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Cheaper oil will not boost global growth, says Moody’s
Cheaper oil will not boost global growth, says Moody’s
Lower oil prices will fail to give a “significant boost” to global growth in the next two years, Moody’s has said.
The ratings agency said any boost from cheaper oil would be offset by the eurozone’s economic woes as well as slowdowns in China, Japan and Russia.
As a result, Moody’s said it would not be revising its growth forecasts for the G20 countries.
“For the G20 economies, we expect GDP growth of just under 3% each year in 2015 and 2016.”
This was unchanged from 2014 and from its previous forecast, Moody’s said.
Marie Diron, the author of the report, said: “Lower oil prices should, in principle, give a significant boost to global growth.
“However, a range of factors will offset the windfall income gains from cheaper energy.
“In the euro area, the fall in oil prices takes place in an unfavourable economic climate, with high unemployment, low or negative inflation and resurgent political uncertainty in some countries.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Consumer Companies Issue Most Negative Guidance Ever, Despite Lower Gasoline Prices
Consumer Companies Issue Most Negative Guidance Ever, Despite Lower Gasoline Prices
But the oil-price crash was supposed to goose consumer spending.
The price of oil continues to crash relentlessly. WTI trades at $49.80 as I’m writing this on Monday after hours, down 5.5% for the day, and down 54% since June 2014.
The oil-price plunge is eating into the American oil boom, munching on income statements and balance sheets of drillers that have gorged on junk debt. It’s chewing up junk bonds and leveraged loans. It’s frying oil and gas stocks. It’s starting to wreak havoc among suppliers to the industry. Layoffs are starting to cascade across the oil patch, company by company, as capital expenditures and operating expenses get slashed in an effort to stay liquid long enough to make it through the oil bust.
Oil busts are terrible creatures in oil and gas states, such as Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota. The last one persisted for a long time. It took down banks, housing, restaurants, oil-field equipment manufactures and their suppliers, grocery stores…. Pickup truck sales plummeted, boat sales dried up. Jewelry stores fell on hard times.
This time, it’s different. Fracking is immensely capital intensive. Wall Street is up to its ears in it. Hedge funds and private equity firms will join banks in taking the hits on their equity stakes and on the debt they hold.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise
The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise.
My year without Amazon | Transition Network
My year without Amazon | Transition Network.
Exactly a year ago today I wrote a piece on this blog called The day I closed my Amazon account. It set out why, and how, I had decided that Amazon was so at odds with my values that I was withdrawing my support for good. It turned out to be the most popular thing I wrote that year. It was eventranslated into German and put on YouTube. I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections on how a year free of Amazon has been. (Spoiler Alert: it’s been great).
At the end of that article, I wrote:
“It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….”
It appears that a year later I’m not the only one deliberately crossing the road to avoid that great behemoth of an online retailer. A campaign called Amazon Anonymous has invited people to pledge to not support Amazon this Christmas, because they:
“don’t pay their workers a living wage. They dodge their tax. They take money away from our local shops”.
Indeed. So far signatories have pledged to not spend just over £3 million with Amazon. Of course in the big picture of Christmas spending, £3 million is but a drop in Amazon’s vast ocean, they probably wouldn’t stop to pick it up if they dropped it, but it’s a powerful statement nonetheless that has generated a lot of press coverage.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Do We Own Our Stuff, or Does Our Stuff Own Us?
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Do We Own Our Stuff, or Does Our Stuff Own Us?.
The frenzied acquisition of more stuff is supposed to be an unalloyed good: good for “growth,” good for the consumer who presumably benefits from more stuff and good for governments collecting taxes on the purchase of all the stuff.
Buying Less Stuff Can Actually Make You More Happy | Carl Duivenvoorden
Buying Less Stuff Can Actually Make You More Happy | Carl Duivenvoorden.
Tax time is never pretty, and for me last year was uglier than usual. By the measures of economics and Revenue Canada, I didn’t have a great 2013. But by the measures of sustainability and fulfillment, I had an awesome 2013. How could that be?
Coincidentally, a book I read recently has helped me make sense of that paradox. It’s called Your Money or Your Life, and it explains how you don’t need as much money as you might think to live a fulfilling, sustainable and financially secure life. That’s especially relevant on the threshold of Black Friday and the coming Christmas shopping frenzy. Here’s an overview.
Financial treadmill
If you work at a conventional job, do you know what price you are getting for your time? Time is the only asset any of us truly have; the authors refer to it as our ‘life energy’.
The answer isn’t as simple as you’d think. If you earn $1,000 for a 40 hour week, the quick answer is $25. But if you spend two hours a day getting ready for work, commuting and unwinding when you get home, your work week is really 50 hours.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question – Transition Milwaukee
Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question – Transition Milwaukee.
Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial
“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama
The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insure that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.
If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Learning from Icarus
A reflection on how making society more resilient may be worse than doing nothing at all.
What if Icarus’ father—knowing his son would fly too close to the sun—had made the wings he designed more resilient? What if he had used bone and string and not just wax to bind them? Would this ancient myth have turned out any differently? Probably not. Icarus would have simply flown closer to the sun before the sun destroyed his wings—perhaps igniting them on fire rather than just melting the wax. And so the boy would have fallen even further and have been crushed even more brutally by the onrushing wall of ocean below.
