John Day
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David Stockman presents the “shale bubble”, supported by the Fed “in plain sight” (and having a heart attack while choking on steak and Jack Daniels).
This Time Is The Same: Like The Housing Bubble, The Fed Is Ignoring The Shale Bubble In Plain Sight
Ugo Bardi’s model of oil investment and production gives Seneca’s Cliff for production.
The Baltic Dry Index has lowest December since 2008, indicating again that it’s overproduction of oil that is resulting in the current price drop, right?
😮
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-08/baltic-dry-plunges-back-below-1000-lowest-december-2008It’s a bit late for Pearl Harbor Day news, but FDR took 8 steps, beginning a year before the event, to force Japan into war with the US, and was completely aware of the day, hour and nature of the impending Japanese attack, monitored radio communications of their fleet (not radio-silence), and got the aircraft carriers and other modern ships out of Pearl before the attack, specifically to get the US into the European war. The “McColum Memo” was the blueprint he followed. It’s declassified. This book is definitive, written by a WW-2 vet on a mission. The reviews of the book lay it out succinctly.
I’m sure nothing like this is going on these days…What’s the historical value of water in California?
It depends upon which historical epoch. A couple of fairly recent ones were basically too dry to support life and lasted a couple of hundred years each. (That’s what got the Anasazi, same droughts.) https://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24993601/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more
So there is more than just oil to focus on in the Double Jeopardy category of Black-Swan-Leavings.@Ilargi: More fine work, sir.
@Huckleberryfinn: Something is eating you, amigo, eating you from inside.
You will know no peace as long as you keep pointing the finger at others.
Peace, Brother.Cognitive Dissonance; that’s the form of suffering which is causing such irate and “illogical”, as Mr Spock would say, responses as regard the workings of deflation.
The implication that something very harsh is already happening, and will overtake all that we know, even when gas gets cheaper and the problem looks solved, is very hard to accept.
It’s easier to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
Guy McPherson gets a much harder time with the cognitive dissonance he engenders with his extrapolation of global warming of 10 degrees F, 6 degrees C by something like 2030, yeah, 15 years from now.
This is worse than most say, and it’s at the bad end of the spectrum of bad.
He’s a sincere and respectable man, not trying to sell anything, and with proper academic credentials.
https://truth-out.org/news/item/27714-are-humans-going-extinctThanks Ilargi,
It is very hard for some people’s minds to look at causality.
It’s all just phenomena…
You can learn some stuff, but most people aren’t born to see beneath surfaces.Point-of-Order, Danny B and Raleigh.
Stockman, and Z.H., and now Ilargi have posted Charles Hugh Smith’s “Oil Drenched Black Swan” article.If Oil Can Drop 40%, What’s Texas Farmland Going to Do?
That’s a question I’m actually a bit MORE interested in seeing answered in the next few years.
🙂Fellow students of history.
I remember the oil price drop in the mid 1980s. I was in med school in Houston, and houses were selling at auction for 20-25 cents on the dollar at auction weekly. Our landlord came by to pick up the check in person one day, in his Corvette.
We’d heard he had financial problems. We never sent him another check.
A bank in Louisiana contacted us half a year later, and said to end them the rent.
We told them about the rats. They didn’t know I’d killed the rats and plugged the hole they got in. We lowered our rent by 20% and they just cashed the checks.
That half year rent free was never questioned.
Your Mileage May Vary.Thanks Ilargi,
Happy Thanksgiving.
Commenters are having a hard time understanding deflation/depression, not having lived through it.
I was the best listener to my Grandfather, who was a radio operator and observer-gunner in a Spad in WW-1, raised a family and built them a house from local wood and stone during the depression, then was in OSS counter-intelligence in WW-2.
I always, and still, feel that I’ll have to assume his cloak, and relatively soon.
We all have our roles to play in life. No spook stuff for me, though.Thanks Euan and Roger for the really revealing graphic analysis unraveling of complex data sets, to reveal temporal relationships, which we can link to known macroeconomic events.
It looks like China and the US agreeing to burn less fuel is within what they may be expecting anyway.It’s all still up in the air. The military certainly defends against EMP, and has that non-nuclear EMP weapon aboard drones. A large metal warship is much easier to defend against EMP than a fighter plane.
