Brett Jordaan writes: What politicians and central bankers around the world are either neglecting to tell us, or to consider, is that the current economic crisis, now a global recession and fast becoming a depression, is a result of a fundamental structural shift in the very makeup of the world economy. The credit crisis is widely accepted as the trigger for the current economic woes, but those who take a broad view of the world will see that our current predicament was actually years in the making, and ultimately, inevitable. As inevitable as the collapse of a house of cards, or the implosion of a Ponzi scheme. In fact, the global monetary system actually fits the description of a Ponzi scheme.
The irony is that as the Fed (US Federal Reserve) prints ever greater sums of money (most notably recently through “quantitative easing”), China will be left sitting on a pile of steadily declining Dollars as the inevitable devaluation that results from oversupply of money takes hold.
China knows this and this is why it has been making calls for a new international reserve currency and has tripled its gold reserves in 8 years.
Now the engine of growth in the US and the West has seized, as the housing bubble continues its inevitable collapse and consumers logically reduce their spending to rational levels. People are actually saving, as the light of sanity shines some truth on the utter lunacy of continual throwaway consumerism.
Unfortunately it seems that sanity is incompatible with running a government and economy nowadays. The solution to our problem trumpeted by the US and other governments is…. More DEBT! Yes, we must borrow and spend our way out of this mess they say. Oh, and if we cannot borrow at a national level (because other countries are seriously starting to doubt lending us money), we’ll print more money to magically create wealth and go back to the good old days of borrowing to buy a lot of junk we just don’t need
Now I find it very difficult to believe that Nobel prize-winning economists and the brilliant central bankers are experiencing such tremendous cognitive dissonance, that they actually believe that the current system can continue, or in fact be rejuvenated by more of the actual causes of this crisis. More spending and more debt, to solve the problem of excessive spending and excessive debt.
Is it just me, or are we being taken for a ride? Are the people in control deliberately sending us headfirst into an economic and social catastrophe in order to gain more power and take more of our feeedoms, or are they so incompetent that they do not see the writing on the wall?
We are in a structural recession. The global economy is structurally adjusting into a more balanced and sustainable system, one driven by savings and production, not borrowing and debt. Savings will finance investment in production of goods and services that actually provide a benefit to society and the biosphere. We live in a world of finite resources. Continual population growth, consumption and environmental degradation are not compatible with this reality.
Any attempts to turn back the clock, to return to that hitherto unsustainable status quo will just cause this transition to be more painful. The excesses of the past are gone and those that realise this and adjust their lifestyles and paradigms, will be the pioneers of the new age to come. It seems that we cannot trust our leaders to solve this problem, it is up to each of us to have the courage to face change, and embrace the opportunity it brings.
