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10 Years Automatic Earth
Winslow Homer Mending the nets 1881
Yes, it’s 10 years ago today, on January 22 2008, that Nicole Foss and I published our first article on the Automatic Earth (the first few years on Blogger). And, well, obviously, a lot has happened in those 10 years.
For ourselves, we went from living in Ottawa, Canada to doing a lot of touring starting in 2009, to support Nicole’s DVDs and video downloads. We visited Sweden, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark, US of course, with prolonged stays in France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, times that I miss a lot here and there, to now with Nicole settled in New Zealand and my time divided between Athens, Greece and the Netherlands.
We met so many people both online and in the flesh in all these countries it’s impossible to remember everyone of them, and every town we found ourselves in. Overall, it was a humbling experience to have so many people share their views and secrets, especially since we never stayed at hotels (or very rarely), we were always invited to stay with our readers. Thank you so much for that.
Since we started publishing 8 months before the fall of Bear Stearns, and we very much predicted the crisis that followed (we had been doing that before as well, since 2005 at the Oil Drum), we were the first warning sign for many people that things were going off the rails.
There are still to this day people expressing their gratitude for that. Others, though, not so much. And that has to do with the fact that governments, media and central banks came together to create the illusion of an economic recovery, something many if not most people still believe in. Just read the headlines and the numbers, on housing markets, stocks, GDP, jobs. Unfortunately, it was an illusion then and it still is now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Automatic Earth Primer Guide 2017
Pablo Picasso Bull plates I-XI 1945
The Automatic Earth (TAE) has existed for almost ten years now. That is nearly ten years of exploring and describing the biggest possible big picture of our present predicament. The intention of this post is to gather all of our most fundamental articles in one place, so that readers can access our worldview in its most comprehensive form. For new readers, this is the place to start. The articles are roughly organised into topics, although there is often considerable overlap.
We are reaching limits to growth in so many ways at the same time, but it is not enough to understand which are the limiting factors, but also what time frame each particular subset of reality operates over, and therefore which is the key driver at what time. We can think of the next century as a race of hurdles we need to clear. We need to know how to prepare for each as it approaches, as we need to clear each one in order to be able to stay in the race.
TAE is known primarily as a finance site because finance has the shortest time frame of all. So much of finance exists in a virtual world in which changes can unfold very quickly. There are those who assume that changes in a virtual system can happen without major impact, but this assumption is dangerously misguided.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Negative Interest Rates and the War on Cash (1)
Irving Underhill City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, William & Beaver streets, NYC 1931
It’s been a while, but Nicole Foss is back at the Automatic Earth -which makes me very happy-, and for good measure, she starts out with a very long article. So long in fact that we have decided to turn it into a 4-part series, if only just to show you that we do care about your health and well-being, as well as your families and social lives. The other 3 parts will follow in the next few days, and at the end we will publish the entire piece in one post.
Here’s Nicole:
Nicole Foss: As momentum builds in the developing deflationary spiral, we are seeing increasingly desperate measures to keep the global credit ponzi scheme from its inevitable conclusion. Credit bubbles are dynamic — they must grow continually or implode — hence they require ever more money to be lent into existence. But that in turn requires a plethora of willing and able borrowers to maintain demand for new credit money, lenders who are not too risk-averse to make new loans, and (apparently effective) mechanisms for diluting risk to the point where it can (apparently safely) be ignored. As the peak of a credit bubble is reached, all these necessary factors first become problematic and then cease to be available at all. Past a certain point, there are hard limits to financial expansions, and the global economy is set to hit one imminently.
