Comment: Something To Think About...

What began three years ago as my "observations regarding humankind's essential quest for truth" - Provisional Truth - so often has ranged far afield into many other disciplines, especially economics, that I have decided to create a separate venue to pursue my interest in the "dismal science," a field of study which exists, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, only "to make astrology look respectable."

So, with apologies to J.K. Galbraith, historian Thomas Carlyle (who coined the term "dismal science") and Monty Python...Now for Something Completely Different:

Anecdotal Economics

At Anecdotal Economics you will find my entire archives of essays and commentaries about the current state of affairs in global economics, finance and investment, along with new, regularly posted insights, and, mostly, as with all other forecasters and predictors (and astrologers), guesses as to what may come in an unknowable future.  I will list my Anecdotal Economics comment titles here at Provisional Truth, with links to each post, so it will be easy to navigate back and forth.

I hope you enjoy Anecdotal Economics and continue to visit Provisional Truth for non-economic observations regarding humankind's essential quest for truth.

   But what do I know?  Send me an email.                   --Keith Hazelton

  Top
 

Especially since the Fed’s Credit System Bailout, anticipating Heightened Global Monetary Disorder has been a key CBB theme.  The ongoing relevant question: how much would (in particular) China, India, Russia and Asia be willing to pay to procure adequate supplies of food and energy for their populations and economies?The obvious answer is “we have no way of knowing”, but the market is becoming increasingly cognizant of the reality that today’s massive international reserve positions provide virtually unlimited purchasing power.  The bidding war has begun in earnest, in what increasingly appears A New Inflationary Epoch.

Noland observes the international reserves positions of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), OPEC nations and other countries are significant, and almost exponentially have grown in the last decade, and provide a handy bankroll with which these countries, mostly authoritarian regimes, may buy social peace, continuing:

I don’t believe it is mere coincidence that crude has posted about a 30% y-t-d price surge at the same time as international reserve positions have expanded at about a 30% annualized rate - to a stunning $6.769 TN.  Over the past 4 ½ years, official international reserves have ballooned an unprecedented $3.921 trillion, or 138%.  During this period, crude prices surged almost 300%.  Chinese reserves ballooned more than four-fold over this period to $1.68 Trillion; India’s reserve position tripled to $303bn; and Brazil enjoyed a four-fold increase to $189bn.  After beginning 2004 at $73bn, Russian reserves have almost reached the half Trillion mark ($493bn).  And in just the past year, OPEC reserves have inflated 42% to $490bn.  To be sure, the world is awash like never before in excess “liquidity” for which to bid up prices of critical tradable resources. 

02/26/2008
February 26, 2008:  The Next Crisis  

02/03/2008

February 3, 2008:  Chicken Soup for the U.S. Economy

A head cold lasts a week if you treat it, seven days if you don’t. Chicken soup often makes one feel better, as do some medications, but they do nothing to cure an illness caused by a constantly mutating virus. A cold’s symptoms, the sneezing, runny nose and congestion which make one feel miserable, are not caused by the infecting virus, but, in fact, by the defense mechanisms employed by the body to rid itself of the infection.

The U.S. economy has caught cold, and it will last the usual amount of time, about half a year for a mild case. Symptoms only now are beginning to be evident: slowing economic growth, rising unemployment and jobless claims, a weakening dollar and falling asset prices in residential real estate and the stock market. The Federal Reserve is ladling out economic chicken soup as fast as it can in the form of liquidity injections and slashed fed funds target rates, but the economy still is starting to feel lousy.

We view the current recession as that seven-day cold (and it sure seems like we’re in a mild one now, with preliminary 4^th Quarter 2007 GDP falling to +0.6%). Annoying, frustrating and to be ignored only at a greater risk of developing something far worse from a weakened immune system, but not something to be overtreated. But, of all the luck, we’re in the middle of an election year.

And so we are seeing a concerted effort to “treat” the symptoms which have been caused by the economy’s own infection-fighting mechanism designed to wring excesses from the system. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury have run to the Congressional drug store for a strong dose of good-old-fashioned fiscal stimulus, which may mask some of these symptoms but will do nothing to cure the disorder. That the economy must do for itself. Whether it can, or lapses into something worse, is the trillion-dollar question.

  Continue Reading Chicken Soup for the U.S. Economy...

