Terminal Triangle: Peak Oil, climate change and global economic meltdown

A DIARY OF THE ONSET OF THE GREATER DEPRESSION,

Vulture restructuring is a purging cure for a malignant debt cancer. The reckoning of systemic debt presents regulators with a choice of facing the cancer frontally and honestly by excising the invasive malignancy immediately or let it metastasize through the entire financial system over the painful course of several quarters or even years and decades by feeding it with more dilapidating debt......

Driving this change is a growing concentration of power in the

financial and banking sector. That, in turn, unleashed a process

called FINANCIALIZATION with the economy dominated by a

vast CREDIT AND LOAN COMPLEX every bit as insidious as the

Military Industrial Complex. This Complex is shadowy and

omnipresent, active in funding our politicians and lobbying for laws

that benefit their businesses. At the same time, it is invisible to most

of us. It operates through a fog of shadowy lobbyists, interconnected

institutions and highly legalized (and hence poorly understood)

rules, laws and procedures underpinning the market system and the

high-speed computers that move money and buy/sell orders

around the world in seconds.(xxii) .......

For years I have been referring to the Terminal Triangle: Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic meltdown, the latter explained in Danny's book in terms of the international ramifications of the Greater Depression. And of course, there are "other horsemen" of the apocalypse, as enumerated by Sally Erickson in her recent blog, so I find it impossible to discuss the mortgage crisis without connecting it with the additional impending global catastrophes that spell the end of the world as we have known it......

When I talk about collapse, my second paragraph usually goes something like, "Get out of debt, get out of debt, get out of debt-unless you plan to be an unincarcerated (or incarcerated) wage slave of corporate capitalism for the rest of your life." .........

As I scour the blogosphere, I find almost no progressive voices discussing the dire economic realities of this moment. After all, it's much easier to bash Bush, obsess about clueless, corporately-owned candidates, or blog about green products, green shopping, green living, and all manner of green-wash. Meanwhile, I continue to ask: What have you done to prepare for a post-petroleum world? As the Terminal Triangle becomes ever-more cataclysmic, how will you acquire food, drinkable water, and healthcare for yourself and your loved ones?

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World food security, as Australian consumers are soon to discover, is at its lowest since records were first kept almost half a century ago.

The precipitous fall in world grain stocks in the last seven years (see chart, above) is a forewarning of what we may expect as the world runs low on water, land, nutrients, technology, as marine harvests collapse, as biofuels grow and as droughts intensify under climate change. It means, year on year, humanity now eats more than it produces.

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Smurf1976 said:

The grain situation is the reason ethanol is not only not a solution to the oil problem, but an outright farce. Turn waste into fuel sure, but turning food into a petrol additive is bordering on criminal IMO.

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Day of reckoning coming

TONY RAGGATT

15Dec07

THE western world will face it's day of reckoning for a rampant credit binge _ it just may take a few years for that day to arrive, according to Townsville stockbroker Daniel Goulding.

"A lot of people are calling it the greatest train wreck in history but it's also the slowest moving train wreck in history," he said yesterday.

"We haven't reached the same point the United States and the United Kingdom have but Australia is in the same boat.

"We have the most expensive real estate in the world. At some point the day of reckoning is coming."

Mr Goulding of ABN AMRO Morgans Townsville has sided with the old school economists who say the Australian economy has moved ahead on rampant credit creation, the same policies that fostered the subprime mortgage implosion in the US, and the aftermath of which is now threatening to bring a global financial credit crunch.

Mr Goulding said many people believed China and its insatiable appetite for commodities would keep Australia afloat.

Unfortunately credit creation was even more rampant in China than here, he said.

Bad debts as a percentage of GDP in China were running at around 40 per cent, compared with 30 per cent at the top of the bubble in Japan in 1989-90.

"The end game is always the same _ asset deflation on a grand scale," he said.

It is sobering to ponder that Japan's Nikki stock index is still about 60 per cent below its 1990 peak.

Mr Goulding believed equities were in the late stages of a bull run and markets had started the next leg of a downtrend.

But evidence could be presented to support bullish and bearish outcomes.

Investors should retain full exposure to the market, balanced by prudent stock selection to limit risk to the downside, he said.

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numbercruncher said:

Anyone digging the terminal Triangle yet ?


Mr Goulding in the above article said "The end game is always the same _ asset deflation on a grand scale,"


Seems to be unfolding sooner than anticipated ?

And oil prices havnt dropped nearly far enough all being considered, must be running low on that black stuff eh ?

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