Is a complete collapse imminent?

[Zlex]

In the end it's all going to come down

True 'dat, except that, it will be painful not matter what.

The 'fascists and authoritarians' are selling us wheelbarrows full of fascism and authoritiarianism. We keep changing the color of the hay in the wheelbarrows from blue to red to blue again, and 'it' doesn't give a crap, as long as we permit the endless shoveling to go on in the ever growing wheelbarrows full of enabled fascism and authoritarianism.

The 'authoritarians' are claiming 'not enough federal regulation' -- even as it was 'federal regulations' that pushed aside 50 sets of more stringent state banking and lending regulations in court case after court case and even USSC case and created the 'credit flowing as water' undisciplined free-for-some we are in the process of trying to clean up. YES, 'private sharks' jumped into the 'state enabled' blood in the waters, and fed with a frenzy. Just as, it was 'state enabled' blood in the water behind the railroad monopolies in the 1800s and the oil trusts and the Ike's MIC and ... so on up until the present half is, half isn't monstrosities 'GSEs' and directly to the present day half nationalized banks about to royally bend us all over with this constructivist federal 'break it all at once' nonsense.

"it' only ever gets bigger, faster, from a starting point of WWII/Cold War/Wot/WoE levels of 'emergency' state spending.

Under Nancy, under Newt.

Under Johnson, under Nixon.

Under Carter, under Reagan.

Under Bush, under Clinton, under Bush, and surely, under Obama.

The latest "War on The Economy" news:

1] Our financial institutions must be Safe, sound and secure"
2] They got us into this mess with unsound lending practices.
3] We want credit to flow freely, like water, before.
4] Capitalism got us into this mess.
5] We must deftly lure private investment back to our economies, to pick up after the pump is primed...

Can you or any human being on earth, other than those fools in Congress, make any sense out of that incoherent jumble of assertions whatsoever?

It seems to me, sometimes, like C-SPAN is broadcasting from a state mental hospital somewhere.

It is breaking before our eyes. Publicly and undeniably and unabashedly cluelessly. The harder it tries, the more it fails. The question isn't, are the wheels going to fall off. The question is, how far does the nation permit itself to sink before it recognized what the real sources of the irritation to our economies are?

We need to rethink 'United We Stand, Divided We Fall."

It isn't 'United It Stands, Divided It Falls."

We need to bring back the rational WE into our current sprint towards a singular point of failure tribal IT.

ITs always crash and burn when they grow too large. Our IT is way too large.

 

[MerchantofMenace]

In the end it's all going to come down... the only question is when, where and how.... simply devaluing the currency by printing enough of it to cover all our debts may be the least painfull way to slowly collapse into another currency or perhaps even a barter economy.

Ideally, our money is based on specie, or the amount of money is related to the amount of specie somehow. I don't think there's enough specie to cover the amount of money we need for transactions, but people generally have more faith in their money if they know that they can exchange it for something tangible. It's faith that money can be exchanged for something tangible that makes it have any value. That's why our monetary system works. The problem with a barter economy is that I might want your wool blankets, but you might not want my potatoes.

Now, what's going on today is that the Fed is printing a tremendous amount of money but it's not really going anywhere because people aren't spending it. They're saving it because they don't know who's going to lose their jobs next. When that money that the fed has printed hits circulation, we're going to have inflation. If we have double digit inflation, it will force a lot more people out of their houses because they can't make the payments. We'll have an even better mess.

 

[ScottBot]

In the end it's all going to come down... the only question is when, where and how.... simply devaluing the currency by printing enough of it to cover all our debts may be the least painfull way to slowly collapse into another currency or perhaps even a barter economy.

The barter economy is already here.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/operations/article194338.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7848000/7848677.stm
http://www.foxbusiness.com/video-search/m/21551812/barter-economy.htm

 

[ScottBot]

Remember what Marx said would follow the collapse of capitalism?

Hell on earth?

