{"id":23394,"date":"2017-03-31T13:49:13","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T18:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23394"},"modified":"2017-03-31T13:49:13","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T18:49:13","slug":"our-economies-run-on-housing-bubbles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23394","title":{"rendered":"Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\nRene Magritte Memory <\/b>1948<\/center>We are witnessing the demise of the world\u2019s two largest economic power blocks, the US and EU. Given deteriorating economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have been playing out for many years but were so far largely kept hidden from view by unprecedented issuance of debt, the demise should come as no surprise.<\/p>\n

The debt levels are not just unprecedented, they would until recently have been unimaginable. When the conditions for today\u2019s debt orgasm were first created in the second half of the 20th century, people had yet to wrap their minds around the opportunities and possibilities that were coming on offer. Once they did, they ran with it like so many lemmings.<\/p>\n

The reason why economies are now faltering invites an interesting discussion. Energy availability certainly plays a role, or rather the energy cost of energy, but we might want to reserve a relatively larger role for the idea, and the subsequent practice, of trying to run entire societies on debt (instead of labor and resources).<\/p>\n

It almost looks as if the cost of energy, or of anything at all really, doesn\u2019t play a role anymore, if and when you can borrow basically any sum of money at ultra low rates. Sometimes you wonder why people didn\u2019t think of that before; how rich could former generations have been, or at least felt?<\/p>\n

The reason why is that there was no need for it; things were already getting better all the time, albeit for a briefer period of time than most assume, and there was less \u2018want\u2019. Not that people wouldn\u2019t have wanted as much as we do today, they just didn\u2019t know yet what it was they should want. The things to want were as unimaginable as the debt that could have bought them.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles Rene Magritte Memory 1948We are witnessing the demise of the world\u2019s two largest economic power blocks, the US and EU. Given deteriorating economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have been playing out for many years but were so far largely kept hidden from view by unprecedented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2674,63,15054,12562,175,195,15055,391,406,3731,13924],"class_list":["post-23394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-automatic-earth","tag-banks","tag-blind","tag-costs","tag-credit","tag-debt","tag-frog","tag-growth","tag-housing-bubble","tag-money-creation","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23395,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23394\/revisions\/23395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}