Russell Lee Levee at Bird’s Point, MO during the height of the flood January 1937 Mostly, it feels like a useless waste of time to wonder why everyone, and certainly economists of all flavors, no matter what gross incompetences they may accuse each other of, so blindly and slavishly talk only of different ways towards the one and same overarching goal: growth. There is a lot of talk about Keynes and stimulus and QE, as well as the pros and
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Jack Delano Troop train on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, Grants, New Mexico March 1943 On June 11, exactly – only – a week ago, I wrote, in Japan Enters Financial Nowhere, about a new phase in Japan’s downfall, the demise of its famous savings surplus which had kept the worst of the worries about its economic reality somewhat at bay until recently. When its economy crashed early 1990s Japan made one fatefully horrible decision: to not cleanse its
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Dorothea Lange No food, no work, baby died, to be sent back to OK from CA Spring 1937 Just a bunch of numbers Reuters published today. Read and weep. While remembering that this spring, after that horrible winter that threw the recovery so terribly off course, would see pent-up demand go crazy. That after the Q1 GDP growth, which has by now been revised to -2% after initially having been predicted to be in the 3%+ range, Q2 would certainly,
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Dorothea Lange Tobacco sharecropper, with baby on front porch. Person County, NC July 1939 The cluster, – or pride, or cabal – of global central banks, led by the Bank of Japan have come very close to strangling their respective bond markets to the point suffocation with ultra low interest rates, and therefore together moved $29 trillion they had ‘invested’ there into equity markets. Restoring the world’s $100 trillion bond markets to health, even ever, will be a task so
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Russell Lee Flood refugee in schoolhouse at Sikeston, Missouri January 1937 A strange point of view is expressed in George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen’s NY Times article ‘The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth’, strange in more ways than just the obvious ones. Of course we find it counterintuitive to link growth to warfare. And of course we don’t like to make a link like that. But there’s a lot more here than meets the
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DPC Whirlpool Rapids (Grand Trunk Railway) Bridge, Niagara Falls, NY 1899 The Automatic Earth’s Nicole Foss will be doing a speaking, teaching and workshop tour of Australia with Oz native permaculture co-guru David Holmgren, from June 29 to July 19. You can see the agenda in this post, as well as in the left side bar of The Automatic Earth, where it will be updated as more details become available. There is of course no need to mention that if
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Jack Delano Military sentry at bridge over Colorado River, Topock, Arizona March 1943 With consensus building, after new health care data were released, that Q1 US GDP contracted by -2%, which is even worse than the latest -1% estimate, you’d think a bit of realism would pervade news reports. Think again. The ‘make it up as you go along’ factor only increases as numbers get worse. And, naive as I am, I can’t help wondering what the reason is for
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Jack Delano Dear Folks … Greenville, SC. Air Service Command July 1943 I’ve done it before, but I’ll gladly revisit Yeats’ prophetic Second Coming written 95 years ago, because it contains truths about mankind that we will see emerge as we move forward. The line “Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold” will illustrate, and become, one of the leading drivers in the world as we used to know it. This is as true for, to pick an example, the
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Detroit Publishing Co. Japanese Rolling Balls, Coney Island, Cincinnati 1910 We’ve carried a lot of news on Japan’s deteriorating economic and financial situation so far this year (and before), but perhaps it’s now time to wonder how much longer until the rising sun comes apart at the seams. To date, the worst fears over a trend of deflationary pressures, diminishing wages and enormously bloated government debt were somewhat cooled by the assumption that the Japanese people were still avid savers,
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Arthur Rothstein Drought refugees from Glendive, MT, leaving for WA July 1936 It’s common knowledge at this point, even if there’s never a shortage of voices who will insist on denying it, that many of the numbers we see allegedly describing our economic realities, are not real at all. Unemployment, GDP, the issue is familiar. And if the US government, or any government for that matter, thinks it’s such a great idea to “massage” their numbers, then to quite an
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