Borrowers are increasingly maxed out and afraid they will not be able to service existing loans, let alone new ones. Many families already have more than enough ‘stuff’ for their available storage capacity in any case, and are looking to downsize and simplify their cluttered lives. Many businesses are already struggling to sell goods and services, and so are unwilling to borrow in order to expand their activities.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity
Below, you can find the trailer, the full documentary, as well as a re-run of the full interview with Nicole. I haven’t had time to watch the documentary, just got the mail from Sam, but I will later today. No doubt, it’ll be worth your while and mine. I remember complimenting them on the sound- and picture quality of the interview last year. Plus, get the likes of our dear friend Dave Holmgren together with Nicole and Ted Trainer, amongst others, and you can’t very well go wrong, can you?
(NOTE: Saw some rushes, and it may contain a tad much hippieness and/or reality-TV semblance for some)
The trailer:
The overlapping economic, environmental, and cultural crises of our times can seem overwhelming, can seem like challenges so great and urgent that they have no solutions. But rather than sticking our heads in the sand or falling into despair, we should respond with defiant positivity and try to turn the crises we face into opportunities for civilisational renewal.
During the year of 2015 a small community formed on an emerging ecovillage in Gippsland, Australia, and challenged themselves to explore a radically ‘simpler way’ of life based on material sufficiency, frugality, permaculture, alternative technology and local economy. This documentary by Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander tells the story of this community’s living experiment, in the hope of sparking a broader conversation about the challenges and opportunities of living in an age of limits.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Balkanization of Europe
I did think afterward that it would be great to do this kind of get together more often, and get ideas running, but then realized we are all workaholics and we all live thousands of miles apart, so the odds of that happening are slim at best. And that in turn made me think of how inspiring the years were when I toured the world with my Automatic Earth partner in crime Nicole Foss, how important it is to have people around to bounce off your ideas of what’s going on, how much faster that crystallizes your own ideas.
But as things are, and as they happened, I didn’t have that time with Yanis. And not nearly enough with Steve either, for that matter, who has/is a brain that I would love to pick for days if not weeks, he’s such a brilliant mind. When you have just a few hours, though, the time is filled with drinking wine and catching up with what’s happened in each other’s personal lives, it had been 3 years since we met, and professionally, since Steve knows Nicole very well, they did quite a few presentations together, yada yada.
Immensely gratifying, of course, to be able to renew a friendship like that, but almost as frustrating to not be able to expand on it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nicole Foss presents: Challenge and Choices
Nicole Foss presents: Challenge and Choices
Nicole Foss: After more than 30 years of exponential growth, gargantuan resource demand and increasingly frenetic consumption, we have now reached, or are reaching, an array of limits to growth. During our long, debt-fuelled boom, we reached out spatially through globalisation to monetise as much global production as possible, in order to facilitate the efficient transfer of wealth from the global periphery to its economic heartland.
We also, through the profligate use of credit and debt, reached forward in time to borrow from the future in order to stage an orgy of consumption in the present. This spectacularly successful modern form of economic imperialism delivered unprecedented wealth concentration, the like of which previous imperial structures could not have dreamed of attaining.
We are facing limits in terms of finance, energy, water, soil fertility, food web integrity on both land and sea, biodiversity, carrying capacity and the environment’s ability to absorb waste streams, among others. All of these factors, and the interactions between them, constitute parts of the reality jigsaw which we have been developing here at the Automatic Earth for the past eight years. Although we focus primarily on finance, as this is the first limit many will face, all limiting factors, and their relative timeframes, are vital to an understanding of the way the next several decades can be expected to play out.
This understanding of the big picture is crucial, but even more important is the ability to apply the knowledge in practice. This involves working through a complex decision tree process, spanning the assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, vulnerabilities and potential courses of action at different scales, from the individual to the regional. Our latest Automatic Earth video offering – Challenge and Choices – is designed to offer guidance in working through this process.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nicole Foss Podcast: The Age of Limits
Nicole Foss Podcast: The Age of Limits
The Automatic Earth’s Nicole Foss recorded a podcast yesterday with Jack Spirko at the Survival Podcast. I haven’t even had time to listen to it yet, but I’m sure it’ll be as lightheartedly entertaining as her appearances always tend to be ;-). One thing I did notice is that for the first 13 minutes or so, there is no Nicole, just talk about sponsors of the Survival podcast. So you might want to skip that. Enjoy!
