Here are three from that [irony alert] eternal optomist James Kunstler.

Back to School

Terrible shocks are going to rip through the socioeconomic fabric of the USA as we turn the corner past these late summer doldrums. The fiasco of bad debt won't be contained. The choices for those who find themselves financially underwater in the fall of 07 will be 1.) liquidation, 2.) bankruptcy, or 3.) destroy whatever remains of confidence in the US dollar in order to erase debt by hyperinflation. People holding power don't like the first two, which translate into Depression (let's make it capital "D.") When a nation turns into a fire sale from sea to shining sea, and bankrupt citizens don't even have enough cash-on-hand to buy things desperately cheap -- well, that's a Depression. Everybody from Fed officials to news editors have favored the softer term "recession" the past half century because it implies a mere pause in the inexorable march of progress toward economic nirvana. That's not what we're heading into. There will be so many assets up for sale across the USA in the months and years ahead that the very sun in the heavens will take on a K-Mart blue-light-special glow. Houses with miles of granite countertops, Maybach automobiles, cabin cruisers that burn thirty gallons of diesel an hour, and much much more. There will be so much slightly used (or barely "pre-owned") stuff for sale that manufacturing another unit of anything (or importing it) will seem like a sick joke. Alas, there may be very few buyers, at least here among the current natives of North America. And so you get "new pricing," and a deadly downward spiral.

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Hot Shots

The Federal Reserve seems to be manufacturing an impressive supply of "greater fools" to go along with the dribs'n'drabs of credit that it is dropping into the sucking chest wound that the economy has become for the body politic. The Fed's idea, I suppose, is that if they lend a little money to the geniuses who engineered the latest (and probably last) bubble of the cheap oil age to cover their present losses, then the US economy will "right itself." What I think they don't get is that finance has virtually become the US economy -- if you subtract it, there is nothing left besides hair-styling, fried chicken, and colonoscopies. By "righting the economy" do people mean the ability to keep running a transparently fraudulent set of rackets that have nothing whatever to do with financing real productive activity? By "greater fools" I mean, of course, buyers willing to step up and purchase securities that other people are shedding as if they were smallpox blankets. But even the Fed's supply of greater fools may prove insufficient when it becomes evident how much bad paper really is out there, and how it has been allowed to contaminate every tradable niche in the banking and investment house of horrors. I don't think we've begun to hear the disclosures.

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Margin Call

What you're seeing now is a simple matter of financial sector players trying desperately to evade the consequences of their own actions. The fake wealth generated by the synthetic securities they created is now being recognized for what it is: a swindle. The hallucination is over. The collective denial that supported that hallucination is dissolving. The losses are become manifest. Even worse, the losses are growing exponentially because the synthetic securities were used as collateral to leverage far greater multiples of "positions," bets, and plays in a casino-like global electronic trading arena. This is what happens when investment gets de-coupled from real productive activity and becomes an end in itself. It has been terrifically enhanced by computer programming. But no amount of digital legerdemain --with the "sugar-on-top" of accounting trickery -- can now hide the fact that there is no "value" there. What's more, the losses are going to have to show up somewhere. If you try to suppress them in one area, they'll pop up in another. If the Federal Reserve tries to cover the losses racked up by the Big Fund Boyz by giving "cash" away, they'll only succeed in destroying the value of the cash itself, i.e. the US dollar.

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Tectonic Shifts and Awareness

The past 20 years have quietly hosted a series of financial revolutions and a radical redistribution of wealth, income and opportunity. While we all know that things have changed, few really factor just how different the new America really is. To the extent that we confront these changes at all, it generally comes in the form of leading voices cherry picking the most positive new developments and heaping on exaggerated praise. There is plenty to be glad of. There is much to lament. The housing downturn may foster re-assessment. The debt debacle could be a catalyst for change and realization of past changes. There is no longer significant doubt that housing will continue down and drag the economy with it.1 Housing quakes are produced by larger tectonic shift. This blog attempts a whirlwind tour.

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China is not the Problem
Offshoring and Free Market Ideology

The pressure put on China is misdirected. The exchange rate is not the main cause of the US trade deficit with China. The costs of labor, regulation and harassment are far lower in China, and US corporations have offshored their production to China in order to benefit from these lower costs. When a company shifts its production from the US to a foreign country, it transforms US Fross Domestic Product (GDP) into imports. Every time a US company offshores goods and services, it adds to the US trade deficit. Clearly, it is a mistake for the US government and economists to think of the imbalance as if it were produced by Chinese companies underselling goods produced by US companies in America. The imbalance is the result of US companies producing their goods in China and selling them in America.

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The Third Rail War

When you look at the demographics, economics and budget of the US, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the great political battle of the next generation can be summed up very simply - it’s going to be about “who pays, who wins… and who takes it on the chin.”

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