Originally posted by Illusionsaregrander

Originally posted by vkturbo

This is a major drama we are seeing before our eyes as every country invests so much into another that when that country fails so does the investor. You have Australia and America keeping China afloat and the UK with their needless buying of cheap crap.

Thats the underlying problem, that right now, just like any unsustainable Ponzi scheme, all we are doing is moving money around trying to pretend that the entire structure is viable, when in fact, its not. Shuffling money from one country to the next will delay the collapse, which wont really occur until people realize, truly, that its all been smoke and mirrors, but it wont solve the underlying problem, which is that the growth our economies have been based on, isnt sustainable. We dont have the resources, ultimately, to allow the consumption we have been enjoying in the west on a global scale.

And, like I said, too much of the worlds wealth has shifted into too few hands. Not that more equitable distribution of wealth would be an ultimate solution to the problem of a pyramid shaped economy, it wouldnt. Sooner or later we would still hit a wall, regardless, unless we let go the model of "grow grow grow" and find another. But, a more even distribution of wealth would allow the game to go on longer.

People can make the terminology as complicated and jargon laced as they want, but the problem is actually simple, and structural. You have too little at the base, supporting to heave a load at the top. You have a lot of people, in number, but those people are economicially weak. They arent making what they need to make to live the lives they want to have, or in some cases, to live really at all. And the whole things depends on a flow of monies from the bottom to the top. When the money stops flowing upward, the game ends, and the fighting begins.

Originally posted by vkturbo
LET THE BANKS FAIL LET THE COUNTRIES FAIL IF WE REMAIN CALM (WHICH I DOUBT) THERE WILL BE NO NEED TO BRING ORDER WITH A ONE WORLD CURRENCY BECAUSE THEN WE ARE SCREWED ONE STEP CLOSER TO ONE GOVERNMENT.

We should have let the banks fail. And we would not have remained calm, but that reset button is going to be hit, and sooner would have been better than later. All America did was take on more debt to save itself and its financial bullies abroad, which only worsened the real problem while buying the rich more time. It really never addressed the underlying problem, which is, globalism itself is a CAUSE of this sort of economic collapse.

Its a little known, (because no one wants to believe it, not because no one noticed it) fact that our first modern foray into globalism ALSO ended in economic collapse. Most economists assumed, because it suited them to, because it allowed them to argue that globalism was workable for the people who paid them, that the nations retreated back into protectionism because they were irrational. When in fact, in this case, the people were acting instinctively and correctly. Nations need to compete. Not become one amorphous generic "labor pool" for corporations to draw labor from. You dont see corporations erasing the boundaries between themselves for some economic free for all, do you? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, and its no less ridiculous when the entities in questions are "corporations" of people and resources, nations, in other words.

"Important" economists simply totally misinterpret what they are seeing both in the last collapse brought on by globalization and this time as well.

www.iie.com...

It would be easier to dismiss all these concerns except for one troublesome fact: We've seen it happen before. As Joe Nye pointed out earlier, we had a similar period of globalization a hundred years ago. The standard understanding, of course, is that this earlier world of globalization-which by many measures was more extensive than today-came crashing down with the advent of World War I followed by the Great Depression. But careful students of that history have informed us that the contemporary backlash a century ago was already significantly rolling back globalization well before the onset of war and depression. Protectionist trade measures-including in the United States but other countries as well-resisted the increasing intrusion of foreign competition. Immigration, which was a huge factor in globalization during that period, began to be resisted, including by earlier generations of immigrants, and began to shut down that element of globalization even before the more traumatic outbreaks in the early part of the 20th century.

And note what he says about the contemporary, (when the speech was given) reaction of the people;

The ultimate paradox is that this backlash against globalization is so severe in the United States even with the excellent economic situation that we are experiencing, as Marty Feldstein laid out yesterday.

That was in May of 2000. Economists saw NO trouble with the economic outlook. At all. In many of their opinions, everything was fanfookintastic. But, just like before the great Depression, the people, the masses, are like the canary in the coalmine, and long before economists in their unreal modeled world noticed anything, the people were already feeling the weight shift on their bottom level of the pyramid. The people werent irrational. Everything wasnt great. It was already starting to come undone, and no one making great money at the top wanted to listen to the cries for help at the bottom.


Profit is privatized, costs and debts are being socialized, (such as in Ireland, and in America, where the cost of extracting resources from the middle east is essentially being paid for by the citizens of America and other "allied" nations, funny how economists and the wealthy dont mind socialism then) and it really doesnt take a genius to figure out that that cannot go on forever. Our leaders arent intelligent enough to save us. They dont know what else to do. A growth economy is what we have been doing for the last 10,000 years, at least. It never WAS sustainable, but the fact that there were unexploited areas to expand into concealed that fact. (But Plato knew it, long ago, and argued for a very different model)

But now there is nowhere left to expand into. And we have already been tapping unrenewable resources for over 100 years, and top that off with the fact that even minor climate change can bring about crop failures which will drive food prices through the roof and we arent looking at a very happy outcome. We are looking not only at global economic collapse, but the real possibility of societal meltdown and the war, famine, and everything else that can easily come with it when large numbers of people cannot feed themselves, and their families.