Interestingly, the Russian persistence of using vacuum tubes, when the US had switched to solid state, made Russian fighters far more resistant to EMP damage. this is dated information. I don’t know their current electronics.
Russian tubes are pretty good, though.@Nassim,
It’s an open question what was going on when the Russian fighter made all those passes over the AEGIS missile cruiser.
This is what every military does when it wants to test the targeting radar of an adversary, but I don’t know exactly what was going on, and RT doesn’t say the ship was blinded during this. It’s an unsubstantiated allegation, as far as I can tell.
https://rt.com/news/pentagon-destroyer-russian-jet-428/OH Shit!
3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater has been pumped into California aquifers.
Drink Coors!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-17/3-billion-gallons-fracking-wastewater-pumped-clean-california-aquifiers-errors-were-@ Jef Jelten, Thanks for the wheat-glyphosate article. It has a mechanism to explain the real, documented phenomenon of increasing wheat intolerance.
Here are a couple of articles about the G-20 meeting that go beyond the chest-thumpng we see in the Anglophone press, one from Deutsche Welle, and the other from a rather obscure Russian political-news website.
https://www.dw.de/merkel-putin-talk-as-g20-debates-ukraine/a-18067417
https://vestnikkavkaza.net/news/politics/62255.htmlPepe Escobar has a good run-down on what happened at APEC.
G-20 may or may not have had anything happen, if it did, it was a secret.
https://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-141114.htmlHer left hand looks more normal in this picture, leading me to doubt my assessment of the “withered left hand” from nerve injury at birth, based on her photograph posted a couple of days ago, where she held it in her larger right hand.
Dont’ch think our world is run by sociopaths, with “fools” as a cover-story?
The know just how much “we’ll let them”, and have layers of defenses, fall guys and thugs to control the eventual backlash. PR does most of the work of controlling us, while finance gently exsanguinates…Oh, all-y’all, look at 2 things in that Dorothea Lange photograph of the woman who never left Mississippi.
First, she has a truly beautiful look upon her face.
Secondly, she is holding her withered left hand in her strong right hand.
I suspect she had a left brachial plexus injury at birth, caused from pulling hard and down to the right, on her head, to get her left shoulder out from under her mother’s pubic bone.
This injury used to be more common.@ Dr Diablo,
I nominate (again) Depleted Uranium as the new uber-collateral.
Make it worth 50 times what gold is (whatever that might become).
The biggest financial powers already have plenty of it, so they wouldn’t have to fight this plan.
It’s pretty nasty in it’s current default role of a tank-busting munition, which burns on impact, creating uranium oxide, which is water soluble, gets into the food chain, and causes deformed babies and cancer for thousands of years in Iraq, or Gaza, or Afghanistan…
It’s rare enough, readily identifiable, costs a whole lot to make, and there is ultimately a limited supply. It lasts forever, too.@Dr. Diablo:
You wrote “like wild Indians”.
You’re an oppressor, no matter what you say, and you’d have done the same as the very few elite members of any generation, who get to call the shots, while everybody else punches the clock and pays the bills.
You’re just all whiny ’cause you missed out on the looting.My dad, born in ’28, got to fight in Korea and Vietnam. How bad was that?
I’m a (1958) boomer, who was just young enough to miss the draft, and have dedicated my good fortune to public health.
I have 4 healthy adult offspring that are my investment, only the senior medical student has any debt, and not so much.
I have no other wealth, having sold the house in 2005 to bike-tour and backpack with the family through the youth hostels of the world for 9 months.
That’s an extremely fortunate life, and I never did believe in the retirement fairy.
I hope the kids do well, and after they are all done with school, maybe I can get a little farmland for those golden years, and for them, and any kids they may have.
By the way, I was just picking on you about the “wild Indians” comment, but we can all be insensitive, so my comment remains fair, as I see it.
I did serve on the Navajo Reservation for 2 years as a physician, so I showed my respect.
Merely benefiting from the oppression going on during one’s life doesn’t make one an oppressor, but focusing on how things came to be as they are can help one benefit his and other generations.
