I agree with jeanne 100%. The economic crisis is the result of collapse of the whole system. The economic crisis will come as a result of unstable world politics(I've mentioned about cold war/trade war between USA and China in 2018, probably russia will be involved somehow ?). Next two years will determine the course of next two decades. Personally, I think the arrow has already left the bow of destruction.
Asian, agree. but when the arrow leaves the bow, it is blown by the wind. It does not always land where it was intended to. The winds blow where they will, not where we want them to.
Zoron agree about wind blowing where it wants to part. But, it started blowing about a decade back and only pick up speed from here. I think those who wants to shoot the arrow do not realize that the wind is blowing in reverse direction, it will only come back towards them.
I've decided to bump this thread because of some news coming out of the financial world. Last week the yield curve on US Treasury bonds inverted, and yield inversion has occurred roughly a year before every one of the last seven US recessions. For more about yield curves and what they could portend, this articles from the New Statesman is a good place to go.
I'm not a keen market watcher. It's just that this chatter about yield curves is another real world indicator pointing to a major economic downturn beginning late this year or in 2020 (as Jeanne has predicted). An economic meltdown would have uncomfortable ramifications for the White House and an administration that has staked so much of its legitimacy on soaring stock markets. As a front page headline in today's New York Times states, "Data Challenges Trump Optimism On The Economy. Experts See Slowdown: Taking Ownership of a Boom, and Risking Blame for a Bust."
The 10 year vs 2 year curve hasn't inverted (yet), but is still very close (0.14% difference as of 28-March-2019). A year ago, it was 0.47% difference. It has been as low as 0.13% in the past few months (range has been 0.13% - 0.21%.
I read somewhere that the global economy is based on growth and behaves like a drug addict. Each economy demands more, more, more. The USA is the biggest consumer, trash producer, and second hand polluter. Growth is considered so pleasurable and the desires for goods, services, and petroleum are insatiable. The only problem here is there is a finite amount of resources, and in order to maintain balance and health, we must nourish each other and the environment in which we live to sustain us.
We may be at a tipping point we think, but it never seems to come. The economy is one function of this over-consumption. It may be good overall to slow 'growth', but will we ever learn to take care of each other?
What you read is correct, FirstCat. Our current growth-based global economy got its start with the European age of exploration, when raw materials were growing scarce in Europe, thus pushing Spain, France, Great Britain, and the like to establish colonies overseas. Now, 500 years later, international free trade agreements and bodies like the IMF, World Bank, and WTO are continuing that extractive pattern of sating the Global North's appetite.
As you said, resources are finite. The major dealbreaker is that the hydrocarbon energy reserves that power the vast majority of our economy (coal, petroleum, natural gas), are also finite, and they're getting harder and more expensive to extract every year. There is a large body of literature out there about how increasingly expensive energy will bring about the end of our paradigm of endless growth, and how the 2008 financial crisis was just a preview of what's to come. (I recommend browsing Tim Morgan's Surplus Energy Economics site to learn more. The Club of Rome's landmark "Limits to Growth" report from 1972 might also be of interest.)
But Jeanne's visions and those of others posted on this site indicate that we really will be moving away from our growth obsession in the years to come. There are lots of collective enterprises and intentional communities that are already enacting that transition. So hang in there. As Arundhati Roy writes, "Another world is not only possible. She is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
My dear FirstCat & Coyote... Thank you! for these posts...
It is going to be a long walk back to the Garden.
With the outrageous corporate take over in the US of our wild lands (unique in the world) and the unprecedented push for more & more oil, mining, drilling, cattle production leases and sellouts to satisfy the greed of an overly corrupt 'economy' globally, it is truly a tipping point that is already here.
"But will we ever learn to take care of each other?"
Ahhh.... sigh.
This may not seem relative to the 'economy' technically, but perhaps it will be a source of light in the 'bigger' picture? The documentary 'Our Planet' airs tomorrow for the first time (Netflix) and is produced by the World Wildlife Federation... this is a docuseries that will address the many layers of what is going on right now with the world we have.......
I hope that we can all see it ❤️
I feel that with the latest round of firings and crazy ideas that Trump is insistent upon executing... there will be some blowback from Republican senators and they will break ranks. Also, some of the things he will do and have done will begin to cause some unraveling in the economy this summer and we will see recession. Trump will blame the Fed for not cutting rates even more but they really cannot cut much more than they already have. We are seeing the WH unraveling right now. Even with the Republicans constantly covering up for him and protecting him, he can't get out of his own way and will blow it all up. He does not want to listen to anyone anymore.
