“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Jin kunstler clusterfuck_nation/2006 That's right, 2006.
==
Swan Dive October 9, 2006
Against the background of everything else happening in the financial markets is the apparent circumstance of peak oil. Even The New York Times joined the chorus in a Sunday editorial, saying:
Our demand for petroleum products strains the limits of the global capacity to supply them. In past decades, if a pipeline broke in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia might compensate by setting workers to pumping more oil. Now, with little additional capacity, rising prices are necessary to balance out supply and demand.
No more increasing capacity = peak oil. It's as simple as that. We now have nine and a half months of "rearview mirror" action to look back and see that world oil production has retreated from its all-time high of just over 85 million barrels a day (m/b/d) achieved in December 2005 (just as geologist Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton had predicted). For 2006, production has remained in the 84 m/b/d range every month reported so far, while demand has exceeded that.
Texas oil man Jeffrey Brown, a commentator at TheOilDrum.com, the outstanding oil discussion group on the Internet, makes the point that Saudi Arabia is at the same point statistically (in terms of ultimate recoverable reserves) that Texas was at in 1972 when production there peaked. The world's four greatest oil fields are in depletion (Burgan [Kuwait], Daqing [China], Cantarell [Mexico], and Ghawar [Saudi Arabia]) and these have accounted for over 14 percent of the world's oil production. (Ghawar alone accounts for over 60 percent of Saudi Arabia's production.) The North Sea has peaked and production there is "crashing." Venezuela has peaked and its oil is shitty heavy crude. Indonesia (an OPEC member) has peaked and is now a net oil importer. Nigeria's political chaos is making production increasingly difficult-to-impossible. Production in the Canadian tar sands is not making up for losses elsewhere. The US is down to about a four-year supply of conventional crude and condensates while we import 70 percent of the oil we consume. Discovery of new oil (including Chevron's largely hypothetical deepwater "Jack" finds) is barely covering a fraction of the world's consumption. So it goes....
Where finance is concerned, the basic implication of peak oil is pretty stark: an end to industrial expansion (i.e. "growth"). All the alternatives to oil will not keep the industrial economies expanding -- they can only slow down a contraction, and only marginally so. The trouble with this picture is that finance is a system that uses paper markers to represent the hope and expectation for the expansion of wealth. These markers are currencies, stocks, bonds, option contracts, derivatives plays, and other certificates that are traded in open markets. If there is no longer any hope of increased wealth in the world, then all those tradable paper markers become losers. Their value unwinds and imagined piles of wealth evaporate into thin air.
The unwinding process depends on the psychology of the people who own these certificates. If they do not understand the global oil situation and its implications, then they will continue to hope for and expect expanded wealth, and thus continue to regard their paper certificates as credible markers of value. And that is largely the case at the moment, since most of the playas in the financial markets are not paying attention to the peak oil story, or don't believe it is for real.
Two special and transient circumstances are now propping up the financial markets. One is that for practical purposes the world is virtually at peak, meaning this is an extra-special time of strange behavior (like the point in the apogee of a steep sub orbital flight in which passengers become momentarily weightless). Supply and demand for oil are only beginning to go out of whack (that is, demand just barely exceeding supply). Even at this early stage, the oil markets themselves are showing stress, as hoarding behavior sets in and induces wider swings of price volatility. But these swings in oil prices -- such as the one we're in right now, where prices have crashed 20 percent since the panic buying (hoarding) of June and July -- send false signals to the financial playas. The main false signal is that all is well on the global oil scene...there's no real supply problem...and hence no threat to the continuing expansion of industrial production and its associated wealth-generating activities. This signal just tells the playas to buy more paper markers. Thus, the stock market goes up.
The second special and transient circumstance is that so much wealth has already accumulated along the way to peak, that financial markets take on a life of their own -- as existing wealth "invests" itself in more paper markers hoping and expecting to "grow" into even more wealth. The problem here is that existing wealth is actually being squandered, since the paper markers will only lose value as the hopes and expectations vested in them dissolve in disappointment. But we haven't quite reached that point yet.
