What will crash first? The economy or the environment?
Last week we had troubling economic opinions being expressed by some that the economic crash has started.
Spending $15 Trillion on printing money, $10 Trillion on buying bonds and the lowest interest rates for 5000 years all in 10 years is as much a solution to the Global Financial Crisis as taking up meth to kick cigarettes.
Sure, you don’t want to smoke ciggies anymore, but you are now a drug fried psychopath.
All we did was kick the problem down the road, and it looks increasingly like we are running out of road…
Goldman Says Stocks May Dive 25% If 10-Year Yield Hits 4.5%
Bill Gates says another financial crisis ‘a certainty’
Man who predicted the GFC tips Aussie house prices to tumble by up to half
…I think the first story is the most significant. Once the AI robots who trade in the nano second see yield’s hit over 3.5% they will ignore human greed and fear and just start pulling money out of stocks and plough them into bonds.
We are reading a point where the super structure of the system can’t digest the vast sums of printed money flooding it.
While the economic crash percolates, and extraordinary and unprecedented heat wave in the Arctic re-wrote all the rules…
…how this wasn’t leading every news story on the planet is the question here.
Both the economy and the environment need each other to survive in a complex society, but if both are now failing and pulling the other down, new paradigms have to be imagined and imagined soon.
The economy that relates to the environment is the one we all live in. The economy of bonds and shares and futures and QE has almost completely separated from it. Albeit the latter can swallow the former in one small bite, and is chewing away.
I back the economic collapse to be postponed till the climatic one is well under way, and the bonds , shares, futures and QU part of it will survive climatic collapse. The real economy where we all live will not.
D J S
Although leader of the National Party Simon Bridges is yet to find his feet we are slowly but surely gaining convincing evidence of what we can expect and how government can progress New Zealand aspirations. Already there have been big reveals in today’s The Daily Blog publications highlighting a number of government functions and / or disfunction. It’s been revealed in Chris’s Trotters interpretation of a Spin Off article that the public service works to protect itself and elected officials work to lobby the beast. As a former crown prosecutor I strangely admire Simon Bridges for his inside knowledge of the public service, no doubt he will sought out more knowledge after becoming Leader of the National Party. Instead Bridges will relies not only is his knowledge insufficient, but more than this we all need to relies that government itself needs to change. It must be decided to accumulate as much knowledge as possible in order for democracy kiwi style to be improved upon before National attempts to reassume treasury benches with out altering National Party ideology in the slightest.
Jacinda Ardern on the other hand has become more powerful and enlightened because of the fact that she understands the difficulties of high flying motherhood. Insight of democratic capitalism being imperfect and has fatal flaws, because of old government mentalities bound by tradition, Jacinda has the opportunity to evolve those mentalities. And voters realising they could defeat themselves as well as voting out a government must look deeper and learn far more than any New Zealand citizen in history. And by looking into New Zealand history, political leaders will find new knowledge and greater power that not even Winston Peters may be aware of. We must move past assuring ones political careers and improve each individual kiwis stay on this planet. And the Green Parties ability to think differently scares incumbent MPs far more than Simon Bridges scares left wing voters as it shows Green Party leadership can adapt and must not be as weak as election17.
The government order of Helen Clark was destroyed by John Key borrowing $50 billion so Jacinda must make a new one, and that makes Simon Bridges one of the most dangerous National Party leaders of all time as he some how manages to continue the devastating National Party ideology against the environment.
Protector of the %1 and hated by the many, Bridges puts the economy before the environment.
Good article Martyn, top class 100%
An economic crash seems our only way to force us to reduce our wasteful “consumerism” cult now threatening to “throttle & choke” our delicate environment today with plastic and toxic chemicals as we are witnessing now.
My Son was in Germany for 11 yrs and is home living with us now and is so saddened to see this country now engaging in very dirty environmental degradation of our environment when Germany is now banning all dirty practices such as keeping diesel vehicles and trucks out of cities by a ticking colour patch system where the only trucks that can travel on roads needs a green sticker which requires a new “firtering exhaust system cast thousands to all diesel vehicles now.
Rail on the other hand is a very clean burning low emission fuel energy system now with only a fraction of carbon emissions so we see that rail is now increasing as a freight mover as is USA with US rail has increasing volumes of freight by 30% last year.
Pity NZ has Ministers that still talk up roads and more roads when discussing our “infrastructure” as if they have lost their brain, but when the economic crash comes most trucks will be off our roads as fuel cost will be to high and rail will again be saved.