Following the release of the commerce department's better-than-expected quarterly report two weeks ago, economists were proclaiming in the New York Times that "The economy is back!" and that "We won't have a recession this year." Now here we are, and in the course of three days, the president has double down on raising tariffs on Chinese products; Iran is threatening noncompliance with the 2015 nuclear deal; and stocks have tumbled (again). One lesson we can take away from all of this is that traditional economists are extremely myopic, and that the world is not as neat and tidy as the lecture halls of Harvard would have them believe (particularly in the age of Trump).
But for all the talk about the economic damage being inflicted by our manic depressive in chief, it helps to keep in mind the innate structural problems that afflict the entire global economy, and that we are due for a calamitous economic crisis regardless of who happens to occupy the Oval Office. Charles Eisenstein sums up our predicament as a society in his essay "Money and the Crisis of Civilization":
"For the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right?
'The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact there there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated...The larger economic system, based as it is on the eternal conversion of a finite commonwealth into money, is unsustainable as well. It is like a bonfire that must burn higher and higher, to the exhaustion of all available fuel...The present [post-2008] crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s. Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940...Other solutions — globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and technology-enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally financial auto-cannibalism — have similarly run their course. Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer."
Excuse the long quotations, but the point I'm trying to make is that these present economic jitters are actually symptomatic of a centuries-deep malaise, and that even a hypothetical President Warren or Sanders wouldn't be able to swoop in to the rescue.
Looked at from a different angle, though, the end of our economic paradigm is actually exciting, since the destruction of the old ways allows each of us as individuals to become potent change agents. Economic salvation will not come from a unicorn presidential candidate. Rather, the new era will be midwifed into being by common people like us, exchanging ideas and sharing our lived experiences.
You might be wondering what this means for your individual finances. Mortgages? Retirement savings? Student loans? I'm not a financial advisor, but as we progress further into uncharted economic territory, your own intuition about what's in your best interests is probably more reliable than missives coming from America's VSPs on high.
Coyote, your amazing post clarifies for me the visions I’ve had of our future. This is the second time Eisenstein’s view resonates and explains my visions for me. He ia a brilliant man who understands global economics, environmental reality and includes spiritual and emotional factors in his analyses.
What the corporations are doing is a giant global Ponzi scheme with ever expanding ways to extract from the earth including extracting from the human spirit to make money.
I’ve mentioned The club of Rome’s work here in the past: in the 1970’s a group of economists from MIT built an econometric model of global growth. That means that they added up all of the resources we need to live —minerals, oil, coal, available farmland, water, etc., and how many people would be using those resources, and discovered that some time in the early 2020’s the world economy would plummet. You can look them up on line. They are still publishing.
All of their models came to the same conclusion — spiraling growth, then sudden crash around 2010, give or take a decade or two.
It was a shocking report that was translated into 30 languages. It prompted Earth Days all around the globe during the 1970's.
And President Jimmy Carter put a solar panel on the White House.
But then in came the Rethuglicans. In 1980, every state except Massachusetts voted in Ronald Reagan and he took the solar panels down and began the surge of unsustainable corporate expansion and inhumane policies that culminated in the gig economy we have today where people work harder for less with no benefits.
Corporate moguls have been getting rich off of unsustainable extraction of resources.
Writer Charles Eisenstein takes the Club of Rome model further. He points out that the corporate extraction growth system has also extracted and exhausted human spirit and caring. Like locusts they siphon off our very humanness and make people work like robots.
The Uber strike of yesterday (May 8) that came just as that company was going IPO, is an example. Uber is forcing its drivers into poverty by siphoning off their earnings to the point where they can’t make a living wage, even while working full time. Other companies are doing the same. Walmart's been doing it for decades -- forcing employees to go on welfare to eat even when they work full time.
Eisenstein’s writings have fit my most overriding visions—the ones that sum up the long-term future and the situation we are in. He helps me see what spirit has been telling me.
