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Richard Duncan: The Real Risk Of A Coming Multi-Decade Global Depression
Richard Duncan: The Real Risk Of A Coming Multi-Decade Global Depression
Richard Duncan, author of The Dollar Crisis and The New Depression: The Breakdown Of The Paper Money Economy, isn’t mincing words about the risks he sees ahead for the world economy.
Essentially, he sees the past 50 years of economic prosperity fueled by globalization and easy credit in serious danger of being unwound, as the doomed monetary policies currently being pursued by the word’s central banks result in a massive multi-decade depression that spans the globe.
The first version of The Dollar Crisis, the hardback, came out in 2003, so I wrote it in 2002. And at that time, the dollar against gold was $300. So the dollar has lost more than 75% of its value since The Dollar Crisis was written, and I don’t think it’s going to stop here. I expect it to continue to lose value over the years and decades ahead.
But what we’re seeing is that the real theme of The Dollar Crisis was that the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system was fundamentally flawed because it couldn’t prevent trade imbalances between countries. And the US had developed an enormous trade deficit with the rest of the world and this blew the trade surplus countries like Japan and China into bubbles. And then, the dollars boomeranged back into the United States and blew it into a bubble, as well. I didn’t know when the housing bubble was going to pop in the US but I knew it would. And I wrote in The Dollar Crisis that when it did, we would have a severe global economic recession/depression that would involve a systemic banking sector crisis in the United States and necessitate trillion-dollar budget deficits and unorthodox monetary policy to prevent a Great Depression from occurring.
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The Way Out
The Way Out
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)
I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?
I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — is that there are consequences. Consult the operating manual of the universe, and you will find that there really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card.
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RESOURCE CRISIS: The Olduvai cliff: are the lights going out already?
RESOURCE CRISIS: The Olduvai cliff: are the lights going out already?.
Those among us who are diehard catastrophists surely remember the “Olduvai Scenario” proposed by Richard Duncan in 1989. The theory is a version of the peak oil idea, but focused on electricity production. It says that the gradual depletion of fossil fuels and mineral resources will gradually lead us back to the stone age (“Olduvai” from the area inhabited by our australopithecine ancestors). According to Duncan’s update of his theory, the start of the precipitous decline (“Seneca style“) might have started around 2012.
Clearly, we are not there, yet, and the new stone age still seems to be far away. But, there are some ominous symptoms that something bad this way comes. I stumbled into pictures of Syria now and three years ago, and they are impressive. The lights are going out there, already. And note that it was obvious from the beginning that the decline was to be accompanied by wars and internecine strife; just as what’s happening in Syria. Surely, two pictures don’t mean that the catastrophists are right; but surely they provide food for thought.
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