Goodbye America...

[Tomcat]

(dummy_plug @ Mar. 22 2008,01:46) there are serious problems today in the American economy, but fundamentally its sound.

Thats like saying ive contracted the Nile Swamp Virus but other than that im fine. You should have just stuck with the cyclic downturn , at least that made sense.

[thaimeup]

We'll just keep printing money and lowering interest rates, and all the rest of you will bitch and moan and do nothing...'cause you still want to sell your stuff to America so you will take our dollars.

And our low interest rates, will become your high inflation and high interest rates. And after a few more years of exporting our problems we'll be in great shape business wise and you'll be holding on to USA Bonds worth half of what you paid for them

[jimslim]

(batman4ever @ Mar. 21 2008,19:49) and regarding tax...well i pay more than 68% of my higher part of income...

Holy Cow Batman

[buttafly]

I am in for 42%

sucks

[Tomcat]

USA isnt the only Country with problems. The Chinese Govt admitted that in that last 12 months there were 60,000 demonstrations against pollution and other gripes. And with a big shortage of females this place is a pressure cooker., there are a lot of angry men who only ever have the right hand palm for comfort.

The guys who are organising the demos are not simple peasants either but drawn from the new middle classes. Yes , some are getting richer ... richer and angrier.

[Otho]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguar....echange

An interesting perspective,,,

"In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

[stogie bear]

I hate links! Post the fucking thing, OK? Grrrr!

[pacman]

Good morning grumpykins . . . I can see you're in for a lovely day.

. . . . . . . . Mr Snappy

[katoeylover]

is that better, Grumpy?

[limpdick]

Without the US all of Europe would be a bunch of Nazi's, Without the US nobody would have nobody to blame

[Tomcat]

(limpdick @ Mar. 24 2008,10:44) Without the US all of Europe would be a bunch of Nazi's

Gimme a break, what about the Slavery , Racial segregation...Martin Luther King...So only Europeans are racists eh!... what a clown

[pacman]

(thaimeup @ Mar. 22 2008,16:08) We'll just keep printing money and lowering interest rates, and all the rest of you will bitch and moan and do nothing...'cause you still want to sell your stuff to America so you will take our dollars.

And our low interest rates, will become your high inflation and high interest rates. And after a few more years of exporting our problems we'll be in great shape business wise and you'll be holding on to USA Bonds worth half of what you paid for them

 

Couldn't have spelt it out better myself, thanks thaimeup.

This is exactly the plan except for one teensy flaw . . . . the Fed is going to need to print out far too much money with the result being hyperinflation.

The massive amounts of bad debt, bundled up with good debt, was securitised & flogged off to the banking system around the world.
Now nobody wants it, nobody will lend against it & the realisation has come that this stinking mess has to be bailed out by monetarising the whole f *ing lot, by the US Federal Reserve . . . with money they don't have.

And when they flick the switch to create these trillions of dollars, all the US currency that currently exists is going to be worth a hell of a lot less than it is now.

85% of world trade is conducted in US$, (all commodities are priced in it) but since FDR defied the Constitution by scrapping the requirement that it was to stay a gold backed currency,
it became a FIAT currency (nothing to do with the cars) & is only paper money. The Govt still promises to honour it but at what value?

Ben Bernanke has said he will worry about inflation later, his first duty is to save the US economy.

Sorry Ben, but you can't have both.
The Fed & the Govt should remove all controls & allow market forces to fix the mess, it would be ugly but at least that doesn't delay the problem,
allowing it to get much worse for the day when they can no longer stall.

And for the best example today as to what hyperinflation can do to a place, check out Zimbabwe, where a loaf of bread (if you can find one) is like 1 million zim$ or something equally ridiculous.

The comments about this sub-prime crisis being all part of a cyclic downturn just don't apply this time.

[thaimeup]

If this were any other country in the world you would be 100% correct (see: Zimbabwe for details).
But this is the United States, which is unique in the world in that WE CAN EXPORT INFLATION
Because the USD is the world currency, and the USA is the biggest market in the world foreign countries HAVE TO take our dollars.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, or part of some brilliant plan (NOT) -- but it is the reality.

On paper the Euro and E.U. market look like they could substitute for the USD and US Consumer, but in reality they don't buy as much crap as us and unless EVERYTHING changed to Euros overnight it would be a bitch converting currencies. Believe me EAD/Airbus would love to sell their planes in Euros €“ but they can't.

(There is also the political angle, USA troops are maintaining regional stability in S. Korea, Japan , Saudi Arabia, etc... These guys know that the price for that is continued use of the dollar)

[thaimeup]

(pacman @ Mar. 24 2008,12:50) The comments about this sub-prime crisis being all part of a cyclic downturn just don't apply this time.

Of course its cyclical, its just (potentially) a bigger cyclical deviation from the norm.

Most down turns are caused by over lending, and usually in the property market.

The problem this time is that the lending did not come from regulated banks, but from unregulated hedge funds and others. Most of which were ridiculously over levereged. The Carlyle Fund which just folded was 32 to 1 Leverged. For every dollar they had, they bought 32 dollars worth of mortgages. That also means that if the value of those mortgages went down just 3% they were bust.

[thaimeup]

(pacman @ Mar. 24 2008,12:50) The massive amounts of bad debt, bundled up with good debt, was securitised & flogged off to the banking system around the world.
Now nobody wants it, nobody will lend against it & the realisation has come that this stinking mess has to be bailed out by monetarising the whole f *ing lot, by the US Federal Reserve . . . with money they don't have.

The problem is a little more subtle than that. Its not that nobody wants the bad debt, its that nobody knows what it is worth so there are no buyers NOW.

Eventually the market will stabailze, banks/funds will write off losses. Property values will go down and then stangnate, etc... When that happens people will be able to buy and sell the bad debt again (at a big discount).

i.e. I have a 10 Million dollar mortgage backed bond, how much is it worth...fuck knows...but wait a year, and I will 'know' that its worth 8 million and be able to trade it again.