  Top

08/05/2007
August 5, 2007: What a Difference a Fortnight Makes

Pop. That would be the sound of a bubble bursting. From gushing liquidity to credit crunch in two weeks.

Thursday, July 19^th, Wall Street celebrated a closing Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000, concluding a four-month, 2,000 point run-up. Private equity fund and hedge fund managers were riding a tsunami of global liquidity with which no takeover deal would be left behind and every opportunity would  be leveraged to the hilt.

Friday, August 3^rd, as the Dow was plunging 280 points in the wake of Bear Stearns' CFO proclaiming bond market turmoil the worst in 22 years, fears of a global credit crunch gained traction.

From “What, Me Worry?” in mid-July to CNBC clown prince Jim “Boo-Yah” Cramer Friday afternoon screaming the Fed had to “do something” to keep the liquidity engine from seizing.

Cramer effectively was lobbying for a federal bailout of Bear Stearns and Countrywide Financial and other lenders, and for the Fed to lower rates to lower interest rates on the ridiculous premise that lower rates would allow troubled mortgages to be refinanced, ending the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

“If the Federal Reserve lowers rates,” according to Cramer, “people will refinance, the liquidity will come back, and not only will this problem go away, but we'll (the Dow) will go up a thousand points.  (See it here.)

Please note, Mr. Cramer, sub-prime and Alt-A homeowners granted “liar loans” for overpriced real estate using dubious, or outright fraudulent, documentation will NOT be able to refinance their mortgages under any conditions which would allow them to keep their homes.

  Continue Reading What a Difference a Fortnight Makes...

  Top
 

July 23, 2007: What Color is the Sky in Your Neo-con World?  New!

Those of us ensconced in "reality-based" communities, relegated to watching the actors on the stage of this administration create and define history for us and the world, often wonder who makes up that core of support for the current occupiers of the White House, and what, exactly, are they thinking?

Johann Hari, writing for UK's The Independent earlier this month, had the pleasure (?) of embarking on a fantastic voyage with 500 or so readers of The National Review for a cruise of the Pacific West Coast from San Diego to Puerto Vallarta.

The armchair Neo-cons, for whom Fox News is the only source of "fair and balanced" information - the truth, of course - in a godless liberal morass of main stream media, well-off and lily-white save one passenger of African extraction, represent that unshakable remnant of Republican allegiance that keeps the president's poll numbers above 25 percent.

On-board this cruise, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the Global War on Terrorism in general have been astonishing successes.  Global warming does not exist - a "hoax" as proclaimed by Oklahoma's senior senator Jim Inhofe - and its adherents only want to use the threat of a dying planet to raise taxes and further regulate and control the private lives of the citizenry.

  Continue Reading What Color is the Sky in Your Neo-con World?...

June 29, 2007:  American Empire Retreats One Step   New!    

The American Empire retreated a step yesterday, if only temporarily, when the President's sweeping immigration bill failed to garner sufficient votes in the U.S. Senate.  The bill, which would have provided amnesty and a path to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, evidently offered something for everyone to hate, conservatives and liberals alike, as it became loaded with amendments and side proposals to address the complexity of what originally was perceived to be a simple set of immigration issues.

One such proposal, entitled (apparently with little sense of irony) DREAM, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, would have created America's first true mercenary element within our armed forces.

DREAM would have applied to an estimated 750,000 undocumented residents of military age, and stipulated that those who arrived in the United States before age 16, graduated from high school, and meet other qualifications could immediately enter the path to citizenship in exchange for at least two years' service in the armed forces.

  Continue Reading American Empire Retreats One Step...

  Top

June 6, 2007: Those Fanatical Atheists

Dan Gardiner is a Canadian writer whose work often appears in the Ottawa Citizen, the largest circulation newspaper of Canada's capital. This essay was his response to an April 28, 2007 editorial published in the Ottawa Citizen by Robert Sibley entitled, “The Dangers of Militant Atheism.”

Sibley's editorial focused upon a growing number of non-fiction works whose authors, the like of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), observe our human tendency toward wholehearted and unquestioning belief in things not seen, contrasting them to religious fanatics of all stripes as their aspiritual opposites, equally zealous and unbending.