Episode-1660- Nicole Foss on Liquidity Crunch and Economic Depression [1:37:01]
Special Notice – In the interest of journalistic integrity I feel obligated to reveal something that occurred today. Skype screwed up and only Nicole’s side of the interview came out in the end. Luckily she is a talker and I didn’t say much in this interview. To make it functional for the audience I went though a re recorded my side and pieced the entire thing together. It came out really well but if anything seems missing this is why. Likely if I didn’t tell you you would never even know that my side wasn’t live…
Join Me Today to Hear Nicole Discuss…
• What is the Age of Limits
• The coming liquidity crunch and economic depression
• Some reasons taking out a mortgage may not be a good idea
• What this means for small farms in regard to debt
• How and why population will most likely be reduced
• Why we should not even focus on climate change as a problem
• What do you recommend for the average 9-5er should do
• How much longer can we kick the can down the road
• Nicole’s predictions for how the world wide economic crisis will play out
• Thought on a possible mass migration in the US
Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?
Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?
The following is a veritable tour de force by Nicole Foss on the value of gold in a crashing economy, for different people in different circumstances.
Nicole Foss: In light of the rapidly-propagating loss of confidence, and consequent shift to deflation, with falling prices across the board as a result, it is appropriate to review our stance on gold. The yellow metal is often perceived as a panacea – a safe haven guarding against all manner of potential financial disruption. It has long been our stance at the Automatic Earth that this is far too simplistic a position to take. We live in a complex world for which there are no simple one-dimensional solutions. It is important to distinguish between the markets for paper gold and for physical gold, and to understand the risks inherent in gold ownership in order to manage them. As we wrote back in 2009:
Firstly, the goldbugs are right that physical gold is real money (unlike paper gold, which is just another Ponzi scheme). It has held its value for thousands of years and will continue to do so over the long term. However, that does not mean that gold prices cannot fall or that purchasing gold now is the right way for everyone to preserve capital….People’s circumstances are different. Those circumstances determine their freedom of action, both now and in the future.
Bubble Dynamics
It is our view that (paper) gold has been in a bubble which peaked in 2011, along with the rest of the commodity complex. It has been subjected to the same dynamic as other commodities, which have collectively lost touch with their own fundamentals as they have become increasingly over-financialized. Financialization moves the dynamics into the virtual world, while simultaneously subjecting them to perverse incentives. Substantial price movements having at best a tenuous connection with actual supply and demand are the result.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nicole Foss Talks Energy Industry Issues and Oil Price Collapse
Nicole Foss Talks Energy Industry Issues and Oil Price Collapse
Part I- Energy Industry Issues
The Doomstead Diner site blurb:
Coal Industry Collapse-Carbon Sequestration
One of the biggest effects we see lately is a collapse in commodity prices, through all sectors. Most intriguing to me is the collapse in coal prices, since coal is used in so many places for the production of electricity. Several large coal mining companies have gone into bankruptcy. How will this affect electricity production as we move along here? Q2: Will the efforts for Carbon Sequestration, Carbon Credits and Taxation have any meaningful effect on this dynamic?
Oil Price Collapse
Many people thought the price collapse in Oil that came at the end of 2014 was unforseen and unknowable. In fact many people in the peak oil community believed for a long time the price of oil would spiral inexorably upward. Some of us here have argued otherwise, that credit constraints would drive the price downward. Steve did the best job of this, and actually pegged the price crash for oil to the month more than two years in advance with his infamous Triangle of Doom charts. Steve, can you tell us how you were able to pull off that stunt? Q: John Mauldin and other shills for the Oil industry assure us that better and cheaper drilling technology will bring up all the oil we need and keep the industry solvent. How realistic is this?