That is just one window of how we will be forced to adapt to cheaper transport and use less carbon emissions.
Sadly, I see the most likely scenario being a mad rush to exploit for profit every environmental asset this planet has till the point that it becomes clear that the only way humans can survive is if they nurture what is left. Then the human race will have many centuries of crawling back from the brink but sadly living on a planet that will be forever devoid of much of its life forms. Hope I’m wrong.
If I ever write a noir fiction novel, I am going to call the chief protagonist “Harry Dent” as in the third link.
Answer: The economy. By a long shot. Environmental changes is a very slow burn, and thus measured over many decades. The massively over-inflated global economy, on the other hand, is a short-term phenomena (usually a decade or less) and is ripe for collapse right now.
When the economy goes tits up the temperature is meant to rise by about .6C, as the particulates the economy ads to the ‘sky’ will be washed out.
I’m sure humans will burn everything they can burn, look at most cities in the middle east post US delivered ‘democracy’, and we sure as fuck have enough bombs and guns to do a shit load of damage, so the system dies and everything gets way worse.
Climate change just continues at the pace 410 ppm CO2 equals, we have very little to do with it all now.
Even if there were 20 billion of us, it wouldn’t speed up.
By the time the environment catches up with 410 ppm CO2 ….. ho hum …. the temperature will be about 24 C above now.
bla bla bla
One thing I wouldn’t want to be at the moment is pregnant that is for sure.
If the system goes really bad, being in debt might not be such a bad thing, as nearly everyone is.
Depending on how fast it pans out? the banks/government/phone lines etc, will all come down, long before they can kick you out of the house, you’ve suddenly discovered you have half a mill of negative equity in.
The whole system has been running on bullshit for a long time, it is just our luck to be here and now.
Taking up Meth to kick cigarettes… I did actually consider that.
Here’s an idea. Call me old fashioned if you must.
Buy a mattock, buy a rake, buy a few basic, staple seeds like potato, cabbage, cauli flower, and learn how to grow them. Quick smart.
Just check the iPhone first? No,no,no,no….
50 kg of burned bracken fern will yield 1 kg of potash. Remember that. Just keep it away from the Fresians.
Call the lawyer?
Call the Accountant?
Call the financial advisor?
Call your insurer?
Call your realestate agent?
Call the cops?
Call the ambulance?
call the gym ’cause abs?
Sure, if they’re edible.
To respond to the question in the headline – the answer is the economy.
The crash is already underway, but the masses will only realise in October as another round of QE is announced (after the predictable failure of tightening). Then it’s Katie, bar the door!
Thank you for posting this. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who is interested in the topics of enviromelt + economic megafuck.
Not sure future QE will be announced. I’m pretty sure the recent share market slide will have been arrested by prudent quiet intervention by central banks with essentially QE money. As future such hiccoughs will be, but it won’t be publicised.
That is why I think it will be hard to identify a crash ; unlimited money can be created and inserted to prevent it. I don’t see a limit to this.
The climate however can’t be managed so easily, and it has the potential in so many ways to flip into a self perpetuating escalation, and not be slow at all. As with methane escaping from the Tundra and the deep sea.
D J S
When the economy goes tits up the temperature is meant to rise by about .6C, as the particulates the economy ads to the ‘sky’ will be washed out. I’m sure humans will burn everything they can burn, look at most cities in the middle east post US delivered ‘democracy’, and we sure as fuck have enough bombs and guns to do a shit load of damage, so the system dies and everything gets way worse. Climate change just continues at the pace 410 ppm CO2 equals, we have very little to do with it all now. Even if there were 20 billion of us, it wouldn’t speed up. By the time the environment catches up with 410 ppm CO2 ….. ho hum …. the temperature will be about 24 C above now. bla bla bla
Industrial societies have been ‘eating the future’ since Limits to Growth was rejected by the financial institutions that control much of society, and all the dire consequences of ‘eating the future’ are now manifesting.
If Limits to Growth projections pan out as expected we have until around 2030 before it all gets utterly diabolical.
‘The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn’t appear to bother us. We hear the holy truth in the decrees of elected officials, in the laments of economists about flagging GDP, in the authoritative pages of opinion, in the whirligig of advertising, at the World Bank and on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of globe-spanning corporations and in the halls of the smallest small-town chambers of commerce. Growth is sacrosanct.’
https://psmag.com/magazine/fallacy-of-endless-growth
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