Steve Bull's Blog, page 209
July 22, 2022
#235. The affordability crisis
What might be called the ‘consensus narrative of the moment’ is that our near-term economic prospects depend on the ability of central banks to tame inflation without tipping the economy into a severe recession. There are numerous complications, of course, but this is the gist of the story.
What these officials need to find, we’re told, are Goldilocks interest rates (‘not too hot, not too cold’), and all will be well if they succeed. If they err too far in one direction, inflation will run higher, and for longer, than is comfortable. If they lean too far the other way, a serious (though, by definition, a time-limited) recession will ensue.
Inflation itself, the narrative runs, has been the product of bad luck. First came the pandemic crisis, which impaired production capacity and severed supply-chains. Before we’d finished dealing with this, along came the war in Ukraine, disrupting supplies of energy, food and other commodities. There are some who add, sotto voce, that we might have overdone pandemic-era stimulus somewhat.
Our hardships, then, can be put down to a run of bad luck. Those in charge know what they’re doing.
It’s conceded, in some quarters, that we might face some sort of crisis if these challenges aren’t managed adroitly. This, though, shouldn’t be as bad as the GFC of 2008-09, and certainly won’t be existential.
We’re navigating choppy waters, then – not going over Niagara in a barrel.
The affordability reality
There is some truth in each of these propositions, but explanation in none.
What we’re really encountering now is an affordability crisis. The aim here is to explain this, without going into too much detail, and with data confined to two sets of SEEDS-derived charts at the end of this discussion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory
In my last post I speculated that covid was a plan orchestrated by the heads of the important central banks to provide cover for printing a gazillion dollars to head off an imminent economic collapse, and to implement tools like digital currencies and lockdown mechanisms that will be useful for maintaining social order when money printing eventually fails and the economy collapses.
In that post I asked the key question:
What force is powerful enough to synchronize senior leaders in most countries to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?
I stated that those of us paying attention and not listening to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense.
Here is a brief summary of the covid facts and actions that do not make sense and that together suggest there is an objective other than public health in play:
no investigation or consequences for China and it’s Wuhan lab that engineered the virusno investigation or consequences for the funders of the Wuhan lab workFauci kept in the most powerful healthcare position in the world, despite his involvement in funding the virus research and the subsequent coverupno gain of function research policy changes to prevent a recurrenceno consequences for grossly incompetent WHO policies that encouraged global spread of the virus in the early dayssuspiciously short and record time to develop a novel vaccine technologyall 4 vaccine manufacturers use the same (probably bad idea) mRNA codesuspicious vaccine patent historyprobable fraudulent vaccine approval process and attempt to hide it for 75 yearsinsufficient testing to determine mRNA longevity and locations of activity in the bodywillingness to rapidly deploy a novel insufficiently tested vaccine technology to billions at low risk from the disease including pregnant women…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
By wis.dom project: Regress in Progress: Who is responsible?
Dire Evolutionary Timeline by BluThis is an essay from reader wis.dom project who describes his painful personal journey of connecting dots to achieve awareness of our overshoot predicament.
I was born in 1969, at a time when everything still seemed possible. On July 20, two people walked on the moon, which is probably the greatest technological achievement of man to this day. In my youth, I devoured novels by Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Dick and Herbert. The galaxy’s colonization seemed within reach.
45 years later, I realized that I was a victim of mass hypnosis, what I refer to today as techno-utopia – a belief in the limitless human development, genius and almost divine uniqueness of Homo Sapiens. I realized that industrial civilization, like any other dissipative structure, is doomed to inevitable collapse.
In 1972 – 3 years after my birth, a book titled The Limits to Growth was released by the Club of Rome. It was the first scientifically compiled report analyzing future scenarios for humanity. It indicated that unlimited development is not possible on a finite planet. The book was published in 30 million copies and was one of the most popular at the time. Surprisingly, despite the wide range of my readings, the book did not appear on my horizon for a long time. As if it was covered by another intellectual “Säuberung”. In fact, it was the subject of an intellectual blitzkrieg and relatively quickly evaporated from the media circulation. I experienced this myself by talking to several university professors. Every one of them dismissed the LtG concept with a shrug and an unequivocal, non-debatable conclusion that the theory had long been discredited.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Anthropocene is a Joke
Stuart Gleave / GettyTHE ANTHROPOCENE IS A JOKEOn geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.
Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.
These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.
