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TSHTF Podcast with Nicole Foss, Raúl Ilargi Meijer & RE
TSHTF Podcast with Nicole Foss, Raúl Ilargi Meijer & RE
Nicole and I did an interview with Reverse Engineer at the Doomstead Diner a few nights ago. I haven’t listened to it yet, but he seems to think it was, let’s say, entertaining yet insightful. Cheerful in the face of collapse.
Here’s what Reverse Engineer wrote about it on the DD site:
Reverse Engineer: Recently, Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth returned to blogging after taking something of a hiatus over the last year. I caught one of her recent pieces on the situation in China, and her writing partner Raul Ilargi Meijer has been covering the situation in Greece extensively. Besides those two ongoing clusterfucks in China & Greece, there’s quite a bit of ongoing collapse related to climate, the recent publication by James Hansen on Sea Level Rise, and of course the Encyclical by the Vicar of Christ on Earth, His Holiness Pope Francis, Chief Spokesperson for some 1.2B members of the Holy Roman Catholic Church…. clearly no shortage of Collapse Topics to discuss!
It’s been about 2 years since I first got together with Nicole to talk about Energy & Inflation & Deflation. So this seemed like a good time to do an update, and I nailed her down for another chat this week. She happens to be visiting with Raul in the Netherlands, so as a bonus in this conversation we got his input as well. Now, for those of you expecting to get the normal “Just the Facts, Ma’am” type of presentation from Nicole in this Podcast, you may be slightly disappointed.
There definitely are a lot of facts jammed into this hour of KollapsnikTM chat. However, because Nicole was chatting with both me and Ilargi, we kind of went off the rails a few times, and hilarity ensued. I decided to leave some of it in there for a little entertainment value.
The stuff I cut out is even funnier, but sadly not for public consumption. LOL.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China And The New World Disorder
China And The New World Disorder
Nicole Foss: Our consistent theme here at the Automatic Earth since its inception has been that we are facing a very powerful deflationary depression, following on from the bursting of an epic financial bubble. What we have witnessed in our three decades of expansion and inflation is nothing short of a monetary supernova, and that period has been the just culmination of a much larger upward trend going back many decades at least. We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history.
Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. We have built an incredibly complex economic system, but despite its robust appearance it is over-extended, brittle and fragile after decades of fuelling its continued expansion by feeding on its own substance.
The Automatic Earth, December 2011: The lessons of the past are sadly never learned. Each time the optimism is highly contagious. In the larger episodes, it crescendos into euphoria, leading societies into a period of collective madness where risk is embraced and caution is thrown to the wind. Sky-high valuations are readily rationalized – it’s different here, it’s different this time.
The Death of Democracy in a Byzantine Labyrinth
The Death of Democracy in a Byzantine Labyrinth
The project of European Union, and its single currency experiment, were politically an attempt to unite fractious nations in order to put an end to a history of horribly destructive conflict. Economically, the goals were to scale up governance in Europe, to transition from the national to the transnational level in order to wield more power as a larger trading block. As such it was very much in line with the global trend of the last thirty years towards scaling up almost everything. However, as we have observed before, such expansions are inherently fragile and self-limiting:
This in-built need to expand, sometimes to the scale of an imperium in the search for new territory, means that the process is grounded in ponzi dynamics. Expansion stops when no new territories can be subsumed, and contraction will follow as the society consumes its internal natural capital….
….A foundational ingredient in determining effective organizational scale is trust – the glue holding societies together. At small scale, trust is personal, and group acceptance is limited to those who are known well enough to be trusted. For societies to scale up, trust must transcend the personal and be grounded instead in an institutional framework governing interactions between individuals, between the people and different polities, between different layers of governance (municipal, provincial, regional, national), and between states on the international stage.
This institutional framework takes time to scale up and relies on public trust for its political legitimacy. That trust depends on the general perception that the function of the governing institutions serves the public good, and that the rules are sufficiently transparent and predictably applied to all. This is the definition of the rule of law. Of course the ideal does not exist, but better and worse approximations do at each scale in question.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Volatility and Sleep-Walking Markets
Volatility and Sleep-Walking Markets
A recent Business Insider chart of the day feature was particularly interesting. Called The stock market is asleep, it observed that the US market has been in a period of very low volatility:
Market technician Ryan Detrick noted that it’s been 8 weeks since we’ve seen a weekly move of at least 1% up or down in the S&P 500. That’s the longest such streak we’ve seen in 21 years.
Markets enter such periods of complacency when there has been a long uptrend, with periods of very low volatility reflecting where the market has come from, not where it is going. Such periods are far more likely to be a sign of an impending trend reversal than of a continued uptrend.
Under normal circumstances, markets can be expected to show more variation, with regular inhalation and exhalation indicative of healthy risk perception. The loss of that pattern, indicating extreme complacency, is a leading indicator of a rude awakening. The VIX index, or volatility/fear index, is at extreme lows, indicating a historic level of complacency. It is no surprise that this coincides with a market extreme.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