In simply bidding the markets up, the system has spun off even more gobs of presumed wealth. Some of this "liquidity" -- say, in the checking accounts of people who work for Goldman Sachs -- has found its way into Manhattan condominiums, or Aspen McMansions, and filtered through the system to everyone from the lawyers who write up the pre-nuptial agreements to the guys who sell the furniture to the people who drive the delivery trucks that bring it to the door, to the men laying tiles in the new bathrooms.
The basic insanity of a system that presumes vastly increased wealth where none will occur, has led to further distortions in finance. The most obvious one is the so-called housing bubble. The misplaced extreme expectation in the ever-increasing value of paper wealth, led to the hijacking of mortgages by financial playas who bundled them into odd lots of tradable debt (promises to pay) and used them to leverage abstruse bets (hedges) on the behavior of other kinds of paper markers (currencies, interest rate differentials, commodity prices) -- very profitably as long as all playas believed that industrial societies that run all oil would continue to grow, to produce more wealth. The level of abstraction in these rackets -- their distance from the reality of productive activity --is self-evident.
But they were so successful that the profligate creation of ever more mortgages became an increasingly reckless and irresponsible enterprise. Contracts were made with house-buyers who had no record of credit worthiness and often no real proof of income. Contracts were made on terms (interest payments) that were deceptive, even ruinously false, for the house-buyers. The reckless reassignment of lending risk into ever more abstract layers of deferred obligation, and the ease of credit that ensued, allowed millions of ordinary people to acquire real property on unrealistic terms, which had the affect of bidding up the price of houses that these owners will eventually have to surrender for nonpayment.
That process is now underway. The reckless creation of mortgages had the further effect of stealing demand for house-building from the future. So many new houses were built and then sold to people who will probably have to surrender them, and then so many more beyond that were built in the expectation and hope that reckless mortgage creation would continue forever, that there is now a massive over-supply of total existing houses while the pool of suckers for new ruinous mortgages has shrunk to zero.
Similar excesses in all the other lending and debt sectors, including "non-performing" credit card obligations and government deficits, will also unwind and thunder through the system.
Meanwhile, the false signal from the oil markets that has been broadcasting for eight weeks will come offline and a new signal will come on as prices go back up. The pause in bidding for future oil induced by the panic over-buying of the summer will end. The heating season is here. It's 40 degrees out in upstate New York this morning and the furnace is cranking. The Chinese and the Indians and even the people in France have not stopped using oil, even if Americans have put their Winnebagos up on blocks for the season.
As the price of oil goes back up, the financial markets will get a new signal that running industrial societies has just gotten more expensive again. That will dampen hopes and expectations for increased wealth from these societies. Meanwhile, the air will be coming out of millions of mortgages, and the loss of value will spread among playas holding these bundles of mortgage debt (i.e. promises that money spent on houses is being paid back, which it won't be). At the same time the houses themselves will lose value as the pool of potential buyers shrinks to nothing. That is, the inflated value (high price) of these assets will deflate.
As this occurs, there will be far fewer wage-earners putting up additional houses, fewer furniture sales, fewer trips by delivery truck drivers and fewer tile-jobs in the McBathrooms.
This is why I view the fall melt-up of the stock markets as a swan dive. We're at the apogee now, just as the world is at the apogee of its oil production. I confess, I thought the reality of our economic predicament would be recognized by the playas and their markets sooner than it has. It turns out the the chief luxury of the final cheap oil blowout has been the artificial support of unrealistic hopes and expectations. . . http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2006/10/swan_dive.html . .
Dr. Bill is giving a big dissertation tonight on how nuclear power plants use about the same amoung of water as as coal fired plants, that cause global warming, thanks to the glogal warming anit nuclear nuts.