        Those Fanatical Atheists
        By Dan Gardiner
        Published May 5, 2007, The Ottawa Citizen

Yesterday was one major religion's holy day. Today is another's. Tomorrow is a third's. So I thought this is an opportune moment to say I think all three of these faiths -- these mighty institutions, these esteemed philosophies, these ancient and honoured traditions -- are ridiculous quackery. Parted seas. Walking corpses. Nocturnal visits to Heaven. For goodness sake, people, the talking wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more plausible.

In the past, I've tried to avoid talking about religion in such sharp terms. It's not that I fear giving offence (which would be something of a limitation in my line of work). Rather, I know, as all humans do, that it's scary knowing you're going to die. And if belief in angels on high eases the existential fears of some, I won't begrudge them. Whatever gets you through the night, as a long-haired prophet once said.

  Continue Reading Those Fanatical Atheists>>

  Top

June 1, 2007:  Credit Market "Bubble" May Be At Bursting Point

This story by Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg News appeared in the May 18, 2007 edition of The International Herald Tribune (Read complete story here).

  Top

May 11, 2007: Oil Addiction, 9/11 and the Global War on Terror   

Spend a worthwhile hour and view the video below courtesy of Oil, Smoke & Mirrors which may help "connect the dots" between the emerging reality of America's oil addiction, the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror now so devastatingly manifesting itself in the killing streets of Baghdad and throughout Iraq.

The tragedy of 9/11 clearly was used as a pretext to put into motion long-standing Iraq invasion plans. The Bush administration collectively, and quickly, realized as that day's horror unfolded, it was to be that “catalyzing and catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor” described in the infamous Project for a New American Century's 2000 white paper “Rebuilding America's Defenses” (p.51).

Any involvement by this administration in the planning, execution or cover-up of 9/11 is unthinkable, yet certainly not impossible, abundant alternate theories to the contrary, and despite some of the opinions expressed in this video (see comments made by the former German minister of science and technology at minute 21). 

Although many have concluded  the Bush administration may have been aware of an impending terrorist attack on American interests somewhere in the world in the late summer of 2001 but even they could not connect the dots sufficiently to conceive of the possibility of an attack within the U.S., a growing body of evidence points to at least tacit government acceptance of an impending terrorist attack, much in the way it is now known that the Roosevelt administration knew Japan would retaliate in some fashion after a U.S. ultimatum was rejected in November 1941, allowing our entry into World War II.

  Continue Reading Oil Addiction, 9/11 and the Global War on Terror>>

  Top

April 19, 2007: Where is the Outrage?

“Plan B is to make Plan A work,” in Iraq according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, as detailed in a recent TomDispatch.com post, twistedly reminiscent of comedian George Carlin's two-step plan to become a millionaire: “First, get a million dollars...”

No doubt Plans C through Z also will be to make Plan A – “victory” – succeed in Iraq. Victory, however, is a too strong word for what has become today only a vague and nebulous concept, unlike the conclusion of the two World Wars of the last century.

Government architects of this carnage now secretly must define victory as the completion and garrisoning of at least four major, permanent military bases in Iraq and a coordinating Pentagon-like “embassy” compound within Baghdad's Green Zone, the ultimate gated community, which is to be staffed by many thousands and equipped with its own water and electricity systems and its own anti-missile defenses.

Outside this fortified embassy compound, this ultimate symbol of imperial power, and away from the Green Zone, ordinary Iraqis try only to survive each day without being exploded into fragments of bone and globs of fleshy goo or roasted alive sitting in a bus as they venture forth and return home to unpredictable, at best, water and electricity services.

  Continue Reading Where is the Outrage?>>

  Top

February 5, 2007:  The Agenda Restated by James Howard Kunstler www.kunstler.com

Since discovering James Howard Kunstler's website a year or so ago, and reading his gripping book The Long Emergency, I have admired his straightforward, almost calm approach to presenting solutions to the problems of everyday life in a localized world emerging from a hydrocarbon-based economy, quite likely in a future near you, sooner than most are aware or are willing to contemplate.

Far from the "doom and gloom" which his critics focus upon, Mr. Kunstler offers practical recommendations for change which could, in fact, result in the simpler, more meaningful life so many of us pretend to desire.

I have reproduced his commentary from February 5, 2007, which summarizes his view of a post-hydrocarbon America, and world, and the opportunities therein.