So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In Ukraine, a proxy war on the planet
As the Ukraine crisis causes global havoc, US officials won’t negotiate with Russia to end the fighting — and are even willing to “countenance” mounting hunger as a result.
(Marine Corps Cpl. Jailine Alicea-Santiago / media.defense.gov)In 2015, one year after a US-backed coup ushered in a US-friendly, far-right-dominated government in Kiev, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer issued a stark warning. “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,” he said. “And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”
Mearsheimer’s cause for concern was what he identified as a US-led campaign to convert Ukraine into a NATO proxy on Russia’s border. The events since have proved him to be both tragically prescient, and understated.
In using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there”, as Adam Schiff put it in January 2020, the US has not only sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives. Four months into Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration is signaling its willingness to sacrifice the rest of the planet, particularly the most vulnerable areas.
In an article headlined “Ukraine War Pushes Millions of the World’s Poorest Toward Starvation,” the Wall Street Journal summarizes the impact of the Ukraine war on global hunger:
The World Food Program says that increases in the cost of food and fuel since March have pushed an additional 47 million people into acute food insecurity, when a person is no longer able to consume enough calories to sustain her life and livelihood, taking the total to 345 million people world-wide. Of those, some 50 million are living on the edge of famine.
In the energy crisis that has followed Russia’s invasion, the New York Times adds, “the poorest and most vulnerable” have felt “the harshest effects.” In Asia and Africa, the International Energy Agency recently warned that “higher energy prices have meant an additional 90 million people in Asia and Africa do not have access to electricity.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
July 21, 2022
Global Water Scarcity on Schedule
A new study by the University of Colorado Boulder published on “One Earth” cites water scarcity as the top threat to food security in the next 20 years. “Multiple events occurring at the same time compound the problem,” the study noted, citing droughts, floods, heat waves, pest outbreaks, diseases, and financial and political conflicts. Over 50% of those experiencing food insecurity live in conflict regions, and increasing political instability and civil unrest will cause this figure to rise. Various agencies such as the World Bank and United Nations have cited that food insecurity reached record levels in 2021 and has increased in 2022. However, one aspect that is not often discussed is water.
Humans can survive longer without food than water. Without water, there are no crops or cattle. Other studies point to increasing global demand for water as well. A 2019 study, “Reassessing the projections of the World Water Development Report,” found that water demand increased 600% over the past century.
“Global water demand for all uses, presently about 4,600 km3 per year, will increase by 20% to 30% by 2050, up to 5,500 to 6,000 km3 per year. Global water demand for agriculture will increase by 60% by 2025. By 2050 the global population will increase to between 9.4 to 10.2 billion people, an increment of 22% to 32%.”
Agricultural needs represent 70% of water demand. The poorest nations often have less access to clean water, and these are the same areas where the population is expected to rise. The aforementioned study also states that food demand will increase by 60% by 2050.
Our model projected entering another “grand minimum,” which overtook the sun beginning in 2020 and will last through the 2050s. This will result in diminished magnetism, infrequent sunspot production, and less ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth. We are facing a global cooling period on the planet that may span 31 to 43 years. It is interesting that these studies are pointing to 2050 as the point where water will become extremely scarce as it aligns with our models’ projection for the weather as we will then enter a new sunspot cycle.
What Is The “Council For Inclusive Capitalism?” It’s The New World Order
The idea that there is an agenda for global government among the financial and political elites of the world has long been called a “conspiracy theory” within the mainstream and the establishment media. And sadly, even when you can convince people to look at and accept the evidence that banking institutions and certain politicians work together for their own purposes, many folks will STILL not entertain the notion that the ultimate goal of these power mongers is one-world empire. They just can’t wrap their heads around such a thing.
People will say that the establishment is driven by greed alone and that their associations are fragile and based only on individual self interest. They will say that crisis events and shifts in social and political trends are random, not the product of deliberate engineering. They will say that elitists will never be able to work together because they are too narcissistic, etc.
All of these arguments are a coping mechanism for the public to deal with evidence they cannot otherwise refute. When the facts become concrete and the powers-that-be admit to their schemes openly, some people will revert to confused denial. They don’t want to believe that organized evil on such a scale could actually exist. If it did, then everything they thought they knew about the world might be wrong.