An astonishing and groundbreaking look at the Mexican Mafia, The Black Hand is an unprecedented story of depravity, violence, and redemption
Rene "Boxer" Enriquez grew up on the violent streets of East L.A., where gang fights, robberies, and drive-by shootings were fueled by rage, drugs, and alcohol. When he finally landed in prison—at the age of nineteen—Enriquez found an organization that brought him the respect he always wanted: the near-mythic and widely feared Mexican Mafia, La Eme.
What it saw in Enriquez was a young man who knew no fear and would kill anyone—justifiably or not—in the blink of an eye. That loyalty and iron will drove him up the ranks as a mob enforcer and ultimately to the upper echelons, where he would help rule for nearly two decades.
He helped La Eme become the powerful and violent organization that it is now, with a base army of approximately sixty thousand heavily armed gang members who control the prison system and a large part of California crime. Arguably the most dangerous gang in American history, its reach is growing.
And now award-winning investigative journalist Chris Blatchford, with the unprecedented cooperation of Rene Enriquez, reveals the inner workings, secret meetings, and elaborate murder plots that make up the daily routine of the Mafia brothers. It is an intense, never-before-told story of a man who devoted his life to a bloody cause only to find betrayal and disillusionment.
global warming brought to you by the foolish anti global warming nuts who have insisted "no nukes!",therefore building coal fired plants, making the problem worse, when in fact we'd be much better off with nuclear power.
In other words, they want to stop global warming, and make the problem worse by stopping nuclear power, the cleanest power there is. There!
Shit, these were the same questions I'd ask at the BC, referencing Iraq, but now it looks like Mr Bush may be asking those questions about Afghanistan, seven years in.
Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush's senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies' role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?
Answering questions after delivering a speech at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Rio de Janeiro, Gutierrez pointed to what he called U.S. policy errors during the Great Depression as examples of what nations should not do now.
John McCain has pulled to a solid seven-point lead over Barack Obama in Indiana. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds McCain leading 50% to 43%.
Was that, T?
ReplyDeleteThe girl has it in her.
ReplyDeleteWell, sure.
ReplyDeleteEverybody knows
Quite a day. We Got Whiskey. How about GEETARS! and Cocaine
ReplyDeleteDoin' cocaine up on Cripple Creek
ReplyDeleteThe Stones, and Bob Dylan Like a Rolling Stone
ReplyDeleteJJ Cale's got his mojo workin'
ReplyDeleteStock Market, yore ass A Country Boy Can Survive
ReplyDeleteJin kunstler clusterfuck_nation/2006
ReplyDeleteThat's right, 2006.
==
Swan Dive
October 9, 2006
Against the background of everything else happening in the financial markets is the apparent circumstance of peak oil. Even The New York Times joined the chorus in a Sunday editorial, saying:
Our demand for petroleum products strains the limits of the global capacity to supply them. In past decades, if a pipeline broke in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia might compensate by setting workers to pumping more oil. Now, with little additional capacity, rising prices are necessary to balance out supply and demand.
No more increasing capacity = peak oil.
It's as simple as that. We now have nine and a half months of "rearview mirror" action to look back and see that world oil production has retreated from its all-time high of just over 85 million barrels a day (m/b/d) achieved in December 2005 (just as geologist Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton had predicted). For 2006, production has remained in the 84 m/b/d range every month reported so far, while demand has exceeded that.
Texas oil man Jeffrey Brown, a commentator at TheOilDrum.com, the outstanding oil discussion group on the Internet, makes the point that Saudi Arabia is at the same point statistically (in terms of ultimate recoverable reserves) that Texas was at in 1972 when production there peaked. The world's four greatest oil fields are in depletion (Burgan [Kuwait], Daqing [China], Cantarell [Mexico], and Ghawar [Saudi Arabia]) and these have accounted for over 14 percent of the world's oil production. (Ghawar alone accounts for over 60 percent of Saudi Arabia's production.) The North Sea has peaked and production there is "crashing." Venezuela has peaked and its oil is shitty heavy crude. Indonesia (an OPEC member) has peaked and is now a net oil importer. Nigeria's political chaos is making production increasingly difficult-to-impossible. Production in the Canadian tar sands is not making up for losses elsewhere. The US is down to about a four-year supply of conventional crude and condensates while we import 70 percent of the oil we consume. Discovery of new oil (including Chevron's largely hypothetical deepwater "Jack" finds) is barely covering a fraction of the world's consumption. So it goes....
