A partir de agora continuarei a escrever exclusivamente aqui.

Até já!

“Green shoots are bursting out. Or so we are told. But before concluding that the recession will soon be over, we must ask what history tells us. It is one of the guides we have to our present predicament. Fortunately, we do have the data. Unfortunately, the story they tell is an unhappy one.”

Lá está este pessoal pessimista…

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People have been asking how we see the future unfold. In case you wonder what we stand for, much of our view of what’s to come can be found in the primers on the right-hand side bar. Here is an additional brief summary (in no particular order and not meant to be exhaustive) of the ground we have consistently covered here at TAE over the last year and a half, and before that elsewhere.

1. Deflation is inevitable due to Ponzi dynamics (see From the Top of the Great Pyramid)
2. The collapse of credit will crash the money supply as credit is the vast majority of the effective money supply
3. Cash will be king for a long time
4. Printing one’s way out of deflation is impossible as printing cannot keep pace with credit destruction (the net effect is contraction)
5. Debt will become a millstone around people’s necks and bankruptcy will no longer be possible at some point
6. In the future the consequences of unpayable debt could include indentured servitude, debtor’s prison or being drummed into the military
7. Early withdrawls from pension plans will be prevented and almost all pension plans will eventually default
8. We will see a systemic banking crisis that will result in bank runs and the loss of savings
9. Prices will fall across the board as purchasing power collapses
10. Real estate prices are likely to fall by at least 90% on average (with local variation)
11. The essentials will see relative price support as a much larger percentage of a much smaller money supply chases them
12. We are headed eventually for a bond market dislocation where nominal interest rates will shoot up into the double digits
13. Real interest rates will be even higher (the nominal rate minus negative inflation)
14. This will cause a tsunami of debt default which is highly deflationary
15. Government spending (all levels) will be slashed, with loss of entitlements and inability to maintain infrastructure
16. Finance rules will be changed at will and changes applied retroactively (eg short selling will be banned, loans will be called in at some point)
17. Centralized services (water, electricity, gas, education, garbage pick-up, snow-removal etc) will become unreliable and of much lower quality, or may be eliminated entirely
18. Suburbia is a trap due to its dependence on these services and cheap energy for transport
19. People with essentially no purchasing power will be living in a pay-as-you-go world
20. Modern healthcare will be largely unavailable and informal care will generally be very basic
21. Universities will go out of business as no one will be able to afford to attend
22. Cash hoarding will continue to reduce the velocity of money, amplifying the effect of deflation
23. The US dollar will continue to rise for quite a while on a flight to safety and as dollar-denominated debt deflates
24. Eventually the dollar will collapse, but that time is not now (and a falling dollar does not mean an expanding money supply, ie inflation)
25. Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing in a positive feedback spiral, so both are likely to be protracted
26. There should be no lasting market bottom until at least the middle of the next decade, and even then the depression won’t be over
27. Much capital will be revealed as having been converted to waste during the cheap energy/cheap credit years
28. Export markets will collapse with global trade and exporting countries will be hit very hard
29. Herding behaviour is the foundation of markets
30. The flip side of the manic optimism we saw in the bubble years will be persistent pessimism, risk aversion, anger, scapegoating, recrimination, violence and the election of dangerous populist extremists
31. A sense of common humanity will be lost as foreigners and those who are different are demonized
32. There will be war in the labour markets as unempoyment skyrockets and wages and benefits are slashed
33. We are headed for resource wars, which will result in much resource and infrastructure destruction
34. Energy prices are first affected by demand collapse, then supply collapse, so that prices first fall and then rise enormously
35. Ordinary people are unlikely to be able to afford oil products AT ALL within 5 years
36. Hard limits to capital and energy will greatly reduce socioeconomic complexity (see Tainter)
37. Political structures exist to concentrate wealth at the centre at the expense of the periphery, and this happens at all scales simultaneously
38. Taxation will rise substantially as the domestic population is squeezed in order for the elite to partially make up for the loss of the ability to pick the pockets of the whole world through globalization
39. Repressive political structures will arise, with much greater use of police state methods and a drastic reduction of freedom
40. The rule of law will replaced by the politics of the personal and an economy of favours (ie endemic corruption)

Eu não percebo onde é que esta gente vai buscar este pessimismo com um Obama no Mundo…

