Dialectics of History

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Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

US Truck, Air, Rail freight all down 20% or more and still l

Post by Spiralman »

US Truck, Air, Rail freight all down 20% or more and still looking for bottom

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044499853045733.html
......
The Air Transport Association of America last week said U.S. air-cargo volumes had dropped 21% in February compared with a year ago. That was the seventh consecutive month of year-to-year declines.
.....
For the first two weeks of April, the U.S. railroad industry's car-load volumes were down more than 20%, compared with a 17.3% drop for the month of March and a 14.5% drop in February, according to the trade group Association of American Railroads.
......
http://fleetowner.com/management/trucki ... ndex1.html
.......

Truckload carriers have seen a 23.3% decline in freight, or "the largest six-month drop in tonnage since 1993," he said. By segment, flatbed carriers saw tonnage decline 30% from a peak in June, 2008, while dry van and tank carriers recorded 25% and 27% drops respectively from peak levels. "And it's affected all lengths of hauls – short, medium and long," according to White.
.......
[
These are leading indicators of the economy. If things aren’t being trucked, trained, or flown around as much, then that means households and businesses aren’t buying as much, which then means workers will be furloughed, wage reduced, or laid off, which in turn means a lot less driving to work and shopping.

Obviously, these figures also imply a radical decline in oil consumption and therefore emissions. Presumably, also by 20% or more. And this will show up as the year progresses and the speculative contracts for the hoarding of oil on tanker ships, called contango, expire and the oil gets added to an already glutted market.

As I have noted before, the Peak Credit Overproduction Crisis process we are seeing is Spike, Crash, Streamline, Replace.

We saw the Spike up to $147/barrel oil. This helped drive investments in Solar and Wind production capacity and innovations in manufacturing processes that are revealing themselves as radical reductions in the production price of solar panels. The Peak Credit/Overproduction Oil Spike spiked the ball of Solar Power over the net of Grid Parity. In addition, it Spiked over the net, electric hybrid cars and trucks. The new Prius and the others from Honda, Ford, etc. will all cost $20K or less.

We are now witnessing the Crash of demand, driven by Debt Deflation. I fully expected demand for energy to drop by 25% to 50% during this phase. The shipping data above certainly indicates that the higher end of the collapse is now much more likely.

The Spike triggered a dramatic shift that will shape the post-Crash future.

The resulting Crash and Streamlining phases are irreversibly destroying demand for Coal, Oil, Nukes, and Gas.
The rising insecurity of investors of those sectors will ensure that insufficient capital is allocated to CONG, so that not only will solar and wind be ready to carry everything forward after the crash, but the CONG will be unable to ramp up quickly and sufficiently since their investors have to assume more and more that the longterm prices under conditions of overproduction and debt deflation demand destruction will not justify the investment.

When even the most gas guzzling of all passenger vehicles, like GM’s Hummer will be getting 100mpg, when even the heaviest semi-trucks driven by the type of hard-edged working class folks who effete, Green, academic, latte-sipping snobs would least expect to be concerned about the environmental impacts are already deploying new drivetrains that cut diesel consumption by 30% to 50% so they can improve their profitability, when Walmart’s founder was the biggest investor in one of the biggest solar companies producing the cheapest solar panels (not to mention the fact that Walmart has already fielded hundreds of semi-trucks in collaboration with Peterbilt, Curtis and Eaton), it’s pretty clear that just about everything we read about climate change scientist’s projected impacts of Armageddon and the need for punitive, regressive Carbon taxes is completely irrelevant. An echo of an already vanishing era. Identical in form to the real estate houseflipping Ponzi or the stock Madoffs who still continue to claim that things will sharply rebound.........always in the next 6 months.

The eco-neurotic’s relentless claims that runaway carbon emissions are just around the corner sound very similar to the refrain that prosperity is just around the corner.

Ironically, those proclaiming an eventual return to economic growth have vastly more truth behind them than the eco-neurotic, who is blind to the phase change in pricing of solar and hybrids that the Peak Credit/Overproduction crisis brought into being.

Humanity will one day consume tens, hundreds or thousands of times as many joules of energy as it did at the Peak Credit moment in Summer of 2008, but it will never again consume them at that level in the form of hydrocarbons.
]

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Deadly outbreak in Mexico caused by swine flu

Post by Spiralman »

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30386163/
......
Unique combo virus
CDC officials detected a virus with a unique combination of gene segments that have not been seen in people or pigs before. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.

Health officials have seen mixes of bird, pig and human virus before, but never such an intercontinental combination with more than one pig virus in the mix.

Scientists keep a close eye on flu viruses that emerge from pigs. The animals are considered particularly susceptible to both avian and human viruses and a likely place where the kind of genetic reassortment can take place that might lead to a new form of pandemic flu, said Dr. John Treanor, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

The virus may be something completely new, or it may have been around for a while but was only detected now because of improved lab testing and disease surveillance, CDC officials said.

The virus was first detected in two children in southern California — a 10-year-old boy in San Diego County and a 9-year-old girl in neighboring Imperial County.

The cases were detected under unusual circumstances. One was seen at a Navy clinic that participates in a specialized disease detection network, and the other was caught through a specialized surveillance system set up in border communities, CDC officials said.
.....
It's also not known if the seasonal flu vaccine that Americans got last fall and early this year protects against this type of virus. People should wash their hands and take other customary precautions, CDC officials said.
[Get your flu vaccine shots anyways.]


Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

US Puts Turkey in Charge of anti-Somali Piracy Operations

Post by Spiralman »

Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 25817.html
......
In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
.......
Below is from a liberal American website:
Moving Beyond Black and White on the [Turkish] Armenian Genocide
It's time to ask what outside resolutions are doing to further the conversation in Turkey over recognizing the Armenian genocide.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?art ... n_genocide

[
It is becoming more and more clear that President Obama’s historic address to the Turkish Parliament a few weeks ago, the first time an American President has ever addressed a Muslim Parliament) signifies a clearcut policy of making Turkey the Eurasian anchor of the Sunni Muslim world, including restoring Turkey to its Ottoman historic role as ruler over the Arab world. Also very importantly, Turkey will also serve as an alternative magnetic pole for the oil/gas-containing Central Asian Turkic speaking nations (Turkmenistan, Turkestan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan) to be attracted away from Russian and Chinese influence.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_off ... arliament/

In effect, because of its disappointments with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the rapidly rising risk of Pakistan’s collapse and the spread of Islamic revolution, the US is implementing a fallback strategy. It is now beginning to outsource operational military control and diplomatic intercession (although not strategic control) over much of the Sunni Islamic Petrol-containing world to Turkey.

Maximal historic extent of Ottoman Empire
Image
Image
I believe the other key US fallback anchors for operational control over the Islamic world will be:

* Indonesia in the Pacific (Obama grew up there)
* Libya in Africa (US under Bush kissed and made up with Khaddafi, and now he is President of African Union)
* Iraq for Arab Shias throughout the Gulf (When Saudi Arabia collapses, the Shia in the East who sit on most of the oil could join with Iraq)
* Iran (Israel will be forced to formalize the Palestinian Bantustan Plan whether or not they bomb Iran)
]

http://generationaldynamics.com/fg/f090425i.pdf (PDF File)

The Grey Badger
Posts: 176
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 11:50 pm

Re: NPR Conspires With Realtors to Fleece First Time Home Buyers

Post by The Grey Badger »

Everybody else is peddling bulshytt when it comes to markets of any kind - don't these people know that Main Street has stopped listening and doesn't believe a word anyone says on the subject? This makes that commentator on NPR (yes, I did hear it and dismissed it as more Establishment vaporware-peddling) just like everybody else I've ever heard on the subject.

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Deflation: Federal Reserve study puts ideal US interest rate

Post by Spiralman »

Deflation: Federal Reserve study puts ideal US interest rate at MINUS 5% & Are the Knives are Coming Out for Geithner?


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37877644-32c9 ... ck_check=1


Are the Knives are Coming Out for Geithner?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/04/ ... thner.html

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

GM to Become "Government Motors" (UAW-owned too) & Same for

Post by Spiralman »

GM to Become "Government Motors" (UAW-owned too) & Same for Chrysis-ler & Pension¹s Death Spiral & World Running out of Money


GM
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... otors.html

Chrysler
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/busin ... .html?_r=1

Pension’s Death Spiral
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... piral.html

Image

The capital well is running dry and some economies will wither

The world is running out of capital. We cannot take it for granted that the global bond markets will prove deep enough to fund the $6 trillion or so needed for the Obama fiscal package, US-European bank bail-outs, and ballooning deficits almost everywhere.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comm ... ither.html

[Once the next round of stock market crashes come, there will be some more funds for a few of the governments as folks flee again to the safety of US Treasuries and maybe a few others.

But it’s still pretty limited. IF the DOW drops by 6,000 points, from 8,000 down to 2,000, that would free up some portion of ~$9 Trillion as panic selling sets in. Maybe that yields $4 Trillion. And if it is multiplied by ~3 to cover the whole world, then there would be ~$12 Trillion to play with. And if the global real estate markets continue their accelerated crashes, then maybe that’s another $10 Trillion that could be salvaged and used to buy government bonds out of desperation and fear. Of course some of that will go to Gold.

So let’s say there would be about $25 Trillion for a few select State Capitalist governments around the world to work with to take over all of their key industries, etc.

But if a collapse occurred like that it would be coming along with cascading detonations of derivative obligations, etc with the resulting further collapses of trust, credit, shutdowns, furloughs, wage cuts, layoffs, etc, then there will be an even more massive need for government spending just to keep people in many countries from starving, being homeless or spreading disease, let alone the escalating security crises internally and internationally.

In effect, the only way for the governments to have access to enough money to deal with the crisis as they are currently planning is for the crisis to become deeper, which then intensifies the need for government funds. At some point, governments will have enough money to implement a much broader, some might say “totalitarian” or “socialist” but which I generically refer to as State Capitalist vision, but this will represent a real phase transition in the system, and will not be much of a continuity of what we are familiar.

It will also be highly unstable, and have an increasing tendency towards civil and international wars.

]

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

The death of the Asian development model vs. China Demand

Post by Spiralman »

The death of the Asian development model by Michael Pettis
http://mpettis.com/2009/04/the-death-of ... ent-model/

China Demand Means Asia Exporters May Be Past Worst

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... er=economy

[
This latter article is more empty happy talk, mistaking the smaller second derivative, ie slowing of the collapse, as being the bottom. It was after reading that, that I sought out Pettis’ site’s update, who has had a much clearer view of things than most.
]

Boomi21
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon May 10, 2010 12:55 am

Re: Dialectics of History

Post by Boomi21 »

I will read time to time that

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