All Posts Tagged With: "world economy"

From Florida, comes news of the first drop in population in 60 years. “Unemployment is soaring,” reports USA Today. “Florida is second to California on foreclosures.”

Yes, dear reader, there is trouble in the sand states…

What we suspect is that the upward trends of the last half a century have now reversed. We’re in a period when the excesses and mistakes of the boom/bubble period must be corrected.

When we were growing up, China was a ‘Red Menace.’ It was full of mad people doing mad things. They humiliated people by making them wear dunce hats and march through town. The Chinese made steel in backyard barbecues.

There are some other ways of keeping score that tend to tilt the game in China’s favor – at least, on paper. When you add up all the scores – it shows China a big winner. But by the end of the day, it isn’t at all clear that China’s economy is growing at such a breakneck speed.

At least…that’s been our worry. That too many people understand the inflation threat and are positioning themselves to avoid it. Everybody can’t be right. As they say on Wall Street, when everyone is thinking the same thing no one is thinking.

What is more likely is that over the coming months, we will get another deflationary scare. Any sell-off in the markets later this year will be met by an even larger stimulus from the policymakers and this will ultimately result in high inflation.

We report to you today from the banks of the Potomac. Our old friend, Congressman Ron Paul organized an off-the-record discussion with several other members of Congress. The subject was the financial meltdown…and the bailout. We were there to talk, of course, but we were more interested in listening.

The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit… end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.