heureusement, ici, c'est james

"The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

'A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,' said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

A report by the bank's research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as "all the chickens come home to roost" from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

Such a slide on world bourses would amount to one of the worst bear markets over the last century."

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Labels: credit crunch, dead paradigms, debt, delusions of grandeur, globalization, growth, mass consumption, psychopathic behaviour

Colour me red, but I decided to abstain from blogging before, during, and after the by-election. The MSM stuttered their speculative stake-raising nonsense and bloggers echoed the dysfunction in tune with their respective party lines.

As fun as it was, we may be facing economic problems so serious that we'll be forced to discuss real ideas for a change -- and wouldn't that be charming?

The National's lead story today featured one investor who said "we're looking at a financial crisis equal to that of the 1930s. We should all be very concerned about what that means."

But he wasn't the only one using alarmist rhetoric.

Another said "there is a possibility we could have a depression. We could be looking at 1929. I'm not forecasting that and I don't want to be represented as such, but the dangers are real and apparent."

The TSX plunged 400 points; the loonie saw its biggest single drop in 40 years, and the price of oil -- often called a market 'fundamental' by those with hats over their eyes -- keeps fluctuating so much that any minute we're all going to keel over with acute nausea.

It's just one day's movement, but the ride's not over.

Lyle Gramley, Former Governor of the US fed and 50-some-odd year economic veteran, said, "we need to begin to start thinking outside the box because what we're experiencing now in financial markets is unlike anything I have seen in more than 50 years in looking at the economy."

But just when we think the market's pissing in our sandbox, we hear such soothing words as "the fundamentals of our economy are still strong," usually alluding to the demand for oil. In fact, it's something our own delusional PM said a few months back, and something a good many people were saying at the beginning of the credit crisis, which I dare point out, keeps worsening.


In the midst of all the anxiety, I'd like to take up Gramley's offer and suggest an idea from outside the box:

We have a global market that is ruled by an unthinking, greedy, and growing global mob. At the centre of the mob, we have a huge hulk of a monster -- the US -- deep in debt from a nasty addiction to oil and oil wars, and using dirty money to finance it all. The dirty money comes from bad loans and other grimy, unseemly "quick cash" schemes.

Suddenly, Murphy and his law caught the US with its pants down, and now we have an economic problem that some are comparing to the 1930s.

But have you heard anyone talk about how broken our global financial institutions are? Are we thinking about changing how we finance credit and debt? Are we talking about just how bad an investment expensive oil is in this warming world (for that matter, do we realize how little oil actually contributes to the Canadian economy as a percentage of GDP)?

No, not at all. In fact, we more often than not hear people jabber on about how oil investments will somehow save us from diving off the edge of an economic cliff; that, like I said, it somehow constitutes a market "fundamental."

The problem with this logic is that oil means nothing if its prices is so high that it grinds down -- rather than greases -- the global economy. And if you look at the problem without your economic-fundamentalist blinders on, you notice that dirty, expensive oil is the dumbest investment we could possibly make in the economy, nevermind the planet, especially at this stage in history.

This is a twofold emergency made worse by our short-term thinking. Though whether we ever treat it as an emergency in Canada is debatable. Our present government doesn't believe in intervention, and I wonder sometimes if they even understand global warming.

Most of all, though this may at first seem from out of left-field, we need to reform our global financial practices. Currency-trading and debt-based economics have not served us well. The practice of using the US dollar as a reserve currency needs to end, and we need a globally-neutral currency or resource to replace it.

Not gold.

We don't have the luxury today of thinking that gold is the world's most precious resource. The most precious resource today the proportion of non-carbon elements in our atmosphere.

What am I talking about? We are facing not one, but two global emergencies: One being the credit crunch, the other, as I alluded to, being global warming. With a currency adjustment, we can quickly harness the power of the free market to save our future.

There is no reason why we can't translate the chemistry of our atmosphere into a global, ecologically-backed currency unit that prevents us from further overstepping our ecological limit and launches us toward a sure-footed economic future built on clean energy.

Sounds funny, you think, making cash out of thin air? Well just what the heck do you think we're doing right now?

Labels: credit crunch, dead paradigms, debt, delusions of grandeur, economy, election, environment, slow learners, subprime housing crisis

Here's a recent bout of analytical verbiage from Chantal Hebert on the National, which aired the night before these recent poll results came out, giving the Liberals a marginal lead and the progressive majority a landslide victory:

"the economy is starting to be on the radar again because of the high dollar; because of what's happening in the United States; because of rising energy prices - go through the list. But I also think that Conservative strategists don't see Stephane Dion as someone who is strong as economic issues. He has made poverty and the environment his two issues and I think they're trying to use tougher times on the economic front to try to portray Dion as someone who would be reckless with public money in difficult times; who would imperil the economy by going overboard on the environment and who would be a spending Liberal"

That might be a great old-fashioned political narrative, but the logic just doesn't hold up.

She thoughtfully omitted Dion's much advertised "third pillar" - the economy - and relied on that dead paradigm where the environment and economy are mortal enemies; the latter always poised to move in for the kill.

But when you turn your brain on, you quickly realize that the high dollar will continue to soar along with the price of energy as long as we pursue oil-intensive economic policies; that oil prices won't come crashing down with the big demand from Asia; that the conservative economic ideology - relying commodity exports - will have the eventual effect of driving up global inflation, and inflation here in Canada as a result; that the trouble in the U.S. economy from the sub-prime lending crisis will carry on for as long as Americans (and much of the rest of the world - us included) continue to finance a debt-based fiat economy through large loans and mass consumption rather than savings.

All this economic bullshit is part of the same ecological crisis.

At the risk of being unkind, I'm not sure what's more harmful to our well-being: dinosaur-pundits egging on our childish, chauvinistic government, or Harper's ancient neoconservative orthodoxy in action.

I never thought I'd see the day when our journalists would be unapologetically confusing Conservative games with actually governing, and then legitimately seeming to respect them for it.

I think it's because their jobs increasingly hinge on the made-up fluff of political soap operas rather than the real-life ramifications of policy positions, which frees them up to rake Dion's personality over the coals with adjectives like "pallid," "inept," "weak," and "incompetent." After all, it makes for a better political narrative.

Believe it or not, it wasn't his charm that won over the party in the first place. It was his priorities. But far be it from me to suggest that they actually figure this out before they spit uncontrollably at the people who are watching them on TV.

Pundits not only underestimate the depth and importance the environmental issue has for Canadians - especially of my generation - but, according to the polls, their comments expire only a few hours after they spit them out.

Harper, it seems, can any weather number of short-sighted flip-flops on the economy, income trusts, the environment, or even the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, by virtue of an emasculated and intellectually decrepit media which continues to laud his "considerable abilities." What a joke.

Believing that conservative orthodoxy will cure any of these persistent problems would be like cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Labels: dead paradigms, environment, Stephane Dion, Stephen Harper