China Is Pushing On A String Ensemble
China Is Pushing On A String Ensemble
Look, it’s very clear where I stand on China; I’ve written a lot about it. And not just recently. Nicole Foss, who fully shares my views on the topic, reminded me the other day of a piece I wrote in July 2012, named Meet China’s New Leader : Pon Zi. China has been a giant lying debt bubble for years. Much if not most of its growth ‘miracle’ was nothing but a huge credit expansion, with an outsize role for the shadow banking system.
A lot of this has remained underreported in western media, probably because its reporters were afraid, for one reason or another, to shatter the global illusion that the western financial fiasco could be saved from utter mayhem by a country producing largely trinkets. Even today I read a Bloomberg article that claims China’s Q1 GDP growth was 7%. You’re not helping, boys, other than to keep a dream alive that has long been exposed as false.
China’s stock markets have a long way to fall further yet. This little graph from the FT shows why. The Shanghai Composite closed down another 1.27% today at 2,927.29 points. If it ‘only’ returns to its -early- 2014 levels, it has another 30% or so to go to the downside. If inflation correction is applied, it may fall to 1,000 points, for a 60% or so ‘correction’. If we move back 10 or 20 years, well, you get the picture.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 5
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 5
Solution Space
To use the word ‘solution’ is perhaps misleading, since it could be said to imply that circumstances exist which could allow us to continue business as usual, and this is not, in fact, the case. A crunch period cannot be avoided. We face an intractable predicament, and the consequences of overshoot are going to manifest no matter what we do. However, while we may not be able to prevent this from occurring, we can mitigate the impact and lay the foundation for a fundamentally different and more workable way of being in the world.
Acknowledging the non-negotiable allows us to avoid beating our heads against a brick wall, freeing us to focus on that which we can either influence or change, and acknowledging the limits within which we must operate, even in these areas, allows us to act far more effectively without wasting scarce resources on fantasies. There are plenty of actions which can be taken, but those with potential for building a viable future will be inexpensive, small-scale, simple, low-energy, community-based initiatives. It will be important to work with natural systems in accordance with permaculture principles, rather than in opposition to them as currently do so comprehensively.
We require viable ways forward across different timeframes, first to navigate the rapid-onset acute crisis which the bursting of a financial bubble will pitch us into, and then to reboot our global operating system into a form less reminiscent of a planet-killing ponzi scheme. The various limits we face do not manifest all at the same time, and so to some extent can be navigated sequentially. The first phase of our constrained future, which will be primarily financial and social, will occur before the onset of energy supply difficulties for instance. Some initiatives are of particular value at specific times, and other have general value across timescales.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 4
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 4
Blind Alleys and Techno-Fantasies
The majority of proposals made by those who acknowledge limits fail on at least one of the previous criteria, and often several, if not all of them. Solution space is smaller than we typically think. The most common approach is to insist on government policies intended to implement meaningful change by fiat. Even in the best of times, government policy is a blunt instrument which all too often achieves the opposite of its stated intention, and in contractionary times the likelihood of this increases enormously.
Governments are reactive – and slowly – not proactive. Policies typically reflect the realities of the past, not the future, and are therefore particularly maladaptive at times of large scale trend change, particularly when that change unfolds rapidly. Those focusing on government policy are mostly not thinking in terms of crisis, however, but of seamless proactive adjustment – the kind of which humanity is congenitally incapable.
There is a common perception that government policy and its effect on society depends critically on who holds the seat of power and what policies they impose. The assumption is that elected leaders do, in fact, wield the power to determine and implement their chosen policies, but this has become less and less the case over time. Elected leaders are the public face of a system which they do not control, and increasingly act merely as salesmen for policies determined behind the scenes, mostly at the behest of special interest groups with privileged political access.