Where finance is concerned, the basic implication of peak oil is pretty stark: an end to industrial expansion (i.e. "growth"). All the alternatives to oil will not keep the industrial economies expanding -- they can only slow down a contraction, and only marginally so. The trouble with this picture is that finance is a system that uses paper markers to represent the hope and expectation for the expansion of wealth. These markers are currencies, stocks, bonds, option contracts, derivatives plays, and other certificates that are traded in open markets. If there is no longer any hope of increased wealth in the world, then all those tradable paper markers become losers. Their value unwinds and imagined piles of wealth evaporate into thin air.
The unwinding process depends on the psychology of the people who own these certificates. If they do not understand the global oil situation and its implications, then they will continue to hope for and expect expanded wealth, and thus continue to regard their paper certificates as credible markers of value. And that is largely the case at the moment, since most of the playas in the financial markets are not paying attention to the peak oil story, or don't believe it is for real.
Two special and transient circumstances are now propping up the financial markets. One is that for practical purposes the world is virtually at peak, meaning this is an extra-special time of strange behavior (like the point in the apogee of a steep sub orbital flight in which passengers become momentarily weightless). Supply and demand for oil are only beginning to go out of whack (that is, demand just barely exceeding supply). Even at this early stage, the oil markets themselves are showing stress, as hoarding behavior sets in and induces wider swings of price volatility. But these swings in oil prices -- such as the one we're in right now, where prices have crashed 20 percent since the panic buying (hoarding) of June and July -- send false signals to the financial playas. The main false signal is that all is well on the global oil scene...there's no real supply problem...and hence no threat to the continuing expansion of industrial production and its associated wealth-generating activities. This signal just tells the playas to buy more paper markers. Thus, the stock market goes up.
The second special and transient circumstance is that so much wealth has already accumulated along the way to peak, that financial markets take on a life of their own -- as existing wealth "invests" itself in more paper markers hoping and expecting to "grow" into even more wealth. The problem here is that existing wealth is actually being squandered, since the paper markers will only lose value as the hopes and expectations vested in them dissolve in disappointment. But we haven't quite reached that point yet.
In simply bidding the markets up, the system has spun off even more gobs of presumed wealth. Some of this "liquidity" -- say, in the checking accounts of people who work for Goldman Sachs -- has found its way into Manhattan condominiums, or Aspen McMansions, and filtered through the system to everyone from the lawyers who write up the pre-nuptial agreements to the guys who sell the furniture to the people who drive the delivery trucks that bring it to the door, to the men laying tiles in the new bathrooms.
The basic insanity of a system that presumes vastly increased wealth where none will occur, has led to further distortions in finance. The most obvious one is the so-called housing bubble. The misplaced extreme expectation in the ever-increasing value of paper wealth, led to the hijacking of mortgages by financial playas who bundled them into odd lots of tradable debt (promises to pay) and used them to leverage abstruse bets (hedges) on the behavior of other kinds of paper markers (currencies, interest rate differentials, commodity prices) -- very profitably as long as all playas believed that industrial societies that run all oil would continue to grow, to produce more wealth. The level of abstraction in these rackets -- their distance from the reality of productive activity --is self-evident.
