As I type these words, it looks as though the wheels are coming off the global economy. Greece and Puerto Rico have both suspended payments on their debts, and China’s stock market, which spent the last year in a classic speculative bubble, is now in the middle of a classic speculative bust. Those of my readers who’ve read John Kenneth Galbraith’s lively history The Great Crash 1929 already know all about the Chinese situation, including the outcome—and since vast amounts of money from all over the world went into Chinese stocks, and most of that money is in the process of turning into twinkle dust, the impact of the crash will inevitably proliferate through the global economy.
So, in all probability, will the Greek and Puerto Rican defaults. In today’s bizarre financial world, the kind of bad debts that used to send investors backing away in a hurry attract speculators in droves, and so it turns out that some big New York hedge funds are in trouble as a result of the Greek default, and some of the same firms that got into trouble with mortgage-backed securities in the recent housing bubble are in the same kind of trouble over Puerto Rico’s unpayable debts. How far will the contagion spread? It’s anybody’s guess.
Oh, and on another front, nearly half a million acres of Alaska burned up in a single day last week—yes, the fires are still going—while ice sheets in Greenland are collapsing so frequently and forcefully that the resulting earthquakes are rattling seismographs thousands of miles away. These and other signals of a biosphere in crisis make good reminders of the fact that the current economic mess isn’t happening in a vacuum. As Ugo Bardi pointed out in a thoughtful blog post, finance is the flotsam on the surface of the ocean of real exchanges of real goods and services, and the current drumbeat of financial crises are symptomatic of the real crisis—the arrival of the limits to growth that so many people have been discussing, and so many more have been trying to ignore, for the last half century or so.
A great many people in the doomward end of the blogosphere are talking about what’s going on in the global economy and what’s likely to blow up next. Around the time the next round of financial explosions start shaking the world’s windows, a great many of those same people will likely be talking about what to do about it all. I don’t plan on joining them in that discussion. As blog posts here have pointed out more than once, time has to be considered when getting ready for a crisis. The industrial world would have had to start backpedaling away from the abyss decades ago in order to forestall the crisis we’re now in, and the same principle applies to individuals. The slogan “collapse now and avoid the rush!” loses most of its point, after all, when the rush is already under way.