In his 2012 book The More Beautiful World our Hearts know is Possible, he described the same message I got from spirit back in 1986 when I first started giving readings -- of light workers (all of you who are part of this community!) coming to planet earth to help the human race evolve and climb up that steep 250 foot plateau that I saw in my mind's eye. I had seen the coast lines move inland and we all came to a 250 foot plateau that we had to climb to move forward. I felt that plateau represented two things: (1) the new sea level that will rise when all the glaciers melts and (2) the higher vibration we will have to achieve in our Selves to make it up there.
In his essay you quote here, I see what my 2014 vision of the future means. At first I'd thought it was just economic. Then as time passed I realized it was emotional. Now I see it is both. It is a sum total of our economic, emotional and spiritual well being.
The graph spirit showed me became shaky and volatile in 2017 as the bully Donald Trump took over. The volatility became worse in 2018, then began to slide downwards like a bear market near the end of 2019 or during 2020.
Even if the dems return in 2021, and they probably will return in a blue wave in Congress, the growth model our economy has been following is ending.
That’s because the growth model of extraction we’ve been on since before Columbus has never been sustainable. Like a Ponzi scheme. And we are nearing the end.
Unless the GOP can come up with another way to stall the inevitable slide (at the cost of our humanity), the game of growth is ending.
They came up with fracking and that temporarily staved off the end of oil. Now they are drilling in the Arctic. But the use of oil is killing the planet so even if they can keep finding oil, the resources that keep us alive are running out. And the humane/spiritual resources are also running out.
This model would explain why ive seen us bounce back near the end of the 20’s yet are poorer.
We are happier but without stuff.
If my 2014 vision still holds, then near the end of 2019 or in 2020, regardless of what happens in politics, there will be a bear market. It will cause a profound shift in the global economy.
Around 2025-28 we will rally. The new people in charge will be women, mothers, and the goal will be to clean up the mess and create a sustainable world so we can survive the long term.
Sorry this is so long. A bit of a stream of consciousness.
Glad to be of help, Jeanne. Charles Eisenstein is hardly the only one out there sounding the alarm about the ticking time bomb that is our monetary system, but he definitely does the best job of synthesizing economics, the environment, spirituality, and cultural change.
It's appropriate for you to bring up Uber and fracking in this context. Ride hailing apps and fracking firms are prime examples of the declining returns on investment that increasingly characterize late stage capitalism. That is, they are bottomless money pits, and their business models are based on gleaning as much capital as they can from gullible investors and expendable workers before economic reality kicks in. Fracking companies even had to be bailed out by the GOP's 2017 tax law in order to stay afloat. But I think the biophysical fundamentals of energy extraction (it takes energy to extract more fossil fuel reserves) will ultimately prevent governments and big business from mining the planet to death. Tim Morgan also recently published an illuminating essay that details how the government/business elites' efforts at maintain the status quo (usually in the form of socialism for the rich) is sowing the seeds for popular rebellion (as seen in France with the Gilets Jaunes). So a fed up citizenry could put the breaks on this global Ponzi scheme first. Most likely, though, a confluence of factors will derail the paradigm of exponential growth.
I read the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" report as an undergrad in environmental studies, and the original 1972 text concluded that "collapse" would occur around the year 2030. But in 2014, Dennis Meadows (one of the authors of the report) told a conference that, in light of destructive societal patterns he could not foresee in the 1970s, he's pushed forward that date by a decade. So yes, we are in the "aura" of the crucible. Luckily, we have people like Charles Eisenstein to remind us that the end of growth does not have to be the end of society, full stop.
Am editing this post from what I passed along yesterday when I posted an email from a reader, who later corrected himself that it was foreigners, not specifically the Chinese, who own $6.2 trillion of the U.S. debt; while the Chinese are the largest owner of our treasury bonds - $1.2 trillion.
I don't know how the Chinese ownership of our debt can affect our economy or how it figures in with fighting trade wars with the Chinese. But given that the president is one of the greatest failures in business and lost more money than any other taxpayer in reckless and manic business dealings, it gives me no comfort to see him playing around with something he doesn't understand.
