Party like it’s 1999

Posted on October 6, 2008 by .
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average managed to shed almost a decade’s worth of economic growth in a single day today. The DJIA closed today at a level that hasn’t been seen since 1999.

The 7% decline today doesn’t compare with the double digit declines that marked the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Over a quarter of the American labor force was unemployed in 1933, with none of the safety nets we have today: no unemployment checks, no public housing, no government welfare of any kind. Back then, though, we had food, we had oil in the ground domestically, we had plenty of home grown resources and we had very little national debt, many of us outside of the High Plains had family farms we could return to and wait things out.

Today, we have monetary inflation of basic foodstuffs in spite of lower real wages for the majority of Americans. We have crippling debt at the national and personal level. It should be an interesting week, and by “interesting” I use it in terms of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Massive layoffs from all sectors of American business will be announced around Thanksgiving this year.

Some of you might be interested in this article that likens the Borg of Star Trek with our modern financial system.

What we are seeing reflects a general insolvency of the global financial system. Part of the problem is that investors, business people and governments didn’t foresee that crude oil production would flatten in 2005 and prices would go from $10 per barrel in 1998 to $100 per barrel in 2008. Or that China and India would consume so much so fast that nearly all forms of commodities would rise in parallel with oil prices.

When credit is extended over a long time horizon, as in a home mortgage, the underlying assumption is that the future will be akin to the past. Inflation will be relatively modest and incomes will keep up so that a steady flow of cash can go back to banks and keep up their reserve balances. Obviously this hasn’t occurred: prices rose faster than incomes and the ability to repay debts faltered.

The United States (and other nations with negative trade balances and large foreign held debts) is in a Catch 22 situation. Flows of credit are so crucial for the daily functioning of our economy that it looks as though these will be preserved at all cost.

It is difficult in a panicky time to step back and ask questions about the greater purpose of what we are doing. One of the problems I have is balancing my current anxiety over the unraveling of systems that I depend on, with the knowledge that these systems are highly misguided and need radical change. As a people, we have become very poor at distinguishing between productive and unproductive debts.

Read the whole post here.

Elsewhere:



See also:

  1. 21.6% inflation
  2. Windy, warm and $5 gas
  3. Freakonomics looks at used bicycle prices
  4. A Surge in Bicyclists Appears to Be Waiting


  • murphstahoe

    Amen.

  • murphstahoe

    Amen.

  • A Midnight Rider

    Seems as thought those protesters at the IMF and World Bank meetings knew something we chose to ignore.

  • A Midnight Rider

    Seems as thought those protesters at the IMF and World Bank meetings knew something we chose to ignore.

  • Christopher Ray Miller

    The tragedy is that we have known this was coming for years. James Kunstler has long been the loudest voice warning about the coming difficulties — and his warnings are based on facts and logical deductions available to many others –, yet he has long been dismissed as some fringe kook. His rhetorical style might be off-putting to those he targets, but the facts he has pointed out, and the logical conclusions, have been unassailable. Five — if not ten — years after I first remember him predicting the collapse of the oil- and "creative loan"-based suburban bubble and the resulting implications for the US and world economy, the chickens have come home to roost.

    This should have been a surprise to no-one. It's a failure of moral fibre that allowed this to happen. Kunstler, again, said so, and we now see he was absolutely right.

  • Christopher Ray Miller

    The tragedy is that we have known this was coming for years. James Kunstler has long been the loudest voice warning about the coming difficulties — and his warnings are based on facts and logical deductions available to many others –, yet he has long been dismissed as some fringe kook. His rhetorical style might be off-putting to those he targets, but the facts he has pointed out, and the logical conclusions, have been unassailable. Five — if not ten — years after I first remember him predicting the collapse of the oil- and "creative loan"-based suburban bubble and the resulting implications for the US and world economy, the chickens have come home to roost. This should have been a surprise to no-one. It's a failure of moral fibre that allowed this to happen. Kunstler, again, said so, and we now see he was absolutely right.

  • cafiend

    A failure of moral fiber? Something like what Jimmy Carter got lambasted for saying back in the late 1970s? Something about rampant consumerism and self interest bringing us all down?

    It's been a bitter few decades for people trying to live modestly while the greedy guzzlers grabbed everything they could and steered the national and global economy in all sorts of malignant directions.

  • cafiend

    A failure of moral fiber? Something like what Jimmy Carter got lambasted for saying back in the late 1970s? Something about rampant consumerism and self interest bringing us all down?It's been a bitter few decades for people trying to live modestly while the greedy guzzlers grabbed everything they could and steered the national and global economy in all sorts of malignant directions.