re and coal from Australia.
No one is immune; the world is a system. And the system is undergoing a historic “correction.” Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid gave a bracing summary when he suggested the western financial world might be “totally unsustainable.”
If policy makers continue assuming that the ongoing global reset is merely another turning of the business cycle, then we lose whatever opportunity still remains to prevent financial crisis from becoming social crisis.
Unfortunately the idea that growth has limits is still a minority view. After all, in the “real” worlds of politics and economics, growth is essential to creating more jobs and increasing returns on investments. Questioning growth is like arguing against petrol at a Formula One race.
Richard Heinberg
…
re and coal from Australia.
No one is immune; the world is a system. And the system is undergoing a historic “correction.” Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid gave a bracing summary when he suggested the western financial world might be “totally unsustainable.”
If policy makers continue assuming that the ongoing global reset is merely another turning of the business cycle, then we lose whatever opportunity still remains to prevent financial crisis from becoming social crisis.
Unfortunately the idea that growth has limits is still a minority view. After all, in the “real” worlds of politics and economics, growth is essential to creating more jobs and increasing returns on investments. Questioning growth is like arguing against petrol at a Formula One race.
Richard Heinberg
…
nternational Monetary Fund had botched the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.
It was a full-on attack from a Washington insider and it hurt, especially when Stiglitz said many of those responsible for forcing countries such as Thailand and Indonesia into deeper, longer recessions were "third-rate graduates from first-rate universities".…
al cover given to its activities, especially in the US and Britain, since the Thatcher and Reagan years in the 1980s.
Within a year of Big Bang in 1986, when the City was deregulated, it became conventional wisdom to believe that management of the economy was best left to global market forces. The mantra of the market became even more pronounced when the Berlin Wall fell in 1990 and the Soviet empire collapsed soon afterwards.
Western capitalism had triumphed in the life-and-death struggle against communism; what is more, the capitalism that emerged victorious was the red-in-tooth-and-claw variety that believed in unfettered free markets where a huge derivatives industry (mortgage-backed securities being but one small part) was allowed to grow up largely unchecked and unsupervised.
After the crisis of recent weeks and months, few believe that capitalism isn't in need of urgent reform. A return to the protectionism and nationalism of the 1930s would be to see the pendulum swing too far the other way. But expect some fairly major adjustments, not tweaks around the edges, in the months and years ahead.
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he culture of Wall Street (i.e., the paying of exorbitant bonuses for the acquisition of inappropriate risk via cutthroat competition that ignores long-term sustainability of companies or economies). And they did not relieve the underlying solvency crisis faced by the banks—they merely papered these problems over temporarily, until the remaining bulk of the “troubled” assets are eventually marked to market (listed on banks’ balance sheets at realistic values).
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has taken on the burden of guaranteeing most of the nation’s mortgages, in a market in which residential and commercial real estate values may be set to decline much further than they have already done.
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&YANG that provides the MAGIC [IN]between by way of...
the algebraic equivalent to symbol ... [≡]THE PROCESS of Quintessential CHANGE will NOT happen smoothly, in the context of evolutionary consciousness, but as a result of the seismic shifts in our global collective consciousness, which will be acquired, as a consequence of the experience of events such as those that have previously happened in the financial markets that underpin the economy of our global village, and more recently the devastation of the COVID and the very latest consequences of climate change.
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predicament was this terrible! What a pit we are in!” My rather gleeful response was due to the fact that I happen to be in the midst of researching and writing a book exploring the evident fact that resource depletion, debt overhang, and climate change have brought about the end of world economic growth (as currently defined). When I drilled into Fleeing Vesuvius, I encountered a rich vein of thought very much attuned with my own, one that includes stimulating ideas and examples that were new and helpful to me.
While other readers may come to this book with backgrounds different from mine, I think they will nevertheless find just as much stimulation and help as I did.
The authors have applied themselves to an analysis of the most important and fateful economic transition in human history. They are among the People who are Paying Attention (PPA)—an almost completely unorganized demographic consisting of individuals who have the privilege to devote a substantial amount of time to following world political, economic, and environmental news, but who are not blinded by any fixed religious or political ideology.
PPA probably number globally no more than a few million, and (if I may speak for them) have generally come to the conclusion that the world is facing a triple crisis:
The depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals;
The proliferation of environmental impacts, principally climate change arising from both the extraction and use of resources (including the burning of fossil fuels)—leading to snowballing costs from both these impacts themselves and from efforts to avert them; and
Financial disruptions due to the inability of our existing monetary, banking, and investment systems to adjust to both resource scarcity and soaring environmental costs—and their inability (in the context of a shrinking economy) to service the enormous piles of government and private debt that have been generated over the past couple of decades.
While these three crises are converging on us, our leaders remain obsessed with one thing, and one thing only: the maintenance of economic expansion. For a variety of reasons, growth has become essential to the political well-being of modern societies.
Yet our fixation on economic growth prevents our addressing any of the three crises: Governments refuse to curtail greenhouse gas emissions (and thus fossil fuel consumption) because doing so would reduce growth. They refuse to reduce their vulnerability to oil supply shocks because that would require them to proactively rein in oil use, thus threatening growth. And they refuse to explore fundamental changes to financial and monetary systems that would make their economies less susceptible to bubbles and crashes because…well, you can finish the sentence.
Richard Heinberg…