There’s still time to do that, for all of us.Ilargu, You got a slew of comments, so that makes this a “provocative” essay.
Good Work!I’m not certain that this IEA statement about definition of “subsidy” for fossil fuels is the right one, but it derives implied-subsidy from the difference between aggregate consumer cost, minus a calculated “market cost”, based on theoretically derived virtual markets in various areas.
https://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energysubsidies/methodologyforcalculatingsubsidies/
The subsidy numbers given here appear a bit different, but maybe it’s raw/unfiltered.
https://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energysubsidies/
That’s pretty fancy.
It looks like any government support of transportation infrastructure, like railroads, roads, shipping and pipelines, would count as a subsidy.
Over subsidies like price controls for gasoline in Iran and Venezuela sure count
This analysis makes it look like the implied subsidies are set up in a way to favor economic activity in general. So far, total economy rides fossil-fuel use pretty closely, from what I have seen.
Applying subsidies to certain parts of any economy might help avoid economic collapse/reset and/or revolution.Euan,
Thanks for the insights.
If the definition of “subsidy” is actually the deduction of a routine business expense, such as exploration, then things make more sense, and become less shocking.
I can’t find a definition of “subsidy” in relation to the oil industry.
It’s the critical piece, huh?Smashing VIX (volatility) by short selling it, has made volatility go negative recently.
However high the risk (infinite when VIX is negative, I read) this is a really nifty way to juice the stock market up into the close.
Who would do that?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-11/todays-359-pm-wtf-moment-day@Jonabark,
Here is something about the $US and empire and the workings of global reserve currency, which speculates about a transition to SDRs in the next financial crisis.
The petrodollar has been “defended” against Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc, by devastating them, destroying their “demand” for oil, and everything else.
The US military is certainly a “big stick”.
You see what you see, oily-carrot, deadly stick. It’s the empire.
How do empires collapse?
Really big power and money is spent every day on preparing for every scenario.
We won’t likely get the answer here, until about the time everybody else does, because the empire is trying with vast computational ability, threats, spies, bankers, to keep the power.
https://philosophyofmetrics.com/2014/10/28/something-sdr-this-way-comes/Charles Hugh Smith looks at where the tail-risk-bubble is being hidden lately.
Hey, it’s like the old “Asian Economic Crisis”, huh?Sadly, as the Bolsheviks discovered, creating a new experiment in the monkey cage also involves suffering, group learning, mislearning, and “cultural transmission” of learned lessons.
sigh…
Professor: Agreed on that “breaking windows to help the economy” stuff, yes on people running trucks on natural gas, like in the 1980s, no on the Mercedes with solar panel skin…
Ilargi: I’m not so much cheering deflation, as seeing it as inevitable in our “powering down” process, a term used in the Transition community, for gradually reducing one’s use of fuel/energy. I spend a lot of time trying to envision scenarios where we power down without genocide. It’s hard. I’m constantly on the lookout for ideas.
I know that global elites are not all in one camp, and it should be obvious to all that this is a bad time to destroy global infrastructure at the end of the era of cheap resources.
I can see global banking elites, Jay Rockefeller types, using monetary maneuvers such as those being done in Japan, to induce reduction in the use of fuel by workers and retirees, as long as they get to keep hold of the reins of power.
US military “solutions” have been destroying demand in Iraq and Libya, and keeping that nice, easy-oil in the ground for a bit later.
I’m just trying to see any ways that we can get from where we were 15 years ago, to where we will be in 15, 20, 30 years, without WW-3.
Help me out if you see something.
Here’s the latest by the Archdruid, John Michael Greer, about the collapse of monetary economy to feudalism, and I can’t see how to get there from here.Gail Tverberg has an updated analysis of global oil supply, demand, debt, wage, and other issues.
If I may summarize, she sees the adaptive shifts from years of high oil prices as destroying the wages which allow consumer-economy. (Robots don’t buy stuff. Factories let workers go, or use workers as cheap as robots.)
Drilling and exploration are down, and won’t come up until price projections come up, which is never. The current plays will keep pumping, even if losing money, because governments collapse, otherwise. After 2 years, supplies will start falling, but demand can’t rise enough to fund extraction of expensive oil… Devise your own scenario to follow.