 

[ACougar]

We'll be looking at the final stage of disaster capitalism and the beginning of a neo-feudal era.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book

&

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/Pubs/display.cfm?pubID=867

&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neofeudalism

True 'dat, except that, it will be painful not matter what.

The 'fascists and authoritarians' are selling us wheelbarrows full of fascism and authoritiarianism. We keep changing the color of the hay in the wheelbarrows from blue to red to blue again, and 'it' doesn't give a crap, as long as we permit the endless shoveling to go on in the ever growing wheelbarrows full of enabled fascism and authoritarianism.

The 'authoritarians' are claiming 'not enough federal regulation' -- even as it was 'federal regulations' that pushed aside 50 sets of more stringent state banking and lending regulations in court case after court case and even USSC case and created the 'credit flowing as water' undisciplined free-for-some we are in the process of trying to clean up. YES, 'private sharks' jumped into the 'state enabled' blood in the waters, and fed with a frenzy. Just as, it was 'state enabled' blood in the water behind the railroad monopolies in the 1800s and the oil trusts and the Ike's MIC and ... so on up until the present half is, half isn't monstrosities 'GSEs' and directly to the present day half nationalized banks about to royally bend us all over with this constructivist federal 'break it all at once' nonsense.

"it' only ever gets bigger, faster, from a starting point of WWII/Cold War/Wot/WoE levels of 'emergency' state spending.

Under Nancy, under Newt.

Under Johnson, under Nixon.

Under Carter, under Reagan.

Under Bush, under Clinton, under Bush, and surely, under Obama.

The latest "War on The Economy" news:

1] Our financial institutions must be Safe, sound and secure"
2] They got us into this mess with unsound lending practices.
3] We want credit to flow freely, like water, before.
4] Capitalism got us into this mess.
5] We must deftly lure private investment back to our economies, to pick up after the pump is primed...

Can you or any human being on earth, other than those fools in Congress, make any sense out of that incoherent jumble of assertions whatsoever?

It seems to me, sometimes, like C-SPAN is broadcasting from a state mental hospital somewhere.

It is breaking before our eyes. Publicly and undeniably and unabashedly cluelessly. The harder it tries, the more it fails. The question isn't, are the wheels going to fall off. The question is, how far does the nation permit itself to sink before it recognized what the real sources of the irritation to our economies are?

We need to rethink 'United We Stand, Divided We Fall."

It isn't 'United It Stands, Divided It Falls."

We need to bring back the rational WE into our current sprint towards a singular point of failure tribal IT.

ITs always crash and burn when they grow too large. Our IT is way too large.

 

[Steve Petersen]

Remember what Marx said would follow the collapse of capitalism?

What did he say would come after the collapse of Marxism?

 

[jamesrwright3]

What did he say would come after the collapse of Marxism?

California.

 

[CCGirl]

We'll be looking at the final stage of disaster capitalism and the beginning of a neo-feudal era.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book

&

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/Pubs/display.cfm?pubID=867

&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neofeudalism

Absolutely. Naomi Klein really nails it, I haven't yet read "From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy" but it sounds interesting. It is of little consequence at this time so late in the game to know that millions and millions of people worldwide knew this was coming yet were either ignored or mocked.

 

[LUColt27]

Hell on earth?

Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

 

[c71clark]

California.

 

[TheNewWorldMan]

Absolutely. Naomi Klein really nails it, I haven't yet read "From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy" but it sounds interesting. It is of little consequence at this time so late in the game to know that millions and millions of people worldwide knew this was coming yet were either ignored or mocked.

Much of the vaunted advancement of the United States and global capitalism was actually the result of a short-term bonanza of cheap fossil fuels and easy credit. To borrow a term from ecology, the growth was to a large extent irruptive. Remove the credit (in progress) and the fossil fuels (going to happen one lurch at a time over the next two to three decades), and the growth reverses.

2050 is liable to end up looking a lot like 1850.

