My dad just e-mailed me to tell me that the shit will hit the fan tomorrow morning, economically anyway. Let’s see if he’s right.
What was the reason he gave you, Scout?
I was wondering when someone was going to start talking about this stuff. I’ve been on another primitivist sort of forum and, bafflingly, it hasn’t even gotten mentioned there.
There’s not going to be a total collapse this morning - it could happen pretty quickly, but not in one morning - but, there is going to be a lot of discomfort, or a lot of shit hitting the fan. A site I’ve been reading is here. And I’ve also been reading a lot. At least some people were considerate enough to put the knowledge of millennia of living with the land into books before civilization obsolesced it. It’d be nice if I’d been raised to have a working knowledge of how to subsist, but I’ll have to make do with what I can find in books. And experience. So far my experience consists of finding a few unripe hickory nuts. And, I’m officially off topic. So: big financial panic Monday. Then, stuff will start happening. A lot.
Edit: I got outposted with the LATOC link.
yeah, that’s the site i’ve been following too. in fact, that’s the link i posted. i just still have a hard time making my links clickable. ???
i too have noticed the lack of attention on other forums…
it’s kind of exciting though. i think this is it.
Looks like my question was answered… thanks.
I think I will take a walk in the sun tomorrow and find something to enjoy.
this will be interesting.
and i find that rewilding types are some of the people that want to acknowledge/talk about this the LEAST.
i am hoping we will pull together and start talking (moving through) about the grief we feel around collapse. kinda like joanna macy’s work.
eh, mostly, I’m just not sure what to say.
Surely we live unsustainably
Surely we’ll run out of resources
Surely that creates a lot of hardship for a lot of people
Surely we’ll all need to come to terms with living w/ less energy
Surely we’re better off if we choose that path before it’s made for us
Surely I have something more interesting/useful/pleasant to do…
Did the shtf this morning???
Let’s just say that the economy took another severe beating.
The exact ramifications will have to play out over the course of the next several months.
whoa! things are happening fast. they’re trying to inject some $700 billion into the financial system just so economic armageddon does not occur.
I’ve heard it’s worse than $700 billion… check out this article
What does this mean? What effect will this have on the populace? I’ve never been able to understand economics.
I’m with Blue on this one too
There’s a lot about modern economics I don’t understand, I’m not an economist, amateur or otherwise, but I’ve picked a few things over the course of understanding this whole “collapse” thing. In other words, don’t take the following as gospel, and certainly don’t think it’s complete!
The desired impact is to help stabilize the market by buying out some of the crap debt (I’ll expand on this a bit later) that the core financial movers & shakers are holding. The crap debt is actually so large, that even the more wealthy & prestigious market players are having difficulty keeping their corporate heads above water. Injecting $700 bn into these companies by removing some (or all) of that crap debt should return some confidence to the market and to lenders (more about this later too).
Now onto indirect impacts (aka so why the hell should a US taxpayer really care about the damn profiteering market players):
The first one is that since Wall Street is often an enabler for mid-size to larger companies, a bruised, battered and bleeding Wall Street means a handicapped corporate America. This in turn means slow to no growth (in some cases, possible negative growth), which as we all know is anathema to “business as usual” in any civilization. Slower growth (or no/negative growth) will lead to fewer jobs created, probable job loss (from lay offs), subsequent higher unemployment, slower economy (fewer people have jobs, so fewer people have money, so fewer people sell goods, so… you get the picture). This is more or less your typical death spiral scenario. This is the scenario that the $700 bn is trying to avoid.
The second one is “Who picks up the tab?”. That’s the US taxpayer. It’s the price of trying to keep a job. It will effectively weaken the US dollar even more (for those who haven’t been watching, the US dollar is already crap, with the $700 bn saddled on top of the debt we already have, now crap looks down on it).
Now, the practical offshoot of a weak dollar is that we now get to create a bunch of new jobs (mostly factory/industrial) to create products to sell overseas. Well, that and products from overseas will cost us a lot more money. In other words, if you’re in the US and there’s anything you’ve been wanting to buy from another country, do it now.
So, really, more than anything, for most US citizens, this is about jobs. For the elite few, it’s about getting a free “do over”.
Personally, I think we’d all be better off forming tribes and walking away, but… we’re still pretty early in the whole collapse timeline, so I’m not holding my breath.
*Crap debt, most of this crap debt is still fallout from subprime mortgages. Subprime mortgages are loans that should never have been made. The idea was to make a loan to a questionable applicant at fucking outrageous interest rates to offset the risk of making the loan to a questionable applicant. To a certain extent that makes fine mathematical sense, but it breaks down when you’re doing more subprime lending than your bank account can actually cover. Of course the situation is actually worse than this because lenders would then turn around and sell part of the subprime loan to other folks, so the whole piece of shit deal got completely spread around. Kind of like the flu.
**Re: market confidence & lender confidence, the whole global economy is a con(fidence) game. The vast majority of the whole deal is concerned with complete and utter intangibles. Right now we have the credit crunch because lenders don’t know who to trust to actually pay back loans. Since loans make this whole thing go 'round it’s wreaking additional havoc on the economy (and jobs) on top of the whole massive quantities of crap debt issue.
I just found this blog at NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/.
It might help make sense out of all this.
Wow, jhereg, that was an incredibly lucid explanation. Thank you.
What about land outside of the US? Does that count as a foreign “product”? (eww, gross, I know… but how would an economist see it?)
Thanks!
Wow, that’s a good question. I’m not sure, but I would guess that land would count as a foreign “product”. (I may need to shower when I get home.)
Our economics is based on a total fantasy. It is like building a house on mud or quicksand. Sooner or later it has to sink. This will not be easy for allot of people. Some years ago I campout allot with homeless people who lived near the beach. I was one of the homed. But I remember thinking then that these tough people were like human rats. They would be the ones that would survive
It is good that some of you are learning a simpler way to live, because if things go as they seem you will be the beginnings of the the afterculture.
I’ve been hearing about bank runs, work was eerily dead for a Friday(I wait tables), and my dad told me with grave concern when I spoke to him on the phone that this is going to be worse than anything he’s lived through in his 60 years (and he was drafted in the 'Nam). The Dow went down, despite all thoughts that it would prosper (relatively speaking, of course)
I have anticipation, mild excitement and extreme uncertainty. I have been expecting this, but have been hoping it could hold off for a couple more years, until I have $8,000-$12,000 in hard currency so I can finally buy some land in rural Nebraska and live free with my closest friends and my parents.
Shall we take bets on how long the economy’s stilts will hold up from here on now?