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LEAP/E2020 believes that, instead of « green shoots » (those which international media, experts and the politicians who listen to them (5) kept perceiving in every statistical chart (6) in the past two months), what will appear on the horizon is a group of three destructive waves of the social and economic fabric expected to converge in the course of summer 2009, illustrating the aggravation of the crisis and entailing major changes by the end of summer 2009… more specifically, debt default events in the US and UK, both countries at the centre of the global system in crisis. These waves appear as follows: 

1. Wave of massive unemployment: Three different dates of impact according to the countries in America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa 
2. Wave of serial corporate bankruptcies: companies, banks, housing, states, counties, towns 
3. Wave of terminal crisis for the US Dollar, US T-Bond and GBP, and the return of inflation

Continuam por aqui uns tipos a querer tirar-nos a esperança…

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“A few days ago I attended a talk by Professor David Hess, entitled “Rethinking the Sustainable City: Exploring the Potential of Local Social Enterprises”. It gave me a lot to thought about on the social questions raised by the Hubbert Peak, and how energy (or the lack of it) can shape the future of our Society. Less energy will likely mean less travel and more local networks. Reshaping our Society to the local level might seem both good and inevitable, but what problems may we encounter doing so?”

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“This past week was the United States Society for Ecological Economics bi-annual conference (at American University near Washington DC). Herman Daly was honored for his many and longstanding contributions. He also gave an amazing speech which he has graciously allowed us to reproduce as a guest post on theoildrum. In it he outlines 10 prescriptions for changing the course of our current socio-economic system, along the lines of the steady state themes he has been writing about for decades.

(…)

Well, let us not do that. Let us ignore the anathemas and instead think about what policies would be required to move to a steady-state economy. They are a bit radical by present standards, but not as insanely unrealistic as any of the three alternatives for validating continuous growth, just discussed.

1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources.

2. Ecological tax reform

3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution

4. Free up the length of the working day, week,

5. Re-regulate international commerce

6.Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO

7. Move away from fractional reserve banking toward a system of 100% reserve requirements.

8. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, but also stop treating the non-scarce as if it were scarce.

9. Stabilize population.

10. Reform national accounts

While these policies will appear radical to many, it is worth remembering that they are amenable to gradual application. One hundred percent reserves can be approached gradually, the range of distribution can be restricted gradually, caps can be adjusted gradually, etc. Also these measures are based on the conservative institutions of private property and decentralized market allocation. They simply recognize that private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed, and that markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the whole truth about opportunity costs. In addition, the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its scale is structurally required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth. And well before reaching that radical physical limit we are encountering the conservative economic limit in which extra costs of growth become greater than the extra benefits, ushering in the era of uneconomic growth, so far unrecognized.”

Há por aí economistas criativos em Portugal?

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“This book paints a vision of a world of energy scarcity that seems more appealing than the apocalyptic warnings of many Peak Oil believers. Rubin also fails to tackle the threat of a bitter struggle for resources as countries and individuals try to grab for themselves the dwindling reserves that remain, which some experts see as a real risk. No doubt Rubin will draw flak from the more extreme end of the Peak Oil movement for his Panglossian optimism, the economist’s perpetual failing.”

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(…)

“The financial mess we’re in: Has it something to do with Peak Oil, too? Is there this systemic crisis because we are heading towards the end of the Age of Oil – and no one is telling the public so?

The current economic collapse is a combination of two things. First, the current global economic paradigm — governed by fractional reserve banking, fiat currency, and compound interest (debtbased growth) — is inherently and by definition a pyramid scheme. Money is useless without energy. One cannot eat a dollar bill or crumble it up and throw it in his gas tank. Each of the trillions of dollars created out of thin air since the fall of 2008 is a commitment to expend energy that cannot and will not ever be there. The Laws of Thermodynamics prevent this. I applaud the decision of Chancellor Merkel to resist the temptation to achieve a temporary solution by printing money endlessly. I am German by ancestry. My great grandfather migrated to the U.S. from a small town in Essen called Ruppertsburg at the turn of the last century. German pragmatism and realism on energy has been apparent to me since my first visit to Germany in 2003. It is not perfect and must be improved, but I have seen more clear thinking on the subject in Germany than in any of the 13 countries I have visited. That is actually not as good a thing as it might sound. There can be no “recovery”, no return to growth (which is what the economic paradigm demands), without energy.

