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.
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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