It actually matters little who is the figure-head at any given time, as their actions are constrained by the system in which they are embedded. Even if leaders fully understood the situation we face, which is highly unlikely given the nature of the leadership selection process, they would be unable to change the direction of a system so much larger than themselves.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3
Energy – Demand Collapse Followed by Supply Collapse
As we have noted many times, energy is the master resource, and has been the primary driver of an expansion dating back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In fossil fuels humanity discovered the ‘holy grail’ of energy sources – highly concentrated, reasonably easy to obtain, transportable and processable into many useful forms. Without this discovery, it is unlikely that any human empire would have exceeded the scale and technological sophistication of Rome at its height, but with it we incrementally developed the capacity to reach for the stars along an exponential growth curve.
We increased production year after year, developed uses for our energy surplus, and then embedded layer upon successive layer of structural dependency on those uses within our societies. We were living in an era of a most unusual circumstance – energy surplus on an unprecedented scale. We have come to think this is normal as it has been our experience for our whole lives, and we therefore take it for granted, but it is a profoundly anomalous and temporary state of affairs.
We have arguably reached peak production, despite a great deal of propaganda to the contrary. We still rely on the giant oil fields discovered decades ago for the majority of the oil we use today, but these fields are reaching the end of their lives and new discoveries are very small in comparison. We are producing from previous finds on a grand scale, but failing to replace them, not through lack of effort, but from a fundamental lack of availability. Our dependence on oil in particular is tremendous, given that it underpins both the structure and function of industrial society in a myriad different ways.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 2
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 2
The Psychological Driver of Deflation and the Collapse of the Trust Horizon
The collective mood shifts rapidly from optimism and greed to pessimism and fear as the bubble bursts, and as it does so, the financial system moves from expansion to contraction. Financial contraction involves the breaking of promises right left and centre, with credit instruments drastically revalued downwards in the process. As the promises that back them cease to be credible, value disappears extremely rapidly. This is deflation and the elimination of excess claims to underlying real wealth.
Instruments once regarded as money equivalents will lose that status through the loss of confidence in them, causing the supply of what retains sufficient confidence to still be regarded as money to collapse. The more instruments lose the confidence that confers value upon them, the smaller the effective money supply will be, and the more confidence will become a rare ‘commodity’. Being grounded in psychology is the primary reason that deflation cannot be overcome through policy adaptations which are inherently too little and too late. Nothing moves as quickly as a collective loss of confidence in human promises, and nothing destroys value as comprehensively.
The same abrupt change in collective mood will also drive contraction in the real economy, but more slowly, since the time constant for change in the real world is much slower than in the virtual world of finance. This process will also result in broken promises as structural dependencies fracture when there is no longer enough to go around. There will be wage and benefit cuts, layoffs, strikes, strike-breaking, breaches of contract, business failures and more on a huge scale, and these will fuel further fear, anger and the destruction of trust.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
Intro
A great deal of intelligence is invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow, 1976
More and more people (although not nearly enough) are coming to recognise that humanity cannot continue on its current trajectory, as the limits we face become ever more obvious, and their implications starker. There is a growing realisation that the future must be different, and much thought is therefore being applied to devising supposed solutions for that future. These are generally attempts to reconcile our need to make changes with our desire to continue something very much resembling our current industrial-world lifestyle, with a view to making a seamless transition between the now and a comfortably familiar future. The presumption is that it is possible, but this rests on foundational assumptions which vary between the improbable and the outright impossible. It is a presumption grounded in a comprehensive failure to understand the nature and extent of our predicament.
We are facing limits in many ways simultaneously – not surprising since exponential growth curves for so many parameters have gone critical in recent decades, and of course even more so in recent years. Some of these limits lie in human systems, while others are ecological or geophysical. They will all interact with each other, over different timeframes, in extremely complex ways as our state of overshoot resolves itself (to our dissatisfaction, to put it mildly) over many decades, if not centuries. Some of these limits are completely non-negotiable, while others can be at least partially mutable, and it is vital that we know the difference if we are to be able to mitigate our situation at all. Otherwise we are attempting to bargain with the future without understanding our negotiating position.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