Why is this not discussed openly: The dinosaurs of the old paradigm — who are about to pass into extinction — cannot admit this because it would have an immediate effect on the financial markets which are already dying. People would stop buying stock if they understood that a return to growth is impossible. I think, however, that on a more fundamental level the dinosaurs just cannot see their own impending extinction. They are incapable of mental and spiritual evolution which all of our survival depends upon. They cannot adapt. As the global environment changes forever, from the related issues of climate change, energy shortages, and economic collapse all dinosaurs can do is die. That’s what Darwin so clearly proved with regard to all life on this planet. Those species which cannot adapt must go extinct. We see billionaires and dinosaurs disappearing or losing money everywhere. Even Warren Buffet and George Soros are losing money because they cannot grasp that infinite growth is not possible. The term “sustainable growth” is perhaps the greatest oxymoron ever coined and an instant indicator of imminent Darwinian deselection for anyone who uses it. I keep a safe distance from such people.

Mainstream media all over the world is corporate-owned; a dinosaur by definition. In America CNN is owned by Time-Warner; CBS is owned by Viacom; NBC is owned by General Electric, ABC by Disney; the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp, ad infinitum. All large press outlets sell stock and — far worse — are tied into a global derivatives bubble now estimated at $700 trillion in notional value that not only is collapsing: The Mother of All Bubbles.[4] Telling the truth to the people means that people will stop buying GE, Time Warner, Viacom and Newscorp stock so that is the last thing mainstream media can acknowledge.

Those who produce, edit and report the “news” are corporate citizens rather than human beings. They have chosen to murder their own children to protect their current jobs (the food they receive from an abusive parent). Being of German ancestry I am sensitive to issues about being willfully ignorant (cowardly) in the face of great evil. I am also aware of and grateful for the White Rose and von Stauffenberg and his heroic colleagues. I have felt like these great Germans must have felt for many years now. I still owe a great debt of gratitude to my old friend Andreas von Bülow from Köln[5] who graciously exposed me to authentic German culture. I have lost contact with Andreas and his wife Anne and I pray they are well. Now we find that this blindness is an inherent part of humans in all countries and the one thing that must and will go extinct with the Old Paradigm.[6]

But the dinosaurs are losing their grip. Since the start of the collapse of industrial civilization, corporate-owned media has become something of a joke. “Check the tire pressure on your resume” is about the best advice they can offer. Then they say, “We think we have hit the bottom, so buy stock and don’t pull your retirement out of the markets” while at the same time issuing reports that show that we are nowhere near a bottom and that everything is getting worse. Who can trust such nonsense. There must be a great German word that means idiotic, contradictory and bullshit at the same time.”

O homem só pode estar louco…

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“When a sovereign’s private banks are essentially insolvent and not engaged in normal loan activities, this is another manifestation of an economic depression. Rather than admit the truth, the Obama administration cobbled together a make-believe series of bank stress tests, which supposedly show that America’s banking system, with a few minor problems, is essentially sound and fiscally healthy. This conclusion is an utter fraud, designed to artificially create a climate of economic confidence. It won’t work, and by delaying an honest approach towards the nation’s crippling level of bank insolvency, the policymakers are insuring that the final cost of the inevitable day of reckoning will be far more costly to the taxpayers.”

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“Neste momento há um risco específico de empresas e países falirem. Portugal é um deles. Há o risco de Portugal estoirar”.

Terá Mira Amaral razão? Não estará a exagerar?

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“Quem participou, no passado dia 21 de Abril, na conferência sobre o futuro energético de Portugal, promovida pela CIP e pela Ordem dos Engenheiros no Museu da Electricidade em Lisboa, terá percebido que a situação energética no mundo é bastante mais preocupante do que os mais pessimistas poderiam imaginar.

(…)

O crescimento e a prosperidade, baseados no consumo e no sucesso material dos últimos 50 anos, em que a economia mundial cresceu cinco vezes, é uma ideia completamente insustentável. E já está a minar os fundamentos para uma nova prosperidade, alicerçada numa visão menos materialista do progresso.

Teremos que assumir as consequências deste facto e enfrentar um desafio obrigatório: é necessário um novo tipo de sistema económico. E até, quem sabe, uma nova forma de organização social. Para que seja possível à humanidade prosperar num mundo com recursos finitos, e com uma fronteira ecológica já claramente perceptível à nossa frente.”

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“”Collapse” is defined as the rapid transformation to a lower degree of complexity, typically involving significantly less energy consumption. Societies “collapse” when they become too complex for their energy base. Thus, the collapse of capitalism is inevitable because capitalism must grow to survive – must become more-and-more complex and consume more-and-more energy.