 

[ScottBot]

Much of the vaunted advancement of the United States and global capitalism was actually the result of a short-term bonanza of cheap fossil fuels and easy credit. To borrow a term from ecology, the growth was to a large extent irruptive. Remove the credit (in progress) and the fossil fuels (going to happen one lurch at a time over the next two to three decades), and the growth reverses.

2050 is liable to end up looking a lot like 1850.

Good. The world needs to slow down and get a grip on itself. THe world is changing faster than our ability to comprehend it.

 

[Kalevalatar]

What a smörgåsbord of a thread...

Yum.

Just do what the US always does when it needs more money. Borrow it from China. who cares if the SS checks are written in Mandarin?

Don't you mean, borrow it from Communist China? SS checks written by those commies, who cares?

The irony!

Wiz-bang technology is nifty, but not without drawbacks. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story called "Superiority" that was rather entertaining and insightful. Definitely a good read if you can find it.

The point of the matter is that every economic system requires expansion to support an expanding population base. The only time communism in its truest for works is in a relatively small, stagnant population group that is exclusively unicultural. Anything beyond that is simply hypothetical.

I'm not sure whether that small, unicultural group thing would or could make it work either. A tiny group of homogenous Finnish settlers tried to establish a utopian commune known as "Sointula" in British Columbia in 1910. The "harmony" lasted about four years.

Much of the vaunted advancement of the United States and global capitalism was actually the result of a short-term bonanza of cheap fossil fuels and easy credit. To borrow a term from ecology, the growth was to a large extent irruptive. Remove the credit (in progress) and the fossil fuels (going to happen one lurch at a time over the next two to three decades), and the growth reverses.

2050 is liable to end up looking a lot like 1850.

I agree especially re: easy credit. For a laywoman, it looks like the boom years were made of (too) easy credit and bad book-keeping across the board, from private households to corporate and public finances. And bad book-keeping is bad book-keeping whether it's done in the name of free markets or centrally planned economy.

Also the question whether to raise or lower taxes, to stimulate or not, is insignificant if the accountability is still not there and mismanagement continues "business as usual". Almost immediately after the previous administration's $150 million bank bailout package, the GAO issued a warning that the US Department of Treasury does not have a mechanism in place to track how banks are using the money. Some poster here seemed to be trying to make the point that regulation is baaad, I disagree. Oversight is not a curse word.

Amid all this financial turmoil, the Canadian economy and banking system is rated the soundest and strongest in the world, thanks to strict regulation. Ditto Finland: OECD's Gurría says Finland better off than most, again, thanks to impressive public sector surplus and comparatively low debt, i.e. good, sound book-keeping. A hard lesson learned from early 1990s. This time, Finnish banks didn't need tax-payers bailout; instead, private Finnish banks decided to bailout Iceland's boom-and-bust banks. That's how it should be done. "Markets" taking care of themselves.

 

[Kalevalatar]

Honestly, I would rather have had Hitler been successful in his Eastern campaign, and then we could have dealt with him in a weakened state. I'm not seeing a whole lot of good that came out of the Soviet Union being victorious.

Agreed. That the other half of Europe fell under that yoke for half a century is a great tragedy indeed. However, I'd like to point out that the Red Army did liberate good many concentration camps, for what ever else that war was about. Without the Soviets, the balance between Hitler's victims vs. Stalin's victims would have simply swung to Hitler: more Hitler's victims at the price of less Stalin's victims. Still dreadfully poor alternative. There was no good or "right" alternative.

Except for some minor operations against the Japanese, the Russians pretty much fought the Axis, which included Hungary, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. Given that the invasion of the Soviet Union occurred the behest of Germany, it's a safe bet that Hitler was responsible for 20 million Russian deaths.

Not that it makes a difference, but I can't (Surprise! ) help pointing out that Finland should be on that list, seeing as Finland fought the Red Army twice.

