, but at a very slow pace until 1900 or thereabouts. Then the exponential explosion occurred and this universal obsession with growth.
We aren't going to grow anymore! The debt won't be paid back, the fiat money will crash, the fossil fuels will be burnt up. And the human population will be sure to follow.
Nowhere in philosophy, nowhere in the great religions, nowhere in science do you see this false idol of infinite growth.
Open your minds and get some gold and silver.
"Nowhere in philosophy, nowhere in the great religions, nowhere in science do you see this false idol of infinite growth."
Genesis 8 might be a case in dispute of this.Export of raw materials is not the same as exporting manufactured goods. That is the difference between the First World and the Third World.
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/
Low cost natural gas is a gift. Let the markets run with it and we will see a reindustrialization.
that gift, LNG, will be on a ship to asia and parts unknown along with everything else that can be dug up for at least half a decade.....
Secret: there's not enough nat gas to power "reindustrialization". And it's still not cheap enough. It'll get exported to fuel the boo elsewhere. That's how the world works
C.E. We will have methane gas coming out of our ass in a few years as thee earth warms--we simply need to capture it and put it into liquid form. Good grief Charley Brown. And converting cars to gas is quite cheap. Milestones
I watched for 30 years with dismay as the manufacturing infrastructure was abandoned, dismantled or exported. Manufacturing requires facilities, equipment, and skills. The first can be built easily but alot of new Mexican facilities were built, put idle and abandoned in the 1990's for china who had a then 1/10 the mexican labor rate
(1/10 the US labor rate).. I suspect many of those properties would be retooled and reoccupied before considering building new facilities domestically. Machine tools are for the most part foreign built and require import to support new domestic production and that, last I checked, is not export. Lastly are the skills required to support manufacturing and in a nutshell we have spawned an entire generation of waiters, waitresses and fast food workers. Anyone who thinks these people could swiftly be retrained for skilled factory work is delusional. Anyone who thinks we have an adequate labor force that could train them is also delusional. The old guys who had these skills are bouncing grand babies and working as WalMart greeters. You just do not learn that stuff from a book and it cannot be done by coding a program then pushing a button.
During my career i watched manufacturing plants go from making a variety of product entirely in house, with a huge skill base and holding tons of parts inventory to specializing in a single product, with imported parts, whose parts inventoried at a level of no more than a few days.
You watch, now labor will be cheap as the dollar gets thrown under the bus, commodities will rise and parts inventories will soar as protection against rising commodity prices. I suspect mexican manufacturing infrastructure idled by china will be reoccupied first since they also have a better skill base by also benefiting from the US manufacturing exodus..
It will take a decade to begin to build a decent manufacturing base domestically. It will take half a decade to train enough skilled work force to support production and that's on assumption products compete in foreign markets profitably. We are starting at a competitive disadvantage because the skills required now reside in Asia or sit with one foot in the grave here.
Forget not that that this situation was deliberate and financially engineered..
Don't hold your breath. There's way too much competition out there. And nobody's gonna sit tight and watch the dollar tank. They'll race it to the bottom. It'll be cheaper to build a plant with workers in Greece
You are absolutely 100% g_d damned right.
Everyone's idea of "making something" revolves around "call someone in China."
And we know all about their quality controls.
Considering that we designed the Saturn V (50 YEARS AGO!), we could not build it again in any short amount of time.
All that knowledge is lost, replaced with the latest MBA approved off-shored solution.
Master Lock eh? Funny how the crime associated with high unemployjment brings back a security company, now when Apple's employees are set to jump from roofs in cleveland, then i'll believe
(Reuters) - House Republicans will propose legislation on Tuesday calling for $260 billion in spending on transportation infrastructure for up to five years, an election-year proposal touted as a job creator in a tough economy.
lol
And they'll turn around and add in $500 more billion to "defense," as they call themselves the party of "small govt" (smaller govt just means that they can suck taxpayer money faster).
what disengenuous shite. megaprojects take a much longer window.
try 10-20 years at least. that's a poison pill from cynical pork peddlers.
I'll believe it when both houses commit at least a trillion for ten years.
Let the govt. pay for cars to be converted to nat gas.
Germany's unemploymen rate in the summer of 1922??? 1%.. They had a booming export economy.