But a “planned collapse” – a planned simplification – would not only mitigate much of the human suffering, it could also usher in a new golden age of leisure, music, arts and crafts – a simpler, more humane, more spiritual society. It’s more-than-obvious that Mr. Potatohead has no answers, so we must see “planned collapse” as a “systems engineering” problem – not as an “economic” problem (“getting the prices right”).”

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“Uma mistura de corrupção entre o sistema financeiro e os políticos norte-americanos, por um lado, o contínuo movimento de desregulação associado à ideologia de que os mercados se autoregulam, e uma política monetária demasiado expansiva lançaram a América e o mundo na pior crise de 80 anos.”

Para já as “soluções” desenhadas são para manter quase tudo mais ou menos na mesma. Tenhamos esperança…

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“Global production of petroleum peaked in the first quarter of last year, says analysts Raymond James, which “represents a paradigm shift of historic proportions. Unfortunately, mankind better get ready to live in a peak oil world because we believe the ‘peak’ is now behind us.”

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“The fact that so many limits are involved also means that it is not just liquid fuels that are being constrained by the limits to growth box. In the diagram above, I show electricity, the credit system, the industrial system, and the agricultural system as being fenced in by limits, in addition to liquid fuels. I could probably have included many other systems as well, such as the international trade system, governmental systems, and long term promises, such as pensions and social security systems.

The world is finite, so it should not come as a great surprise that the various limits are being reached, to varying degrees, simultaneously. Systems such as the electrical system, the credit system, and the agricultural system all depend on availability of finite resources, so are affected as we start reaching limits of various kinds.”

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“In this issue of the GEAB, our researchers anticipate the different forms a US default will take at the end of summer 2009, a US default which can no longer be concealed concealable from this April (most taxes are collected in April in the US) onward (10). The perspective of a US default this summer is becoming clearer as public debt is now completely out of control with skyrocketing expenses (+41%) and collapsing tax revenues (-28%), as LEAP/E2020 anticipated more than a year ago. In March 2009 alone, the federal deficit has nearly reached USD 200-billion (way above the most pessimistic forecasts), i.e. a little less than half of the deficit recorded for the entire year 2008 (a record high year) (11). The same trend can be observed at every level of the country’s public organisation: federal state, federated states (12), counties, towns (13), everywhere tax revenues are vanishing, suffocating the whole country with spiraling debts that no one can control anymore (not even Washington).”

Um grupo de lunáticos que diz nomeadamente, que uma Depressão Económica é provável?

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É interessante seguir como eu o tenho feito desde Janeiro de 2008, as previsões das Instituições de referência. Estará o FMI a ser optimista?

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“O Banco de Portugal reviu hoje em baixa a sua estimativa de crescimento económico, esperando agora uma contracção do PIB de 3,5% este ano, o pior desempenho desde 1975.”

Repito o que disse no primeiro post do ano. Espero um 2009 bizarro. Para já, sejamos esperançosamente audazes.

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“To become a client, an Estonian must register online, listing the useful things that he can do for others (eg, grocery shopping, walking a dog, fixing cars) and those that he would like done unto him (eg, having a suit darned or windows cleaned). The “bank” — really an internet portal to allow the civic-minded across Estonia to network altruistically with each other — will formally open for business in May. Professor Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, calls it “a creative idea, worth following closely”.”

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“The G-20 has agreed on plans to fight the global downturn. But its approach will only lay the foundation for the next, bigger crisis. Instead of “stability, growth, jobs,” the summit’s real slogan should have been “debt, unemployment, inflation.”

Eu não lhe quero chamar overdose, mas admito que possa ser. Eu gostaria que fosse um remendo, ou uma angioplastia, que desse ao moribundo, mais uns anos de vida. Vamos ver. Para já goze-se a audácia da esperança…

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“A crise económica global vai acompanhar-nos durante uma geração, e não apenas durante um ano ou dois anos, porque na realidade é uma transição para a sustentabilidade. Nos últimos anos, a escassez das matérias-primas primárias e os danos das alterações climáticas contribuíram para a desestabilização da economia mundial que resultou na actual crise. A subida dos preços dos alimentos e dos combustíveis e os grandes desastres naturais ajudaram a minar os mercados financeiros, o poder de compra das famílias e mesmo a estabilidade política.”

Eu diria mesmo, a Grande Transição.

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“The end of cheap natural resources compounded by the debt collapse will prevent the future growth needed to pay the interest on federal, corporate, and consumer debt. We are seeing a last ditch spending effort to revive growth while other nations will still lend the U.S. money. After this, it is game over.

