I've been closely watching the Latoc "financial Doom"thread; there seems to be some financial wizards there; or at least they talk a great game. those members post a good selection of doomy news articles and blogs from around the world. After reading"tomorrow will be a -2000,-3000 day" almost every day since the begning of this mess I have to reach the same conclusions Ran reaches below... (i.e.The "system" though demonstrateably built like a house of cards seems to be rather resilient.)And we maynot see a defining moment of tshtf.) Some Ran prieur recently postedon latoc: http://www.ranprieur.com/ October 23. There was a decent Archdruid post yesterday about how we mistake short term trends for long term trends, and both optimists and "pessimists" do it. I put that in quotes because I've learned that people who predict catastrophe are not actually pessimists, or even forecasters, but entertainers. For almost ten years I've been reading daily predictions of a hard crash. I made many of them myself, and in some ways we were right: oil production peaked, gas prices went way up, the housing bubble popped, the stock market tumbled, and banks failed. But find me a single person who said that after all that stuff happens, daily life will still be almost the same. There is no kind of non-fiction writing more difficult than predicting the future. But if you're serious about it, then when you get something wrong, you will look at your underlying models, find the source of your mistake, and change it. I first saw the mistake three years ago when Katrina shut down gulf oil production and crippled America's biggest port city, and the only effect noticeable to most Americans was a 20% rise in gas prices. The message has been repeated with every crisis since then: the system is not a house of cards. It is tough and resilient and can absorb huge blows and keep going. And when we add that to our model, it tells us that future hard blows will also not bring it all down. Of course, if you were in New Orleans, or in a collapsed financial company, then you experienced a fast local crash. And we could always get a physical global catastrophe, like a nuclear war or an Anoxic event - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/Filecean_currents_1911.jpg" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Ocean_currents_1911.jpg/200px-Ocean_currents_1911.jpg"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/7/7c/Ocean_currents_1911.jpg/200px-Ocean_currents_1911.jpg. And the big systems are going to have to adapt to resource depletion, climate change, and the impossibility of perpetual economic growth. But people who continue to predict a hard crash just around the corner strike me as bad magicians: "The rabbit will come out of the hat NOW... ok... NOW... wait... NOW... no, I really mean it this time... NOW..." And in twenty years they will look back, view the ten thousand background changes as a single foreground change, and say, "Look, I was right!"
I think the reason that the dire (but expected) results in the DJIA haven't occurred is that Hank Paulson is day-trading with our tax money. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. However, should BHO be elected, watch the wreck speed up...
Worse than that by far..... The Ship of State has been hijacked by looney bin escapees, the experienced crew locked in the bilges, and a mindless narcissistic minor Party functionary from a failing city suddenly given the Captain's hat..... We don't need an iceberg to sink this scow......