USA inc. exports plenty, most notably the largest exporter of Democracy in the world whilst at the same time also being the planets largest manufacturer and supplier of arms.
coincidence? I think not.
but here's the interesting part, the IDF, for example, fly's around in F-16 and F-15 jets that are more advanced than what a large majority of our own USAF pilots fly in, same can be said for other nations who purchased the advanced blocks of these machines. largely because the F-22 was supposed to replace both fighters currently in service so there was no need and from what I understand no budget to significantly upgrade the fleet of legacy fighters. of course, raptor production was shut down after delivering only 189 of the originally planned 2,000 or so aircraft. so now here we are with no significant number of 5th gen fighters and an aging fleet of aircraft that badly needs to be upgraded, if not replaced.
but here is where it gets even better. instead of re-directing resources to that end, the money simply went to another next gen cash sinkhole project, the JSF program aka f-34 lighting. it's (hoped) cheaper production cost was more attractive and the fact that it had international backers to help share the cost of development and guaranteed export made it the heir apparent to replace the canceled raptor program.
until now. the project is way over-budget and behind schedule and now congress is beginning to question if it is even necessary, expected production has already been scaled back much like the raptor and if the recent pattern holds, it will may end up than the US buys few if any, while countries like Turkey who holds a production license once it is finished, could build them till there harts content. meanwhile, GD has recently unveiled it's newest version of the F-15 the "Silent Eagle" to the international market, it has all the latest stealth tech, electronic warfare, radar and weapons capabilities and congress isn't even looking at it.
so the irony is US arms manufactures are busy selling the latest and greatest, just not to us. I can just imagine the headline when a USAF pilot gets burned in an engagement because the F-15 he was flying in was inferior to the one he was engaged with. Or when a JSF Lighting produced in Turkey shoots down some Israeli F-16's over Iran.
exporting at it's finest.
US military aircraft programme (and that of plenty other nations who follow its premise) bullshit.
Agreed
Your premise? (the one of US air superiority being in any danger, as well as it being a significant issue now).... bullcrap!
If you want to discuss military tactics from a purely hypothetic (illusionary) sports-game POV..... be my guest, i'll bite and discuss (i'm fascinated about the subject myself)...... yet portraying it as any REAL issue? Go fuck off zombie/puppet!
So, your campaign slogan would be: "Bombing our way to prosperity!"?
Come now - in Korea US Sabres flying with derivatives of Rolls-Royce jet engines were outperformed by Soviet MIGs with copied Rolls-Royce engines flown by Soviet pilots in Chinese markings. The British fought in the Falklands and found the Argentinians had more modern British radar than the British did.
Soon our First World problems won't mean shit because we will have a new set of Third World problems.
Growth is the veneer that can cover up the cracks in the foundation. In the make-believe world of John Meynard Keynes, simple answers like "growth is good" remedy all ills.
Growth, even synthetic, debt-induced growth is inherently inflationary (more demand for money). This is good news for the one-percenters whose wealth is invested in stocks and for homeowners with upside-down mortgages. At the same time, inflation is bad for ALL of us. Low inflation (under 2%) is not fatal IF it is contained.
The reality is that inflation will make interest rates rise. Not the Fed (supply of money) but the markets (expression of demand). When that happens, we are hosed. We must either borrow more or tax more to service the exploding federal debt. Neither option is conducive to sustained growth.
In spite of what you hear in the debates or SOTU, our mfg base has left the US primarily because our labor is too expensive. Americans are not willing to work for $2/day or less like the Filipinos, Chinese, Malaysians, Cambodians, Laotians, Peruvians, etc. nor could they live on anything close to that in the US. Mfg will not return just b/c we repealed some onerous reg.
Raising tariffs on imports is inflationary in itself. Tariffs are reciprocal and thus doubly inflationary. Let's add a 15% tax to everything that is imported and exported! How would that help growth? It would not bring mfg back.
I am envious of all the attention mfg is getting. It must be a misdirection of sorts. Or, they have not thought this through. Mfg uses lots of natural resources and especially lots of energy. US mfrs already outsource (AAPL) and foreign mfrs already insource (MBZ, Nissan, Honda, Toyota, et al).
Would we be better off if we had an industrial policy that encouraged companies that used none of the world's precious resources, produced enormous value to society but no pollution, and costs nothing to deliver? Industries like software, movies, books, inventions, ideas -- intellectual property. Newsflash: AAPL is a software company. The hardware is commoditizing faster than you can say that.
Yet we hear nothing about advanced training, income tax relief, sales tax exemption and like subsidies for software engineers, programmers, graphics designers, user experience experts, software testers, publishers, authors, producers, directors and actors -- it is all about mfrs. "What is good for GM is good for the country" is a last century adage. Let MSFT, GOOG, ORCL, CSCO, AAPL, LNKD, LIKE, et al have the stage.
"Let MSFT, GOOG, ORCL, CSCO, AAPL, LNKD, LIKE, et al have the stage."
This is just another "technology will save us" argument.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's all pretty much crap. It's NOT going to continue to displace people w/o increasing the threats against it: Karl Marx was right in this regard.
Ah, yes, sure. How old was that Keynes? Was he a biblical figure or somelike?
Because during the nineteenth, with the US of A program of transfer of land, all surrendered by mesmerized Indians who saw the incredible potential US citizenism represented for, that was not growth?
Current Ponzi is US citizenism started, 1776, July, 4th.
I doubt Keynes was born.
It is Gostak distimism alone that is responsible for the current plight of the doshes. When distimism is outlawed, only outlaws will distim doshes.
WTF????
