[Kreditanstalt]

Hello, new commenter.

Excellent analysis, something we’ve been waiting to hear for some long time! But let’s carry it further and ask WHY growth has stopped…why speculation and sheer BETTING has increasingly replaced bona fide “investment”, why yield has vanished and why living standards are falling. Why “a dollar buys a nickels’ worth” and why currency debasement has been a feature of “money” for decades.

And, although “deflation” is the contemporary meme, if looked at in longer-term and in context we actually live in an era of soaring price inflation. Look at house prices, art prices, stock prices, bond prices, healthcare, education, rent…everything except iPhones.

I was originally tempted to finger the constantly increasing supply of money & credit as the cause of the end of growth. It’s tempting too to blame central banking. But then I thought a bit more: perhaps the soaring money and credit supply is a SYMPTOM or a RESPONSE to an underlying cause.

The system’s response has for decades been one of replacing the absence of real growth with DEBT…borrowing from the future.

To my mind the real root problem is resource depletion and scarcity, specifically the depletion of cheaply-extractable resources, especially when the cost of extracting those resources is juxtaposed with the assumption that living standards (including of those paid to do the extracting) are expected to keep rising endlessly.

This constant-economic growth-dependent system is perniciously breaking down, from the margins towards the centre. Not everyone suffers lower standards of living equally or simultaneously but those at the margins are doing so FIRST.

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