jaycey

Understanding Energy: Professional Money Management and Peak Oil

I doubt they used the same terminology but there absolutely were multiple episodes of "peak timber" in the ancient world. England was rescued from it by coal--without which there would have been no industrial revolution. Interested readers should check out "A Forest Journey" by John Perlin. It was written in 1989 but is still a *very* relevant read given our situation today.

books.google.com/books...


On Oct 27 05:18 PM che wrote:

> i wonder if they used a term "peak timber" in the middle ages

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

Generate electricity at home with nat. gas and heat your house with the waste heat:

www.csmonitor.com/2006...

www.microchap.info/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Money Remains Main Barrier to Geothermal Power

"More than 100 gigawatts of geothermal power could be developed for just $1 billion spread out over the next 40 years—the price tag of just one advanced coal-fired power plant and one third the cost of a new nuclear generator." [Scientific American, 1/23/07]

The Bane of Broken Balance Sheets

I forgot to say the previous comment was Re: jimmy46.

Mr. Webmaster: Can we please have a "preview comment" button on this site?

The Bane of Broken Balance Sheets

Umm, there's this thing called Google. Maybe you've heard of it?

www.google.com/search?...

Mapping the Market Genome

That's kind of like saying what we need to handle global warming is more efficient air conditioners.

You can have the best information, the most high tech war-room-command center, but it won't mean much.

We have a world awash in too much debt caused by massive trade imbalances. We have a regulatory system that's dysfunctional not because of incompetent regulators but because of venal politicians and their paymasters the financial oligarchs. We have an underconsumption problem because workers are not getting paid enough to purchase the fruits of their labor (hmmm, when have we seen that before....).

This meltdown is a symptom of a deeper rot in our system and you can have the fanciest fire trucks in the world, but as soon as you put out one fire, another will start somewhere else. They won't end until we rebalance trade, give the workers of the world a raise (here and in the Asian surplus nations), shrink the financial industry by half or more, and throw the incumbents and their lobbyist pimps out of DC.

VAR, Schmarr, guns don't kill people, *people* kill people.

Target for Inflation: Getting It Right

The reason, IMHO, for stabilizing prices rather than money is because there are serious income transfer issues for borrowers vs lenders if prices fluctuate unpredictably. The economy needs price stability to encourage investment.

Any discussion of our bubbles that doesn't take the US trade deficit into account isn't worth the pixels it's printed on. The root cause of our bubbles is the trade deficit--the war between the (US) militarists and the (Asian) mercantilists. We're not going to solve any problems until we start talking about the right things!

www.telegraph.co.uk/fi...

JPMorgan: Beneficiary of Depression?

It's deja vu all over again

I've been reading about turn of the (20th) century politics and finance recently and the similarities are striking. The finance aristocrats seem to have an ancient playbook that they recycle every generation--as soon as the public has forgotten about the previous episodes. Bubbles, contractions (macro pump & dump?), imperialism, war profiteering and government giveaways; all facilitated by political bribery, slanted news coverage and paid shills to gull the public. It happened then, it's happening now.

What strikes you reading that stuff is how much the discussion of the intrigues and lies have been marginalized in the present day. Turn of the century commentators were much more frank--though it's debatable whether it did them much good.

I recently read an old book about the "crime of 1873." The author, a member of the US Monetary commission of 1879, says the whole "free silver" "Cross of Gold" thing was orchestrated by European investors wanting to double their money on Civil War bonds. It seems the bonds were sold for greenbacks then selling at half the value of gold and silver coins. They had over a billion dollars of these bonds and stood to make a killing if they could get their principal back in gold dollars rather than greenbacks. A quiet campaign of subterfuge and corruption slipped the law through the legislature unnoticed by the general public. The result was a bonanza for the foreign bondholders and a painful deflation for everybody else.

If you want to make sense of the world, follow the money!

www.archive.org/stream...

WSJ's One-Two Gold Punch

Anybody interested in the gold market needs to read Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's <i>Gold Warriors</i>. Nobody knows how much gold there is in the world and there seems to be a lot of "black" gold floating around out there (and I don't mean oil). Here's a short exerpt:

"Official records maintain that Asia, with more than 75% of the world's population, holds less than 5% of the total world supply of gold, a statistic that is ridiculous on the face of it. ... nobody really knows how much gold there is. We do not know how much was looted by Spain from the New World, because once it reached Europe most of it was passed on to the great European banking families, the Fuggers and Welsers, who had financed the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Whatever the Fuggers and the Welsers did with that gold they kept very secret. We also have no way of knowing the actual wealth of families like the Krupps, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warburgs, or Rockefellers, except that they have been very rich for a very long time and their wealth is dispersed in a multitude of clever ways. A trillion dollars sounds like a lot, but economists tell us that today there is some $23-trillion in the hands of the well-heeled, much of it sleeping in offshore private accounts where banking secrecy and local laws keep these assets hidden from the tax-man, spouses, and clients. We know even less about the gold holdings of the great Asian and Middle Eastern dynastic families, trading networks, and underworld syndicates. Western tycoons may own banks and oil companies, and influence or control governments, but wealthy Asians never trusted governments or banks, preferring to keep their wealth in small gold or platinum bars, and gems. In China this absolute distrust goes back thousands of years. We can be sure that what was tucked under the rug in Asia over 2,000 years is far more than what has been deposited in U.S. and European banks since Western banking (and the gold market as we know it) came into existence barely three centuries ago. The U.S. Government refuses to disclose how much gold it holds, and the last public audit of Ft. Knox was in the early 1950's. In short, gold is one of the world's biggest secrets." [p 9-10]

An excellent read and a real eye opener!

Yen Carry Trade: Dire Threat or Poltergeist?

Is there something somewhere on the net that explains in a schematic fashion just how Japan deals with these surpluses? It is my view that despite the fact that they've been running surpluses for decades the old saw that "Things that can't go on forever, don't go on forever" must eventually blow up the currency pressure cooker that is the yen.

I've read a lot of "revisionist" history about Japan and it seems to me that "smoke and mirrors" is a way of life for government officials over there. It also appears that deflationary policies are a deliberate means of dealing with a yen that wants to go up because of economic forces and foreign pressure while still maintaining their sacred surplus.

Your thoughts? Links?

Charlie Munger's Lollapalooza Effect and This Credit Fiasco

The cycle of financial scandal:

After the horse is stolen, lock the barn door.

A few years later, after everybody's forgotten the theft, remove the lock.

Repeat.

All the recent scandals (S&L, Enron, Subprime) involve repealing or circumventing regulations designed to prevent them--usually politicians responding to special interest cash but sometimes financial innovation provides a way around existing regulations. These things don't have to happen, they are all variations on themes that go back into the mists of history.

The ratings agencies conflict of interest deserves more attention in the media. Maybe litigation can accomplish what public opinion can't?