BIGGEST PICTURE:
$30 trillion in debt + 6 billion people
= $5000 per person.
At 3% interest = $150 per year to service it.
Yawn.
Better increase the $30 trillion to $100 trillion to get the economy moving. "I owe, I owe! It's off to work I go" - sung to the tune in "Snow White and the 7 Dwarves".
Uncle Al has reduced interest rates and so has Japan, to encourage people to borrow, spend and work and commit themselves to it for a decade or so.
Baldur, I think the doom and gloomsters, as throughout history, only get sporadic, ephemeral satisfaction and they have had it. DNA always tries to make life better for themselves. Humans have the happy trick of intelligent, co-operative, discovery of laws of existence and turning that knowledge to our advantage.
Being only slightly removed from our chimpanzee cuzzies, we are not very good at the process, so the human realm looks more like a large chimpanzee cage than some of us would like. But we are making accelerating progress.
If we look at rate of progress per lifetime:
Before Present
10,000 At last the ice-age is lifting.
5,000 Growing crops, inventing the wheel and better spears.
2,000 Large dominance hierarchies the norm [but Christian egalitarianism and similar concepts spreading]
1,000 Not much different from the beginning of the Roman Empire time
500 Still very ugly, but substantial improvements in many areas.
200 The process takes off!
100 The process goes into post-industrial revolution overdrive with burgeoning global population, creativity and economic development, taking off with aircraft and thousands of technologies.
50 We enter hyperdrive and you and I arrive on the front edge of the tsunami. Taking off into space with millions of technologies and burgeoning globalisation.
2 We lift off into cyberspace and start changing our DNA by choice. 6 billion people with millions of technologies and the world's a village.
Mad Moslem Murderers are minting silver coins and destroying who and what they can. They [John Walker Linde for example] look just like the semi-human apes of the introduction to "2001 A Space Odyssey". The Mad Moronic Mutilating IRA contribute by scrambling human DNA in Omagh, but their technology doesn't work. There are relatively few of these superstitious crazies. They won't stop the other 6 billion of us.
Don't worry about a bit of debt - if it doesn't become a self-sustaining collapse, which it won't become since we've had 2 years of correction and crunching of debtors, then re-ordering debt will just change ownership of assets. Globalstar, Global Crossing, margined shareholders and bankrupty Argentina and Enron and others have been reamed out and are in the process of market clearing with no great damage overall [just a change in who has possession of the money].
Mqurice |