For many years the agenda for global governance was only whispered about within elitist circles, but every once in a while one of them would speak aloud in public about it. Perhaps out of arrogance or perhaps because they felt the time was right to ease the populace into accepting the possibility. Whenever they did mention it, they called it the “New World Order.”…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Those who the gods wish to destroy…
The UK is already in a de facto recession – only the fiddling of the data to count GP appointments as a value-adding activity led to a paltry 0.5 percent GDP growth in May. Discretionary spending has already plummeted, and it is only a matter of time before we see widespread business failures and debt defaults. Indeed, this is likely to be one reason why Britain is experiencing a wave of strikes – provoking a strike to save on energy costs and the wage bill was a common response to inflation in the 1970s and is likely to be one of the few similarities today (the big difference being that we no longer have nationalised industries, so nobody is going to give in to workers’ demands).
Internationally, there is a global dollar shortage – which the Federal Reserve is exacerbating – which threatens a sovereign debt implosion beginning with developing economies dependent upon a single commodity for foreign exchange, but eventually dragging down any economy which trades in dollars… which brings us to the ill-advised sanctions salad imposed on Russia and China in response to the war in Ukraine. This has brought forward the establishment of an alternative BRICS currency system which will cover around a third of global trade, and in the process crush the economies of Europe. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Russia seems to be finally responding by halting its supply of gas to Europe, causing capital flight and industrial closures – including of the wind turbine industry which is supposed to save the day – across the continent.
In Britain, the “curse of oil” means that the unfolding collapse will be all the harder – since the 1980s, Britain’s neoliberal governments have used oil and gas revenues to underwrite the explosion of debt – and profits for the few – generated in the City of London…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Exclusive: Saudi Arabia doubles second-quarter Russian fuel oil imports for power generation
People walk near power plant number 10 at Saudi Electricity Company’s Central Operation Area, south of Riyadh, April 27, 2012./File Photo
SummaryThis includes content produced in Russia, where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine.Kingdom burns Russian fuel to free up crude for exportsBiden travels to ask Riyadh for more oilRussia raises supply to Asia, Africa amid Western sanctionsMOSCOW/LONDON/DUBAI, July 15 (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, more than doubled the amount of Russian fuel oil it imported in the second quarter to feed power stations to meet summer cooling demand and free up the kingdom’s own crude for export, data showed and traders said.
Russia has been selling fuel at discounted prices after international sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine left it with fewer buyers. Moscow calls the war in Ukraine a “special military operation”.
The increased sales of fuel oil, used in power generation, to Saudi Arabia show the challenge that U.S. President Joe Biden faces as his administration seeks to isolate Russia and cut its energy export revenues.
While many countries have banned or discouraged purchases from Russia, China, India and several African and Middle Eastern nations have increased imports.
Biden was on Friday visiting Saudi Arabia and was expected to seek an increase in oil supply to global markets from the kingdom to help to lower oil prices that have aggravated inflation worldwide. read more
There is little spare capacity for Saudi and others to increase production in the short term. Saudi Arabia has also maintained its cooperation with Russia in the alliance of global producers known as OPEC+. The two are the de facto leaders of respectively OPEC and non-OPEC producers in that group.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
July 20, 2022
Energy consultancy keeps lowering worldwide recoverable oil resources
It’s hard to say that three years makes a trend. But one of the world’s major energy consulting firms has lowered its estimate of world oil reserves for three years in a row now.
Rystad Energy provides a publicly available analysis of world oil reserves each year. In 2020 Rystad wrote that “the world’s recoverable oil [dropped] by around 282 billion barrels.” That represented a 12.9 percent decline in just one year. In 2021 the firm stated its analysis showed that recoverable resources declined by another 178 billion barrels or about 9.4 percent. Rystad said the decline was due in part to new modelling based on resources “at well level rather than field level.” The closer Rystad looked, the less oil there seemed to be.
In 2022 Rystad noted yet another decline of almost 9 percent in its press release headline. Recoverable oil resources dropped another 152 billion barrels. (For all estimates Rystad uses figures for crude oil and lease condensate which is the accepted definition of oil.)
With estimated recoverable resources standing at 1.572 trillion barrels, there is no seeming immediate threat to oil supplies. But the trend, should it continue, would be troublesome. There is a lot to look at “under the hood” of these estimates. Rystad reduces its broad 2022 estimate to an amount it believes could be produced profitably if oil is around $50, namely 1.2 trillion barrels. Price always matters when talking about recoverable resources. Higher prices, of course, make harder-to-get resources more likely to be profitable.
Rystad notes the lowering of investment in oil exploration as one of the culprits. This drop has been driven by the uncertainties surrounding the pandemic and a world about to be ever more stringent regarding fossil fuel emissions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
