"if you're looking for one overarching explanation for the still terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future ( and many have discovered that they don't need to buy a new car or stove every few years). both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse...the old consumer economy is gone and it is not coming back...if governments stop spending at the same time consumers do the economy can enter a vicious cycle as it did in hoover's day. the prospect of that cycle is one reason an impasse on the debt ceiling , and a governemnt default , could do so much damage."
n y times 7-17-2011
causality rarely supports "one overarching explanation" for anything...there are too many variables to account for in something so large and interconnected in so many unseen ways as the economy...i was never a big user of credit and i never used my home equity as an atm...i enter into cycles of debt only when absolutely necessary and i stay out of stores and banks...buy used books for school and for research...don't have cable or satellite tv or an i-pad or a smart phone...all of which marks me out as a very conservative spender... ( some would call it fucking cheap...but i am a child of children of the depression who preached "make do" and never really trusted the powers that be to be truthful...the appear to have been correct)...we are all more complex than we seem at first glance...glad to see so many coming around to my point of view...then again i miss the wasteland and my one concession to post-modernism's claptrap about defining things by what they are not...i have been on about smaller, more local economies for some time ( as the two or three of you who actually read this already know ) that is an idea whose time has come even if "the market" still believes in growth...i don't...in a finite world all true economies are a zero sum game...you cannot get more out of them that you put in...the rest is simply ponzi schemes that seemed real because of the two hundred year bubble of cheap fossil fuel...that is as dead as consumerism ( hence the reference in the time to rising gas prices...don't look for that to sustain any sort of long-term downward trend...ever. )..if you want to get grounded in the basis for this argument here's a short reading list .
powerdown, peak everything, and the end of growth by richard heinberg.
eaarth and deep economy by bill mickibben.
fleeing vesuvius edited by gillian fallon and richard dowthwaite ( it has a couple of articles by dimitry orlov who is a complete ass )
the post-carbon reader
and on the extremist end
the long emergency by james howard kunstler
endgame vols. 1 & 2 by derrick jensen
radical simplicity by jim merkle
it's entertaining to watch the stock market stutter and lurch ( yes i know i have a 401k) and listen to the bullshit posturing that comes out of the federal reserve, the treasury, the national bagnio, the oval orifice, and from business and economic departments at major universities around the country...all smoke and mirrors...policy is bankrupt and so is the government...have along hard look at greece and start brushing up your mandarin ( but don't use up too much time on it...the chinese run at the top is going to be a short one...you'll only need it for a decade, tops.) the governor of maryland says the republicans are playing politics with the debt-ceiling to undercut obamaland's chances at a second term...no shit sherlock...but then you are a member of the fraternity of the only real whores there are...you should understand these things.
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