Some other good info is here

My estimate for Stalin might be a bit high, because the entire death toll for the Soviet Union is around sixty million. Stalin was in control for about half of the period that the Soviet Union existed.

Interesting link. Thanks.

Here's another one in exchange, my favorite, a sort of "Twentieth Century Death Toll Atlas", which lists the highs, lows, and medians of different historians' and sources' estimates.

 

[ACougar]

An event is on the horizon and we'd like to understand it's implications so that we can prepare for it... I think it's important to consider many different perspectives. Even brilliant thinkers like Naomi Klein tend to live in a bubble surrounded by too many people who think too much like them.

Absolutely. Naomi Klein really nails it, I haven't yet read "From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy" but it sounds interesting. It is of little consequence at this time so late in the game to know that millions and millions of people worldwide knew this was coming yet were either ignored or mocked.

 

[MerchantofMenace]

Not that it makes a difference, but I can't (Surprise! ) help pointing out that Finland should be on that list, seeing as Finland fought the Red Army twice.

I think Finland was more of a co-belligerent than a full member of the Axis. She fought with Germany and the fascists because no one else really wanted to fight the Soviets.

 

[TheNewWorldMan]

The crux of the problem can be seen on this chart here:

http://www.321energy.com/editorials/bloom/bloom071008a.jpg

As you can see, much of the celebrated "growth" of the last half of the 20th century was simply an expansion of the amount of energy available per capita to humans in industrialized nations. The American standard of living peaked around 1970. We've read a lot about how growth largely stagnated during the last couple of decades of the 20th century, and that stagnation occurred when the amount of energy available per capita plateaued.

As fossil fuels deplete and the amount of energy available per capita declines, we'll see an unwinding of much of that growth. By the middle of the century, we will have access to about as much energy per capita as we did at the beginning of the 20th century...and likely our standard of living will be only a little better than what we had then.

This is actually difficult for most Americans to understand, because this problem does not fit into the Left versus Right paradigm that has dominated American politics in the Industrial Age. This is not an issue of wealth distribution gone awry, nor of excess government regulation. This problem did not arise because the rich got too rich or weren't allowed to get rich enough. We can't solve it by expropriating the wealth of the rich, nor would us working people selling our houses and donating the money to the Forbes 500 so they can buy more LearJets make it any better. Neither Barack Obama nor Rush Limbaugh have much of anything to offer here.

Inasmuch as any single factor or event can be blamed, it is our turning away from space exploration and technological development. Had we kept up space colonization at the same pace that gave us the Apollo program, we would likely have discovered new sources of energy and technologies.

 

[MarkSB]

The crux of the problem can be seen on this chart here:

http://www.321energy.com/editorials/bloom/bloom071008a.jpg

As you can see, much of the celebrated "growth" of the last half of the 20th century was simply an expansion of the amount of energy available per capita to humans in industrialized nations. The American standard of living peaked around 1970. We've read a lot about how growth largely stagnated during the last couple of decades of the 20th century, and that stagnation occurred when the amount of energy available per capita plateaued.

As fossil fuels deplete and the amount of energy available per capita declines, we'll see an unwinding of much of that growth. By the middle of the century, we will have access to about as much energy per capita as we did at the beginning of the 20th century...and likely our standard of living will be only a little better than what we had then..

Those numbers look pretty bleak. Is that graph current to 2008 then?

The catastrophic energy crisis always seems a bit OTT, if the economy remains relatively stable and new forms of alternative energy continue to be sought out, the energy crisis is a problem that can be dealt with.

 

[Wyzaard]

Capitalism itself could probably expand indefinitely, provided that there is something to sustain it.

You mean an infinite world with endless resources to pillage and an inexhaustible supply of exploitable labor? Sure!

But as we don't live in some hideous fantasyland...

I just hope that the government will figure out that it's making the problem worse, and step back to let the system reset itself.

No evidence, no cookie.

 

[Wyzaard]

I will have nothing to do with communism in any of its forms.

Then you refuse to be human in any sense of the word.