But they were so successful that the profligate creation of ever more mortgages became an increasingly reckless and irresponsible enterprise. Contracts were made with house-buyers who had no record of credit worthiness and often no real proof of income. Contracts were made on terms (interest payments) that were deceptive, even ruinously false, for the house-buyers. The reckless reassignment of lending risk into ever more abstract layers of deferred obligation, and the ease of credit that ensued, allowed millions of ordinary people to acquire real property on unrealistic terms, which had the affect of bidding up the price of houses that these owners will eventually have to surrender for nonpayment.
That process is now underway. The reckless creation of mortgages had the further effect of stealing demand for house-building from the future. So many new houses were built and then sold to people who will probably have to surrender them, and then so many more beyond that were built in the expectation and hope that reckless mortgage creation would continue forever, that there is now a massive over-supply of total existing houses while the pool of suckers for new ruinous mortgages has shrunk to zero.
Similar excesses in all the other lending and debt sectors, including "non-performing" credit card obligations and government deficits, will also unwind and thunder through the system.
Meanwhile, the false signal from the oil markets that has been broadcasting for eight weeks will come offline and a new signal will come on as prices go back up. The pause in bidding for future oil induced by the panic over-buying of the summer will end. The heating season is here. It's 40 degrees out in upstate New York this morning and the furnace is cranking. The Chinese and the Indians and even the people in France have not stopped using oil, even if Americans have put their Winnebagos up on blocks for the season.
As the price of oil goes back up, the financial markets will get a new signal that running industrial societies has just gotten more expensive again. That will dampen hopes and expectations for increased wealth from these societies. Meanwhile, the air will be coming out of millions of mortgages, and the loss of value will spread among playas holding these bundles of mortgage debt (i.e. promises that money spent on houses is being paid back, which it won't be). At the same time the houses themselves will lose value as the pool of potential buyers shrinks to nothing. That is, the inflated value (high price) of these assets will deflate.
As this occurs, there will be far fewer wage-earners putting up additional houses, fewer furniture sales, fewer trips by delivery truck drivers and fewer tile-jobs in the McBathrooms.
This is why I view the fall melt-up of the stock markets as a swan dive. We're at the apogee now, just as the world is at the apogee of its oil production. I confess, I thought the reality of our economic predicament would be recognized by the playas and their markets sooner than it has. It turns out the the chief luxury of the final cheap oil blowout has been the artificial support of unrealistic hopes and expectations.
.
.
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2006/10/swan_dive.html
.
.
Live From The Fox Theatre circa 1993 Lynyrd Skynyrd
ReplyDeleteChuckie Baby Johnny B. Goode
ReplyDeleteWhere it all began. The boy just wishes he could sing like the Old Man. Jambalaya
ReplyDeleteWhy do you ride for your money
ReplyDeletewhy do you rope for short pay
ain't gettin' no where
You're losing your share
Must have gone crazy out there
Well, let's just
ReplyDeletepick up the tempo
If they ever made a better one than this, I ain't heard it. Patsy - Walkin after Midnight
ReplyDeleteThe way back machine ...
ReplyDeleteDoes have its' uses
Reminder of why I left the job that required drivin' down the LA Freeway
I betcha 36' catamarans are going to gettin' pretty cheap, for cash money.
.
ReplyDeleteI'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive (Hank Sr.)
.
How About
ReplyDeleteSome Gi tar In Spanish?
Ray Charles, and Willie Nelson Seven Spanish Angels
ReplyDeleteWonder how many Icelanders are feeling the London Homesick Blues?
ReplyDeleteLet's see just how old you whippersnappers really are. I Promise I'll quit after This one. Man, I'm getting Drunk - It wasn't God that made Honky Tonk Angels Kitty, Kitty, Kitty
ReplyDeleteDr. Bill is giving a big dissertation tonight on how nuclear power plants use about the same amoung of water as as coal fired plants, that cause global warming, thanks to the glogal warming anit nuclear nuts.
ReplyDeleteRevisiting "Fuerte"
For Rufus.