February 5, 2007    James H. Kunstler     http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html

The Agenda Restated

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

• Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

  Continue Reading The Agenda Restated>>

  Top

January 18, 2007:  Social Insecurity 2007

Washington (AP) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on January 18th that the economy could be gravely hurt if the nation's fiscal house is not put in order and Social Security and Medicare aren't revamped. "If early and meaningful action is not taken, the U.S. economy could be seriously weakened," Bernanke said in prepared testimony to the Senate Budget Committee.

It marked the Fed chief's most extensive comments to date on the challenges facing the United States with the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers, the oldest of whom will start retiring next year. This huge wave of retirees will hit the U.S. budget as well as the economy, he said.

Absent policy changes by Congress and the White House, rising budget deficits are likely in the years ahead to increase the amount of federal debt outstanding to unprecedented levels, Bernanke said. That could propel interest rates for consumers and businesses upward, which would be a worrisome development, he said. "Thus a vicious cycle may develop in which large deficits lead to rapid growth in debt and interest payments, which in turn adds to subsequent deficits," he said.

December 20, 2006:  The Age of Mammals  

TomDispatch.com posted this year-end 2006 piece, "Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century," by Rebecca Solnit (© 2006 by Rebecca Solnit) which offers her fascinating, plausible look at what might be our near-term future. 

Well-researched and thoroughly documented, Solnit's alternate future presents a detailed account of life on Earth in 2025, "gone-local" following a global energy resource war in 2009 and a severe economic dislocation which followed.

  Continue Reading The Age of Mammals>>

  Top

December 07, 2006:  Malaise Anyone?

Webster's offers "a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being" as a definition of malaise, as in "something's bothering me but I'm not exactly sure what."  President Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in his July 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" speech which marked the beginning of the end of his presidency, but it forever became known as his "malaise" speech.

As some remember, he remonstrated us, especially those with short tempers from long gas-pump lines, to "snap out of it" and to be prepared to accept limits and restrictions in our consumer-driven lives beyond adjusting the thermostat or driving less.

  Continue Reading Malaise Anyone?>>

  Top

November 24, 2006:  Between Iraq and a Hard Place

With great sorrow and respect for the Iraqi people dying daily in that country's U.S.-sponsored civil war it has been more difficult to watch the carnage knowing we have no idea what to do next in that beleaguered country. 

Do we self-absorbed, Playstation-3-besotted, Thanksgiving-dinner-stuffed, shopping-obsessed Americans have any idea what horror daily life must be like for ordinary Iraqis only trying to survive in their "liberated" country? 

  Continue Reading Between Iraq and a Hard Place>>

  Top

November 8, 2006:  The Real Winners of Election 2006

Although Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter may be among the happiest citizens in the American empire this week, what with the prospect of apoplectic ranting at Nancy Pelosi in particular and the Democrats in general for the next two years, it is the American people who are the real winners in Tuesday's elections.

Nationwide it is estimated only 40 percent of eligible Americans bothered to keep the torch of democracy brightly lit at home by showing up at the polls (once again denying the privilege to complain anytime during the next two years from the remaining 60 percent who did not vote, as in "Didn't vote? Don't bitch").

  Continue Reading Real Winners>>

  Top

November 6, 2006:  The Privilege of Voting

We are so keen to export liberty, democracy and voting rights throughout the world, sometimes by force, yet more unlikely to practice it here at home. Nearly half of eligible adult Americans each year refuse to vote, nonetheless still making a choice, if only of one of expressing apathy or frustration.

Turnout for presidential elections is not much better, about 60 percent in 2004, which was the highest in nearly 40 years.  Yet the number of eligible adults who did not vote - 78 million - outnumbered the votes garnered individually by each candidate (Bush: 62 million, Kerry: 59 million).

Our voter turnout is pathetic by comparison to other countries.  In fact, more than 110 democracies around the world have better voter participation, a number that doesn't include the compulsory democracies where voters are presented only one choice.  Add those and in 130 countries more citizens turn out to cast ballots for the candidates of their choice.

     Continue Reading Privilege of Voting>>

  Top
 

October 27, 2006:  Embracing the Subtle Upside of Terror

By Garrison Keillor
Published October 25, 2006
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Link to Original

We are engaged in a struggle between freedom and the forces of terror, my little macacas, and mostly I side with freedom, such as the freedom to look at big shots and stick out your tongue and blow, but of course terror has its place too.