Here's an article that explores the possible impacts that threatening the Chinese can have. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/chinas-self-destructive-nuclear-option-in-trade-war-selling-us-treasury-bonds.html
The following is an article from last night on the subject. Their numbers are a little different from those above but they seem to give a fairly balanced view of the positive and negative effects on both countries if they decide to reduce the amount of US debt that they hold:
Jeanne, I worry about our enormous debt held by the Chinese too. Especially because Trump's tariffs seem to be deliberately intended to harm their economy, and he seems so gleeful about how much they're going to suffer. Good will with the USA is one the key factors that's been keeping the China/USA debt deal together, and Trump is doing his best to damage it. I read or heard some news blurb today about how Chinese media recntly started putting out bad messaging about the USA. This has to negatively influence the sale of Iphones, the purchase of Starbucks products, and other US goods. The Chinese are also developing alternative resources for soybeans and algriculture products that used to come from our breadbasket. US farmers are dealing with unsold soybeans rotting in silos, while Brazil and Russia are pinching themselves because they can't believe their good luck. These kinds of channels aren't easily switched back.
Even more, China could take much more aggressive moves to disengage the $USD as the dominant world currency. They've already started chipping away at this by refusing to purchase oil in $USD. When the $USD is no longer the dominant world currency we'll be in a world of pain and our standard of living will be dramatically, irrevocably changed for the worse. Trump seems so cavalier and reckless about all this. Like we have some kind of immunity, and we don't have to bother being a decent, cooperative or diplomatic world citizen. Instead, Trump thinks he can impose his will by tweeting threats and insults. This whole scene could easily escalate out of control, with one retaliation following another. And where are the legislative checks and balances in all this? Oh, that's right. There aren't any. Bottom line, I don't have a good feeling about how our economic relationship to China is going to play out.
And lastly, as a reference point, the Britannica cites the US's imposition of international tariffs as one of the four biggest contributing factors to the great depression. Recall that Hoover, the only other business man president, took a booming economy and brought it to its knees. It's also the last time the US engaged in tariffs in a major way.
The key word you wrote about DT is "reckless." I keep thinking about the tax news that he lost $1.1 billion in reckless business deals in less than a decade. He lost more than any U.S. taxpayer ever. When will the business community wake up? His business dealings are smoke and mirrors with an undercurrent of crime, and the manic ravings of manic depressive personality.
I have this habit of beating myself up for the financial choices I make.
I have my Master's degree, and my total education costs is over $100,000.
I keep berating myself that I should have simply started working at Walmart after high school, instead of furthering my education. Yes, I would be broke, but I wouldn't have this much student debt.
But I can't do that anymore. I know the economy is going to tank, and if the time comes when I can't pay my bills, I will just be grateful for everything I do have. There are millions of us barely hanging on, when we were told to go to college, don't worry about the loans, you'll be fine.
As a lightworker and empath, I know I will be taken care of by my higher power, as long as I remain in gratitude. But when the economy crashes...I can't imagine how people will react.
I am proud of what I've accomplished, but I don't think that will protect me, or any of us, from what is coming. I think most of us feel so bamboozled by the "experts" who are now telling us we shouldn't have taken out loans for school. We can't win.
Like most of us, I will do the best I can with what I have, and just be grateful for everything I have. Yesterday, I enjoyed watching the birdies play in the puddles made after the rainstorm. I'm also grateful I'm finding more and more gluten-free food I can eat.
I'm grateful I'm able to save about $500 in my retirement a month, but that may not last either. This is truly scary, but when I remain grateful, I feel like I have just enough.
Thank you for this forum. It brings me peace.
When I was just out of HS in the early 1970's I had friends who put themselves through college working part time at some grocery store. They paid their tuition in cash along with their car payment. Times have changed in that regard and not for the better.
At one point in my working career I was in charge of a large corporate tuition reimbursement program that reimbursed employees for their college. When I was there we reimbursed anyone for any college program. Since I retired it has been limited to "high potential" employees which has totally cut out the factory workers who used to be a small but not insignificant part of the program. I see it as just another example of the country splitting into two pieces and it saddens me.
Pacosurfer somehow I feel you will be protected over time. You happen to be entering school at a difficult time when tuition had soared and aid money had dropped. So many young people did exactly what you did and progressives in this world want to help all of you out of this mess. I feel something will change in your favor when the time is right.
Does anyone else on here feel like Trump wants to purposely destroy the U.S. because he just wants to see the world burn?
He strikes me too much like a comic book villain. Just destructive and chaotic for the sake of it.
@Pacosurfer I've been focusing on gratitude as well. It's one of the few ways I can stay free of worry and anger.