The Black Hand - The Bloody Rise and Redemption of Boxer Enriquez, a Mexican Mob Killer
ReplyDeleteAn astonishing and groundbreaking look at the Mexican Mafia, The Black Hand is an unprecedented story of depravity, violence, and redemption
Rene "Boxer" Enriquez grew up on the violent streets of East L.A., where gang fights, robberies, and drive-by shootings were fueled by rage, drugs, and alcohol. When he finally landed in prison—at the age of nineteen—Enriquez found an organization that brought him the respect he always wanted: the near-mythic and widely feared Mexican Mafia, La Eme.
What it saw in Enriquez was a young man who knew no fear and would kill anyone—justifiably or not—in the blink of an eye. That loyalty and iron will drove him up the ranks as a mob enforcer and ultimately to the upper echelons, where he would help rule for nearly two decades.
He helped La Eme become the powerful and violent organization that it is now, with a base army of approximately sixty thousand heavily armed gang members who control the prison system and a large part of California crime. Arguably the most dangerous gang in American history, its reach is growing.
And now award-winning investigative journalist Chris Blatchford, with the unprecedented cooperation of Rene Enriquez, reveals the inner workings, secret meetings, and elaborate murder plots that make up the daily routine of the Mafia brothers. It is an intense, never-before-told story of a man who devoted his life to a bloody cause only to find betrayal and disillusionment.
"thanks to the glogal warming anit nuclear nuts."
ReplyDeletehuh?
global warming brought to you by the foolish anti global warming nuts who have insisted "no nukes!",therefore building coal fired plants, making the problem worse, when in fact we'd be much better off with nuclear power.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, they want to stop global warming, and make the problem worse by stopping nuclear power, the cleanest power there is. There!
This is the song, bob, that they partied to, in Sweden this past summer.
ReplyDeleteKid's growin' up, no doubt of that.
Bobal: In other words, they want to stop global warming, and make the problem worse by stopping nuclear power, the cleanest power there is.
ReplyDeleteIn Soviet Chernobyl, uranium enriches YOU.
Everybody Knows--
ReplyDeleteThat heaven is
at least partly
made outta music
and
I let my hair down here
and tell you a secret
when my good aunt almost
died
in my arms
she talked of beautiful music
from unseen stars
so,
I know
the myths tell the truth
I was witness
And pass it to my friends.
Shit, these were the same questions I'd ask at the BC, referencing Iraq, but now it looks like Mr Bush may be asking those questions about Afghanistan, seven years in.
ReplyDeleteLt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush's senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies' role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?
h/t westhawk
Rufus: Was that, T?
ReplyDeleteNot unless that was a dyke bar.
- Stan Getz – The Girl from Ipanema –
ReplyDeleteThe Girl From Ipanema - A Cruise to the Muse -
US commerce secretary in Rio de Janeiro
Answering questions after delivering a speech at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Rio de Janeiro, Gutierrez pointed to what he called U.S. policy errors during the Great Depression as examples of what nations should not do now.
Gotta Be the Best Lookin 62 Year Old in the World!
ReplyDeleteDoug, you've heard of a MILF? That's a Grand-MILF.
ReplyDeleteSometimes we forget these guys are musicians, and artists, first Willie Nelson - I never cared for you
ReplyDelete- Everybody Knows - Rufus -
ReplyDeleteHates Americans? Why doesn't he go write for the Sao Paolo Post. Fuck him.
ReplyDeleteJohn McCain has pulled to a solid seven-point lead over Barack Obama in Indiana. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds McCain leading 50% to 43%.
ReplyDeleteEverybody knows the American people aren't gonna elect an out and out Marxist.
ReplyDelete- The Girl From Ipanema Original US Version -
ReplyDeleteEverybody Knows
Gee, on the Radio, it said NO Laws were Violated!
ReplyDeleteNY Times:
Efforts to Oust Trooper Found to Violate Law
that's how it goes.
ReplyDeleteeverybody knows.
ReplyDelete