Oil Price Slide – No Good Way OutSo deflation is showing up in decreased demand for oil/energy, the “master commodity”?
That seems ideal from a viewpoint of “powering down”, which is the transition we all need to make going forward.
Weakening the Yen keeps fuel prices in Japan from dropping, keeps Japanese from consuming more fuel. Japan has been using more fuel since shuttering the nuclear power plants. This is effectively more austerity for the Japanese people, and they will consume less from the outside world with their weaker currency.
Europe is already in austerity, but not overtly transitioning the economy into sectors involving more human-input, compared to cheap robot manufacturing.
The Japanese are known for being able to buckle-down and work together, but Europeans, not so much. Individual European states have repeatedly been able to buckle-down in times of adversity.
If this is the clever misdirection guiding us into getting by with less, then EU break-up is necessary pretty soon. Will the UK lead the way? It would be easiest for them.
Central bankers are used to cooperating in one way, while presenting things in another way. Here is more on the purported plan to transition to SDRs (special drawing rights) as the new global reserve currency.
https://philosophyofmetrics.com/2014/11/05/the-ottoman-multilateral-model/
It would seem to make global central banking a supranational authority, and appears to be supported widely, as the world chafes at the boot of the $US regime.Thius article posits, and rather well, that the global central banks are coordinating to create a financial crisis which will require the next step up the ladder of financial complexity, to Strategic Drawing Rights as the global reserve currency.
https://philosophyofmetrics.com/2014/10/28/something-sdr-this-way-comes/
Each important currency is being gutted through debasement, and we see the day approaching when the boy who cried “wolf” will not be able to spend his promissory notes any more.
Of course this is the point of collapse, where complex systems collapse down to whatever level is inherently stable, like the feudal farming community.
We have cut those rungs out of the ladder as we climbed, haven’t we?
They have not been cut out everywhere.
50% of the world’s food is still grown by small farmers, just not where we live/eat.
Growing food on a human scale is really hard work, and unforgiving; no paid sick days…In times past, people grew their food, grew gardens, and it is still like that in most of Thailand, which was just mentioned.
The kind of starving-in-asphalt-jungle poverty that now exists in the industrialized world is extremely harsh, indeed.
There is no growing of food, no useful chores to do, just exploitation and dehumanization.The game will go on as it is, until there is suddenly nothing left in the game.
We should do what we can to get our little “dachas” and grow some veggies, and figure out how to get water, beans and some cooking fuel.
It’s strange that the west has become so complacent, and Russia jumps into action to increase domestic agriculture, manufacturing, and self reliance.
Russia has a good spot now, in an otherwise bad 25 (or more) years, and sees the opportunity to avoid ruin. This is uniting Russia, and it’s impressive.
That’s not happening in Austin, Texas.
We’ll have to find ways to work on self sufficiency on a much, much smaller scale.Hey Christiangustafsen,
How did you get that nice picture to show up?
I want to do that, too.
😮
John@Raleigh,
It sure seems like HIV and Ebola could have been “adapted” from what already existed in nature, such as the Simian Lymphocyte Virus in chimps, and the naturally occurring Ebola virus, one of several hemorrhagic fevers. The Russian were working on weaponizing these things, too. https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/ebola-crisis-rekindles-concerns-about-secret-research-in-russian-military-labs-1.310409A can of worms is here from the Church Hearings into the CIA and NSA, a last gasp of democracy in America, just after the Nixon downfall.
MKNAOMI was a chemical/biological secret weapons program started in 1952. Some big names in medicine and US foreign policy play prominently.
AIDS and Ebola look to have been strategic projects, and aligned with specific stated objectives of Secretary of State Kissinger.
We are still getting blasted from the past, it seems.
Shudder… Sorry…
https://greatgameindia.com/ebola-cia-project-codename-mknaomi-hi-tech-assassinations/We’re all resonating on this post, so it must be good.
I have had so much humanity happening this year; lots of illness and death and hospital time with loved ones, some now dead.
Directly engaging the dying with honesty, compassion and presence is tiring.
It’s a treatment for loneliness, though.
I feel larger for it, but somewhat blurred and unfocused, too.
Howzit for you?
