…and check the dip-stick on my salvation!
Ilargi: I’m convinced it’s not so much that it’s hard to understand; instead, it’s hard to accept. Still, for most people that’s enough reason to not understand.
It might therefore be a good moment to reiterate what we’ve said often before at The Automatic Earth: the financial system as we know it can not be saved. It doesn’t matter whether “official institutions” nominate 30 banks as being too big to fail, or 300. It is inevitable that the enormous amounts of debt accumulated in a relatively and amazingly short period of time must be serviced. Pay offs, write downs, defaults, bankruptcies. They’re cast in stone. It’s too late, too big to fail or not.
Here’s another gob-smacker that’s easier to understand than God is dead, but is even harder to accept: Not only is the economy about to get its zombie head blown off, it won’t be reincarnated as anything we’d recognize as normal for the foreseeable future, because the peak oil debate is over.
Again, it’s easy to understand that global oil production has clearly plateaued over the past seven years (for the first time since WWII), and that year-on-year declines are imminent. After we drink the second half of our milkshake, there’s no more milkshake.
Read the ASPO-USA press release, in particular the letter to Dr. Steven Chu, here. Check with Dr. James Schlesinger (former Sec Def, CIA director, Sec Energy, Atomic energy Chair, etc.,), or Dr. Robert Hirsch (former Sec Energy, author of the 2005 Hirsch Report), or drop in at Dave Cohen’s joint.
If you still find acceptance difficult, you may prefer to join Daniel Yergin and Barack Obama in their Pulitzer- and Peace Prize-clutching quest for oil, money and power. You can buy yourself some limited edition Justice Coins to fondle during our next regime change humanitarian operation in the oily regions of the world.