Housing Bubble II: Deja Vu, Again

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FOR RENT in tony neighborhood, handyman special, low low rent, tenant responsible for maintenance. Any problems, call 1 800 BITE ME. (Photo by Kevin Dooley/Flickr)

FOR RENT in tony neighborhood, handyman special, low low rent, tenant responsible for maintenance. Any problems, call 1 800 BITE ME. (Photo by Kevin Dooley/Flickr)

I knew a woman with lung cancer who almost blew her face off while sneaking a smoke under an oxygen mask. Wall Street reminds me of her. The Masters of the Universe (hedge fund guys, private equity managers, parasites, whatever you wish to call them) are so addicted to subprime lending they can’t give it up, even though they are still in traction from the last time it blew them up (and evicted ten million Americans from their homes).

Immediately — and I mean, immediately — after the collapse of the subprime-mortgage bubble brought the entire world’s financial system to its knees, the MOTU decided that the remedy to the destruction wrought by subprime mortgages was — subprime rental contracts. (Not to mention subprime auto loans, which is another story.) Continue reading →

Junkie Nation

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Are antidepressants depressing the vote in America? (Wikipedia Photo)

Are antidepressants depressing the vote in America? (Wikipedia Photo)

I was standing outside a small-town courthouse, chatting with a clutch of town and county officials, on a fall evening a few years ago, when the conversation turned to their constituents. We were on a break from a sparsely attended candidates’ forum inside, and I asked them what was on the voters’ minds that year. After a little bit of this and a little bit of that, they reached sudden and enthusiastic consensus (after making sure that no one from the local paper was in earshot): in general, the voters don’t give a shit.

Now this is at a level of politics that big money has not been able to lock down, simply because in a race for a few thousand votes to get elected to the county commission, there’s nothing on which to spend big money. At this level, votes decide, but the voters don’t care. The only way to get a crowd at a political debate is to open with Beyonce.  Continue reading →

Masters of the Universe Head for Exits

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It may be time to put your money under the mattress again.

It may be time to put your money under the mattress again.

The list of stock market players who are talking openly about the danger of an imminent crash (in doublespeak, that’s “correction”) is growing fast. This is all the more remarkable when you remember that it is generally against the best interests of players to warn people away from the game at which they are making their money. They are, in a sense, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded casino; either they know nobody is going to pay any attention, or they are sitting next to a pre-dug tunnel out. Or there really is a fire.

Rich people are in general given too much deference in our money-worshiping culture. We don’t do that here. But people who speak against their apparent interests are especially interesting, and it usually behooves us to listen to what they have to say.   Continue reading →

Fareed at Last: The Middle East Explained. Totally.

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Fareed Zakaria holds forth on CNN. He’s one of the better pundits, but as with them all, the reasoning tends to be more circular and the fables more disconnected from reality. (Wikipedia Photo)

Fareed Zakaria holds forth on CNN. He’s one of the better pundits, but as with them all, the reasoning tends to be circular and the fables disconnected from reality. (Wikipedia Photo)

Another Sunday, another tsunami of TV tirades from the elders of our tribe, as we gather around the firelike tube and absorb their wisdom. (Will someone please explain to me why William Kristol is there, week after week? How is it that a man who has been so wrong so often gets invited back to the inner circle, and how is it he is still smirking?) Hundreds of pundit-hours, in a single morning, yesterday most of it devoted to explaining to us the Middle East.

Among these explainers, perhaps the least doctrinaire and most intelligent is Fareed Zakaria, who with Time Magazine and CNN has created an admirable Pundit Empire. Continue reading →

Rats Start to Leave the Fracking Ship

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What top oil people are starting to do about the fracking revolution. Abandoning ship.

What top oil people are starting to do about the fracking revolution. Abandoning ship.

The first sign of a doomed ship is said to be the urgent departure of its rats; the first sign of fire in a crowded theater is not the guy who shouts it out, but the several people with good noses who start to sidle quietly but purposefully toward the exits. In the world of America’s bogus oil and gas fracking revolution, the nostrils of the rats and the smoke-sensitive alike are beginning to twitch. Let us watch those noses.

