The country has now been zombified. The accompanying illustration shows the CEO's of the three major automakers arriving for the start of their congressional hearing last week. These guys have been dead so long they've forgotten they were ever alive, and are unaware the economy has gone bust, although they seem to be vaguely concsious that their own companies are having a little bit of a "cash flow problem." When asked how they plan to deal with changing conditions in the auto markets, they looked baffled, as if their congressional interlocutors had asked them the solution to some incalculable quadratic equation.
For the rest of us, the big question has become "What's next?" or "Where do we go from here?" If you want to know the answer, I believe the best person to read is James Howard Kunstler. I would rather rely on the opinion of someone who's been right about everything for the last five years than, say, Thomas Friedman of the Times, whose predictions are more often wrong than right.
Kunstler hasn't always been right about the details of world and national economic developments, and his predictions of the timing of things is as frequently off as anyone else's. However, he understands the fundamental shape and fundamental weaknesses of modern economics, and he is militantly honest about the latter. Since well before 2006, he has been forecasting peak oil and, especially, the current economic meltdown and debt tsunami, and describing very accurately exactly how and why these things would unspool exactly as they did.
He posts to his blog once a week. Read today's post, Zombie Economics, if you want to find out where we're going over the next couple of years and beyond. It's not a pretty picture, but at the same time it's not hopeless. A short sample:
My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep WalMart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we'll learn that "change" is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.
2 comments:
Kunstler has had some very good blog posts on economics.
It's over. America's hegemony is over. It's been over for at least two decades but there's just been a long lag time. Oh, we still have, for now at least, the world's biggest military and lots of warheads and other killer junk, but that's about it. It's like beomg reduced to living in your car with your precious uber-large plasma TV bubble-wrapped in the trunk. Just a memento from a prior life.
When friends and family ask what I think about the economy, that's all I say: It's over.
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