  Continue Reading Embracing the Subtle Upside of Terror>>

  Top

October 17, 2006:  Earl Doherty's Essay: Götterdämmerung

Earl Doherty's essay "Götterdämmerung" (The Twilight of the Gods) appears on one of two of his websites, Age of Reason, and describes in terms of Richard Wagner's opera of the same name, last of his four-part epic "The Ring of the Nibelung," the "insight and acceptance that the gods must pass away in order to make room for something new."

Along the same lines as Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Doherty argues "the gods" are now "the greatest threat to our very progress and survival. They can no longer be accommodated, for the truth of the matter is that they have been commandeered by that element of human society which is most unenlightened, most irrational, most fanatical. Liberal religion has now been marginalized; it is a spent, largely irrelevant force. It has no control over the extremist expressions of the world's major faiths."

  Continue Reading Götterdämmerung>>

  Top

October 11, 2006:  James Kunstler's Essay: Twilight of Lumpenleisure

Read James Howard Kunstler's essay "The Twilight of Lumpenleisure" at www.kunstler.com for a concise portrayal of how we arrived at the energy-dependent present and a description of a quieter, less optimistic future as the world arrives at peak-oil and begins a slow, traumatic descent into history's and humankind's greatest challenge.  This essay is a brief version of the theme of Kunstler's book The Long Emergency and his conclusion is presented below.

The Twilight of Mechanized Lumpenleisure

By James Howard Kunstler

Among the many wonders and marvels of American life in the twentieth century, especially after World War Two, when our country ruled much of the world economically, was the astounding rise in standards of living among social classes who had hardly known leisure or had a dollar to spare on the accoutrements of it from time immemorial.  The subject of class itself in America has been so sore, that we can barely acknowledge its existence as a fact of life, despite the workings of whole industries devoted to exploiting the envy of the lower orders. 

The very term I have just used – lower orders – would be considered grounds for sacking if I had the misfortune of teaching at a college, and will certainly be seized on by critics of this book as evidence of my intellectual unfittedness.  In short, any discourse on class consciousness is regarded in America these days as an obscenity, far worse than yelling “fuck” onstage in a Broadway theater, or stealing $100 million from the shareholders of a telecom corporation.

  Continue Reading Twilight of Lumpenleisure>>

  Top

October 2, 2006:  An Open Letter to Senator John McCain

Dear Senator McCain:

Thank you for your recent email. I cannot, however, in good conscience make a contribution to the Republican National Committee, despite your personal encouragement. Please understand, I voted for you in the 2000 Ohio presidential primary and I wish you had won that ballot, as I also wish you had won the presidency that year and again in 2004. I think many things likely would be different - for the better - in October 2006 had you been elected (or Al Gore, for that matter).

  Continue Reading Open Letter>>

  Top

September 26, 2006:  Misplaced Priorities?

The New Orleans Superdome, place of such fear, misery and death only 13 months ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Crescent City, was formally reopened last night as the NFL Saints hosted the Atlanta Falcons.  Completely refurbished in less than a year at a cost of $185 million, funded by FEMA ($115 million), the state of Louisiana and the NFL, the new, improved Superdome is supposed to be a beacon of hope to that half of New Orleans' residential population not displaced a year ago.

  Continue Reading Misplaced Priorities>>

  Top

September 25, 2006:  An Increasing Toll

U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11, 2001 toll of 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

  Continue Reading An Increasing Toll>>

  Top

September 18, 2006:  The Plank and the Speck

Pope Benedict XVI ignited a controversy in Islam following his quotation of 14th century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus from an obscure 14th text which observed - accurately, in that age - as "evil and inhuman" the prophet Mohammad's "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." 

Muslim clerics have demanded a formal, personal apology, which so far the pope has declined, stating the quote did not represent his personal views.  Not good enough, according to Muslims, and now al-Qaeda militants in Iraq have vowed war on "worshippers of the cross."

  Continue Reading The Plank and the Speck>>

  Top

September 11, 2006:  Endless Jihad 

It has been five years since 9/11 and the beginning of war with Islamist Jihad, notwithstanding our more recent diversionary adventure in Iraq.

Columnist David Ignatius recently pondered the rise of Islamist militancy and terrorism as shorter-term generational phenomena, as in 'when all the angry, young Muslim men of this generation grow older, they no longer will be interested in Jihad,' and the threat of terrorism will diminish and perhaps disappear (he hopes).

  Continue Reading Endless Jihad>>

  Top

  Home