Let’s apply that question to today. What if we make our globalized consumer society more resilient? That is to say, what if—as more people in the sustainability community are advocating—we make our economic and social systems more able to withstand the inevitable shocks that come with an ever larger human population living within a destabilizing Earth system. What if we build future coastal homes on stilts. And invest billions of dollars and massive amounts of natural capital (in the form of cement and embodied fossil fuel energy) in sea walls around cities like New York and New Orleans. And we even genetically modify crops—even livestock—to withstand drought and heat.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A brief history of contemporary “consumerism” and anti-consumerism
A brief history of contemporary “consumerism” and anti-consumerism.
History books usually study social movements of the second half of the nineteenth century from the point of view of the split between anarchists and Marxists. Both theories played an important role in debates of the great workers’ movements of the following century, and for a long time, no one seemed to question the root they shared: the idea that the origin of the “social problem” was in the way in which the production of things was organized.
It’s normal for that powerful idea to occupy, almost without question, the center of historical stories: from the First International to the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the story of European reforms and revolutions was written in terms of work stoppages, general strikes, “wildcat” strikes and factory occupations. In the world of alternatives in the same days, not much was different. For two centuries, to say “cooperative” in continental Europe or in South America automatically meant “worker cooperative,” and it was the most powerful community movement of the time. Israeli “kibbutzim” (communities) were founded to create a productive base in the wastelands of Jewish migration in Asia. Even when the Catholic Church started to develop its “social doctrine” with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, its focus was on the same starting point as the theoreticians of the IWA: the drama of proletarianization of the artisan and the peasant, the transition from the workshop and its culture to the factory and alienation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Inner Transition: Commit to Staying Awake | Transition US
Inner Transition: Commit to Staying Awake | Transition US.
Will cities and states along the Mid-Atlantic coastline wake up in time? One drowsy regional eye opened during the September 2014 People’s Climate March; a brief but powerful awakened moment. The visual of400,000 people in New York City streets screamed public recognition of the intensifying dysfunction that precipitates climate change, economic contraction, and resource depletion.
The crowds are gone now. The hoopla of frenzied, back-to-back strategy sessions quieted.
The murky, “business as usual” mist has resettled. Now what? The challenge that the dispersed People’s Climate Marchers, Wall Street flooders, and eco-activists of all stripes now face is far deeper than any policy, treaty, legislation or regulation can reach. The litmus test of authentic forward movement is to skillfully address the fear, greed and desire for power that warps the collective perception of self, others, and the Earth.
The sleep of deep-seated conditioning to want more is so irresistibly seductive. It’s hard to stay awake when the pervasive fog of consumerism and desire for power hang heavy. Having more, and especially, wanting more, in order to strengthen one’s identity is a mesmerizing trance that fuels the environment-destroying economy. And as we’ve witnessed time and time again, in movement after movement, legislation is utterly impotent at the level of embedded human beliefs and identity formation. There is no legal shortcut. There can be no enduring outer transition without a corresponding inner-transition
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Plastic Society – Moving Towards Plastic Independence
The Plastic Society – Moving Towards Plastic Independence.
We all know about society’s over-consumption of plastic. We’ve heard again and again that it takes up to a millennia for plastics to bio-degrade (1), and consumers worldwide are using approximately 500 billion single-use plastic bags per year (2). And the issue of micro-plastic in our oceans in the past few years have gained awareness via social media. With all this data perpetually smothering our faces on a regular basis, it really begs the question why aren’t governments providing effective immediate solutions on a macro-scale to combat society’s rampant plastic consumption? If plastics are so costly in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact, then action has to be undertaken promptly, and in this article are practical solutions as to how you can build and begin successful projects.
Sure, we have recycling plants, wonderful appropriate technology like Ubuntu Blox, that re-uses plastics to create useable bricks for house construction, Upcycling, bio-plastics and the like — truly, these are all practical and amazing ideas and technologies, but they have minimal impact on, when looking at the broader scale, the impact of plastic consumption on our planet and measures aren’t being implemented fast enough on a broad scale.
Social paradigms are certainly the major issue. Plastics are convenient, cheap and durable – so much so that they have become deeply engrained in the psyche of the consumer. The solution for shifting the paradigm and reducing consumption is twofold: local councils and governments need to introduce incentive schemes to entice consumers to reduce their personal consumption; and, education programs need to be expanded and improved upon.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER – DESPERATE MEASURES « The Burning Platform
CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER – DESPERATE MEASURES « The Burning Platform.
The desperation of retailers grows by the day. I head to Wal-Mart and Giant in Harleysville every Sunday morning at 7:00 am. to do my weekly grocery shopping. I go to Wal-Mart at opening to avoid the freaks we see weekly on the People of Wal-Mart post. The workers at Wal-Mart are only a small step above the customers. They can barely communicate, rarely look you in the eye, and generally act like they are prisoners in an asylum.
I’m in winter/bad times ahead prep mode. I had a load of fire wood delivered yesterday which I wheelbarrowed to the back yard and stacked with my already decent sized stack. Last week I took an empty propane canister back to Wal-Mart to replace it with a full canister. That would give me three full propane tanks. I left the empty tank outside next to the propane cage and went in to pay. The old lady cashier with the gravelly smoker voice told me she would call for someone to get me a new tank.
I went over the cage and patiently waited for a Wal-Mart drone to come out, unlock the propane cage and give me a full tank. Two minutes, five minutes, and eventually ten minutes go by with no one coming out to help me. The cashier pokes her head out the door and shrugs her shoulders and says no one is responding to her calls. What a well oiled machine they have at Wal-Mart. Eventually the old lady abandoned her cashier post and in a painstakingly slow manner proceeded to unlock one bin after another until she found a full tank. I’m sure a line of unhappy customers were piling up at the only register in the garden center while she spent ten minutes getting me my propane tank.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
