If I live another 19 summers I shall have completed the traditional Biblical lifespan for a human being- three score years and ten. At this point I find it hard to conceive that my original plan to take retirement at that point, a mixture of two pensions social security and my own careful investments (ha!), along with winters sailing while renting my house to snowbirds, all seem to be pie in the sky. I am glad I have a job that allows me to work in a manner that an 80 year old could manage physically, even though with the most optimistic view it's hard to picture myself still enthusiastic after another three decades of 9-1-1 calls!
.I have been pondering this dilemma of aging in view of a widening appreciation for the fact that we are slipping into the Great Depression 2 that has been denied and avoided, as usual, by our leaders and influential commentators. It seems likely then as we humans tend to ignore history and thus repeat it, that we shall enter a decade of no growth and minimal expectations followed by a massive war to re-set the economy and start another round of prosperity. If that actually happened it seems the remainder of my active life is to be spent in a scramble for survival followed by a period of living in some manner on the Home Front while a generation of youngsters gets it's innocence blown away at the hands of old people fighting by proxy (Iraq comes to mind right now...). This is not a cheerful thought, even for a child free adult like me.
.These reflections came to me from reading the Naked Capitalism column (in my Alphabetical Web List,) wherein I read the comments of one Enrique Mendoza an economist from the University of Maryland who suggests Irving Fisher, a Depression Era economist may have supplied the formula to relieve us of our current economic chaos. Fisher who is credited by some smart people with understanding the mechanism that created the Great Depression has advice for us in our hour of catastrophe says Mendoza:
The worst of the Great Depression was not so much the initial economic collapse, as dramatic as that was, but its persistence for several years. This is what we still have time to avoid and where our energy should be invested. The political spin about pushing for reforms and bailouts to “avert disaster” needs to be corrected, so that everyone’s expectations are not biased towards thinking that a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus means back to business as usual. The emergency is real and present, but not to escape catastrophe. All the numbers we have about employment, production, world trade, the financial system, etc. show that we are already in a catastrophe. The emergency is to avoid the persistence of the stagnation that occurred during the Depression. The emergency is to prevent most of the next decade from looking like 2008.
.If the next decade does end up looking like 2008 I shall be sixty years of age when we get out of our Great Depression 2. That's a dreary thought. And what's even more dreary is that our current crop of leaders have no idea how to get us out of this mess and the prospects for prolonged misery look inevitable, as long as the Treasury Secretary keeps pushing on the financial string.
.Fisher suggested work for people in distress, support for asset stabilisation (which means help homeowners not banks) and better regulations and oversight in the future. Continuing to pour money into the banking system simply means we keep creating debt, wasting the money and failing to take our medicine and restart the economy. How far down this path will they take us? Or will we let them take us?
5 comments:
Until 2012 when it all collapses. TEOTWAWKI aside, the question I ponder is how to reset people's mindsets that we are at rock bottom and to change their habits.
Like a drug intervention, people need to admit they are at rock bottom before they can plan to dig out. However, until people feel the pain, they will not change their habits.
Imagine if hari-kari was committed. All credit cards are not longer accessible (but you have to pay them). What you made each week it what you had to spend. This is the first step. Adjustments are hard, but they can be done. Also, no more leases. I will concede transportation loans and rent/house payments for now. I doubt if people would live the lifestyles they have been living.
I think what we are arguing is non-accountability and entitlement lifestyles vs. common sense.
Ten years after the end of the Great Depression II you will be regaling us with tales of character building self sufficiency, community, and simplicity that all existed in the keys during the ten lean, survival years and lament the new go go economy that will start taking hold of the keys in and around 2019.
I will be a terrible bore. I promise.
I have 12 years on you.
I also have one up man ship.
We in Canada are not in quite the same messes as the USA is.
That said by the end of the next ten years, or 2012 which ever comes first,
Quebec will no longer be part of Canada, the National Capital will be in Calgary. The only language in Canada will be English, Automobiles and related will all come from foreign sources and we who ride motorcycles will be pushing wheelchairs.
Oh and universal health care will
pay for needle executions to all persons beyond age of 80 years.
Anybody over 80 years of age is a drain on the universal health care system.
And all international borders will be closed. You're born in a country, you stay there until you're dead.
I agree with you, NO more bank bailouts for all they do with the $$ is to pay more bonus's, and they (the Banks) can't even give an account of where that money went. But you are more or less, right (but not quite). I was listening to some analyst on BBC news and apparently the depression lasted until many years after WWII. we actually went into the early '50's before we pulled out of it. It wasn't until many years after the war before consumer goods started to be produced.
bob
bobskoot: wet coast scootin
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