Washington is NOT "antagonistic" to energy production? We have not had a new nuclear(the real future of energy) plant built in decades! They just stoped a pipeline from Canada! They have been harassing US drillers (on shore and offshore) for decades! The idiots are now working on ways to stop fracking!
As far as growing out of out finanacial situation by destroying our currency so Americans standard of living is so poor that they will work for anything. No only is that stupid but it sounds like something Obama would do - he's an idiot. Great Plan! This article sounds like Obama propaganda.
And The Wurlitzer Plays on ....
This is a FINITE planet, there ARE finite resources. Extracting resources faster is NOT the way to sustainability- strength through exhaustion- yeah, talk about fucking idiots!
The ENTIRE reason the currency is collapsing is because it's not backed by ANYTHING. This wasn't something Obama did*! (yeah, sure, he continued the bail-out-the-bankers theme started under GW, but this thing was DONE before it was even started, it was finished when it was modeled on infinite growth on a finite planet)
Why can't people get this simple shit rather than getting distracted by soap operas (political distraction)?
* I detest him like I detest all the other politicians and corporate elitist "leaders."
I doubt that. But then again, I doubt that even more. Wishful thinking.
The author acknowledges that peak [cheap] oil is real and has been around for several years... but it's peak [cheap] oil that is the BE ALL, END ALL of the currently system we live in. Just skip forward to 2:23:43 of the latest Zeitgesit movie and watch the "Beyond The Peak" part about peak oil... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
Maybe Martenson is just trying to ease folks into thinking about limits. This piece was picked by TD, it wasn't necessarily written FOR ZH (the choir).
Seven billion people is 6 billion too many. There, I said it, so what are we going to do about it? ANy "miracle" energy beakthrough would result in the same can-kicking that the debt dumbassery has, so how do we deal with too many mouths?
Just wanted to point out a few things. I'll be brief.
1. Some of you should really get a day job or something.
2. Things that grow eventually die.
3. Coal? Duh. Gas baby!!!
YOU SIR, ARE A FUCKING IDIOT ! Why would you even consider for one second that exporting ANY of America's energy sources could be a good idea? SHORT TERM POTENTIAL GAIN = LONG TERM PAIN. Also, I would like to express that the only reason American labor is "more efficient" is that we have had a MAJOR BLOODLETTING and are now doing more with less. Also, if a worker gets a pay reduction, then by your metrics that worker has become more efficient. YOU'VE GOT YOUR HEAD UP YOUR ASS! My wife, for her years of good service received in 2009 a reduction in pay from around 90k to 52k. I HAVE SUFFERED A SIMILAR FATE. WE WILL NOT BE GOING OUT TO BUY A NEW CAR ANY TIME SOON, NOR WILL WE BE CONSIDERING UPGRADING OUR LIVING ARRANGEMENTS IN THE NEAR FUTURE. WELCOME TO "YOUR MORE EFFICIENT WORKER" you blind ass fuck. Get out of your ivory tower and go talk to some real people for a few months. Then come back and 'upgrade' this pittiful excuse of a worthy article.
I think you should re-read the article. Martinsen is telling you how it's going to be. He's giving you an advantage, take it or not.
Stop, look at the world, how it really works, not how they say it works then decide how you can take advantage of what is coming.
Also, by CHRIS MARTENSON having posted this article it discredits HIM (CHRIS) and EVERYTHING HE AND HIS WORK TO DATE HAVE ACCOMPLISHED ! CHRIS, I thought we were headed for a future of "less" - not more. Are you running out of articles to post?
Eh? No, he's been pretty consistent for the last five years or so. The only questions have been how exactly it'll play out. Depression, Inflation, hyperinflation and that's down to policy decisions. It seems Stagflation is the choice made. Not a huge surprise.
Really I recommend you take heed and get your asset allocations and job lined up now, before it becomes blindingly obvious to the masses.
The industrial behemoth KRUPP was running at full capacity in Weimar Germany durring hyperinflation because it was "competitive". Is that what you want for America?
It had huge contracts for weaponry. Contrary to populist history books, Re-armament in Germany began in 1919 when Germany started cooperation with Russia. Krupp was making weapons and hiding the output from Allied Control Commission inspections. It was Adolf Hitler in 1933 who ended cooperation with the USSR
Heyoka Bianco
I heard TPTB are supposed to take care of that problem later this year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjjIy1DO0gs
The price of pursuit of growth-at-all-costs is just another sorrowful example of how short-sighted policy makers have become.
http://theinternationalperspective.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/daily-comment-%E2%80%93-4th-february-2010-the-price-of-immediate-growth/
Economic Growth led by new growing companies ripened for Wall Street to consolidate and sell off to Korean conglomerates should help pay down the Debt Wall Street has built up. Entrepreneurship is now the production of Cash Crops for Retail by Government-insured Wall Street brokerages
the price of growth is always death
and digestion.
something dies, digested and something is born
or grows.
no? how can you be in two places at once
when you're nowhere at all?
fiat money, first base. now i'm all mixed up.