Must we review the industry’s propaganda again here? How hydraulic fracking has changed everything, America now has abundant gas and oil, we’re surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, we’re number one in the world again, we’re headed for energy independence? (No one has yet had the chutzpah to predict we’re going to get to energy independence, since it’s mathematically impossible, but it shouldn’t be long now, they’re getting desperate.) The latest iteration of the industry line is an essay that appeared in the New York Times  titled “America’s Oil Bonanza,” a song of oil without end, amen. Continue reading →

Attack of the Zombie Plants: World War A

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Just when you think it's safe to go near the water, you start feeling dizzy. Thanks, algae. (Photo by Dave Shefer/Flickr)

Just when you think it’s safe to go near the water, you start feeling dizzy. Thanks, algae. (Photo by Dave Shefer/Flickr)

Along most of its coastline, in its bays and estuaries, and in many of its rivers and lakes, America is under mounting attack by another enemy of its own making — toxic green algae. It’s like a bad horror movie, with the slime sprawling across vast reaches of water (so much that it’s visible from space), eventually covering beaches and burping a neurotoxin that is deadly to earthlings. As a movie, it wouldn’t get past a concept lunch in Hollywood today (Hey, Arnie! It’s been done, okay?) but it is raising real dread — not the fake movie kind — from California to Florida, from the coast of Washington to the coast of Ohio. Yes, Ohio. Continue reading →

The Scariest Picture in the World

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Just a garden-variety protest in some Middle Eastern county, you say, nothing to be afraid of here? Wait till you find out where these people are. (BBC Photo by Safa Al-Ahmad)

Just a garden-variety protest in some Middle Eastern county, you say, nothing to be afraid of here? Wait till you find out where these people are. (BBC Photo by Safa Al-Ahmad)

What, this picture? It’s almost a cliche, right, more Arab Spring stuff? Yes, except for one thing. This uprising, inspired by the so-called Arab Spring three years ago, and unquenched since then, is happening in Saudi Arabia. The protesters are minority Shia Muslims in Saudi’s Eastern Province, the center of gravity of the country’s oil industry. This picture represents the worst nightmare of the Saudi royal family, and of all industrialized nations. If Saudi Arabia comes unglued, so do we all. Continue reading →

China: Falling Faster

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Sunset in Shanghai. Except that’s not the horizon the sun is sinking behind, it’s the pollution layer. (Photo By Suicup via Wikimedia Commons)

Sunset in Shanghai. Except that’s not the horizon the sun is sinking behind, it’s the pollution layer. (Photo By Suicup via Wikimedia Commons)

It is increasingly likely that our ailing Western industrialized economy will be preceded in collapse by that of China, whose degradation of the natural web of life has been far faster and more profound than ours. Every six months or so I check on China’s disintegration, plowing through metric tons of punditry on its Miracle-Grow GDP, its rising military power, its imperial ambitions — to come upon a patient in ICU, nearly comatose. If America is Dead Man Walking with respect to food, water, air and soil quality, China is The Walking Dead. [Really? I have to explain that? One is about a man about to die, the other about a zombie, already dead.] Continue reading →

Oil Storm Flags Up: Take More Cover

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Coming soon to an economy near you: a two-train wreck.

Coming soon to an economy near you: a two-train wreck.

The second train wreck about to sledgehammer the world’s economies is the implosion of the oil-and-gas renaissance scam. This implosion, most likely to occur in 2015, may occur before Train Wreck Number One (the financial “correction,” see the previous post, Financial Storm Flags Up: Take Cover) and bring it on, or it could kick in just afterward as the panicked Masters of the Universe run for the lifeboats. The cumulative effect of the two events will be devastating and lasting. They are not likely to bring on, quite yet, the ultimate crash of the industrial age — there is a lot of momentum left in the old battleship yet. But they will come close. Because while the financial implosion may not be quite as bad as that of 2008, the end of the oil scam, in itself, will be devastating to the world. Continue reading →

Financial Storm Flags Up: Take Cover

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God may not play dice with the universe, but the Masters of the Universe shoot craps with everything. (Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks/Flickr)

God may not play dice with the universe, but the Masters of the Universe shoot craps with everything. (Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks/Flickr)

This is not about TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), nor about the Crash of the Industrial Age (Wait! The acronym for that’s CIA!) that we expect. But it is about a very hard time we are all about to go through, most likely beginning before next year is out and ending God knows when. Most probably, it will not end, but like the last Great Recession simply deliver us to a new plateau of diminished expectations that will become the New Normal. This imminent event is being forecast by a rising chorus of voices like those who warned us 10 years ago that a prosperity based on subprime mortgages, and financial derivatives thereof, could not stand. These voices — actually some of them the very same people — are telling us that we face not one, but two, train wrecks that will be nearly simultaneous, in that one will bring on the other. Continue reading →