Tuesday, December 29, 2009

"Forecast 2010" by Cluster...

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/12/forecast-2010.html

This is an interesting, well-worth-the-read analysis of where the U.S. and the global economy stand.

His observations are macro in nature and address the fantasy extend and pretend game being played by the banks and U.S. Government. They also explore pressing but little-talked-about issues such as peak oil. His observations parallel those made by Perkins, but are very different in tone. Here is a sample passage:

"The past 20 years we've seen the institutions of capital finance pretend to create growth where there is no growth by expanding financial casino games of chance and extracting profits, commissions, and bonuses from the management of these games - mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and all the rest of the tricks dreamed up as America's industrial economy was shipped off to the Third World. But that set of rackets had a limited life span and they ran into a wall in October 2008. Since then it's all come down to a shell game: hide the giant pea of defaulted debt under a giant walnut shell....

....Meanwhile President Obama has given next-to-zero money or attention to public transit, to repairing the passenger railroad system in particular. I maintain that if we don't repair this system, Americans will not be traveling very far from home in a decade or so.

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