President Obama went to Harvard, but it was in law not economics, and even if he studied economics it would have been the wrong kind; universities need to retool and start teaching powerdown and steady-state economics because that is all we will have left within ten years. We will have to develop new economic models that do not rely on indefinite growth to pay interest on our debt.”

É irrelevante se são 10 anos ou não. Eu vou tentar ser mais sustentável e feliz. E o leitor(a)?

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Possivelmente este vídeo tornar-se-á um documento histórico. Brilhante!

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“Finance is one of the great social inventions of humanity; the division of labour and specialisation in effort and activity that are at the root of all prosperity depend on it.  It makes me sick to see an entire branch of human endeavour brought into disrepute by the actions of a relatively small (but still far too large) number of masters of the universe.  There will have to be a reckoning, and not just in the court of history.”

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“The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale, centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention — in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.”

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“Bouts of social upheaval are set to disrupt economies and topple governments around the globe over the next two years, the Economist Intelligence Unit warned.”

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“World oil production peaked in 2008 at 81.73 million barrels/day (mbd) shown in the chart below. This oil definition includes crude oil, lease condensate, oil sands and natural gas plant liquids. If natural gas plant liquids are excluded, then the production peak remains in 2008 but at 73.79 mbd. However, if oil sands are also excluded then crude oil and lease condensate production peaked in 2005 at 72.75 mbd.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) should make official statements about declining world oil production to renew the focus on oil conservation and alternative energy sources.”

Não pode ser…

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Escrevi em Outubro de 2008:

“Voltando às consequências da crise financeira , podemos dizer que, se as coisas correrem bem, no curto prazo, “apenas” teremos um razoável agravamento dos juros das nossas dívidas e tornar-se-á muito mais díficil aceder a novos créditos. Na economia, haverá provavelmente uma recessão já em 2008 e 2009, com aumento do desemprego e demais consequências sociais (já reparou nos divórcios e na criminalidade?). Se as coisas correrem mal, o crédito pode tornar-se quase totalmente inacessível, com as implicações no investimento e no consumo, que se traduzirão numa fortíssima recessão ou até depressão económica. Neste caso o desemprego atingirá valores elevadíssimos, como resultado dum aumento substancial de falências em todos os sectores económicos. Se as coisas correrem muito mal, teremos um colapso financeiro e económico, com os países a declararem Estado de Sítio, entre outras visões interessantes. Parece-me que a primeira hipótese, mais benigna, é a mais provável, mas caro leitor(a), isso seriam apenas boas notícias de curto prazo.”

Continuamos num período de forte incerteza quando à duração e intensidade desta crise económica. Se se concretizar o melhor cenário, são boas notícias para o Projecto Coisas do Vizinho e para a nossa capacidade de nos prepararmos para fazer uma mudança suave, rumo a outra forma de viver.

“A actual civilização está num importante e complexo ponto de viragem, de que a presente crise económica e financeira é apenas um sinal. Estamos no zénite da era fóssil, e o mundo começa a sentir a urgência de se preparar para sobreviver ao esgotamento, a breve prazo, dos recursos energéticos que moldaram a nossa maneira de viver nos últimos 150 anos.”

Seguramente os carros eléctricos serão parte da solução. Na outra parte da solução,  há um enorme espaço que terá que passar por uma mudança no sistema de crenças dominante, no qual, existe uma forte correlação entre consumo de energia e a escolha de parceiro sexual para a vida…

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“So, in conclusion and caveat emptor for investors: Dear investors, do enjoy this dead cat bounce and bear market sucker’s rally; most likely most of you will jump the ship as soon as this rally loses its steam; and your attempt to jump ship will make the next round of the bear market bust even faster. Today short-selling covering is leading to a more pronounced bear market rally; at some point in the future the capitulation of investors trying to sell their equities at the peak of the latest bear market rally will make the next round of the bear market bust faster and more pronounced. So, don’t wait too long until you jump ship while the financial Titanic hits the next financial iceberg: you may get squeezed and crashed in the rush to the lifeboats.”

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“Regular readers will know that I think we’re facing a phase-shift from perpetual growth to perpetual contraction, driven by diminishing energy supplies, ecological constraints, and diminishing returns on our investments in technology and other forms of complexity. Most people, I imagine, will refuse to accept this even if they realize that it is 100% true. What will this lead to? John Michael Greer has an excellent piece answering that question.”

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