[gold_dredger_phd]

The value of your gold is whatever the government says it is when they find it. First you have to prove to them that you did not get it from selling crystal meth.

[gold_dredger_phd]

Lindi is right. If oil became more expensive, we would have spent the money on finding a replacement. They do exist. Why doesn’t every home in CA have solar panels?

{Solar power right now is a boondoggle. Too expensive compared to coal, hydropower, wind power, natural gas and nuclear. If you think it’s such a good idea, then go out and buy these solar panels yourself. Sunlight only provides 1.5kW per square meter under the best of conditions and if your panel is 10% efficient, then you can make 150 watts while the sun shines! Woo-woo!

Oil is becoming more expensive.

There is no “collective we”. }

Trade is important, as each country has unique resources and skills. However, our government leaders have allowed big business and their Fed member banks most likely, to profit at the expense of the American worker and our future productivity.

[Business exists to make a profit as does everyone who gets a job and goes to work. Businesses exist to make money, not provide jobs. Providing jobs for people is just a means to an end which is *to make money*.

Fortunately, our government leaders have been smart enough not to interfere with private business to the extent that people still have jobs in this country. Otherwise this place would be like Germany where they have 10% unemployment and the government there pays generously for people not to work. ]

When we started moving our manufacturing off-shore, there should have been a move to replace auto and textile manufacturing with something else: better farming, pharmaceuticals, engines, alternative energy. Instead, they just went for cheaper goods from overseas. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no planning at all.

{Thank god that there was no planning at all! Why shouldn’t they move manufacturing off shore? No one in this pristine state of California wants a factory next to them since it would pollute the pristine air or view or reduce property values. Do you want to live next to a steel mill or a chemical plant? Probably not, so don’t complain.

You want the government to pick winning industries for the future to replace the textile mills?

Curse the people that shop at WalMart for wanting cheap goods. Their wages have been stagnant since the late 1970’s, so the only way they can maintain their standard of living is by paying less for things. }

Likewise,the entire development of our society with far-flung suburbs and millions of miles of freeways (just a guess) should have been recognized as unsustainable by the urban planners in the 1950’s and 1960s. Did they think that oil is the only resource on this planet that is in unlimited supply? Don’t get me started, I’m getting real pi**ed off at the way our elected officials have let this country go to pot.

{I guess you think that urban planners should be able to see into the future 50 years so that you would not get p*ssed off! They did not invent the crystal ball yet and as far as I know, it’s still in the future. Where would your have put people that want to live in the suburbs? In beehives in the city? Dormitories near their factories?

Elected officials can get elected. That is their qualification. What do you expect? If you don’t like their lack of omniscience, then run for office yourself. }

Corporations are just as bad. They use corporate bonds and their big profits from the recent liquidity boom to buy back stocks, so the stock price goes up. Then the insiders sell the stock at high prices, in anticipation of the decline which is coming. Not enough money is invested in the future of the company, in building it up. The money goes to elevate the share value for the insiders.

{Corporations exist to make money for their shareholders, in theory. In fact, corporations are run for the benefit of the upper management. Accept this fact of reality. With concentrated benefits to upper management and diffuse costs to shareholders, why shouldn’t management pay itself as much as possible?

You get all of your economic news from Mother Jones and Utne Reader. I suggest reading, “Where are the Customers’ Yachts” to find out how Wall Street works.

Corporations should return the excess cash to their shareholders, otherwise they just go one an empire-building spending spree. }

Then we’ve got the bubble in private equity funding. What value is created by that? Just as with free trade where we shift higher paid jobs to lower wage countries and don’t replace those jobs with anything at all, what good comes of it?

{It puts the UAW out of business permanently which is a service to this country. The UAW was run by communists in the 1930’s and the leadership learned much of their economics from the same place you obviously did. Maybe the federal government can make a “jobs bank” for them where they can get paid 95% of their working wages and read the paper.

If you are worried about all this “private equity funding” then have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act repealed. There would be little incentive to take companies private. }

If we really want to help the poor countries, we should teach them how to farm and manufacture. Maybe I’m just rambling…

{Who says we should help the poor countries? What did they do for us? We have enough debt without giving them free money! These people already know how to farm and manufacture, they just need the government there to guarantee private property rights, have an independent judiciary, and not interfere in the economy. They don’t need help from us. Banana republics are banana republics for a reason. Look at Iraq. }

{I’m done rambling if you are.}

[gold_dredger_phd]

Some of the people on this board must be communists.

Why do you believe in central planning? You seem to have faith that the government can predict oil prices and knows when to “invest” in alternative energy. Why should the government or anyone else have invested in alternative energy back in 1998 when oil was $10-12 per barrel? That’s the lowest price since the Great Depression.

The whole of the Soviet Union was about central planning and the place, despite having a wealth of natural resources, went bankrupt.

No one planned the cities and suburbs 50 or more years ago around the “end of cheap oil”! All they wanted to do was build houses for returning GI’s at prices ordinary people could afford. They weren’t worried that oil was going to run out in 100 years! This was a time when they had fantasies about nuclear powered cars and electricity that was “too cheap to meter” and other nonsense.

In 1968 Stanley Kubrik made the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” that showed an optimistic picture of a possible future. Men were going to go to the moon in the next year. It was only a natural extension of the current trends then to postulate moon bases in 2001.

Instead of that future imagined in 1968, the year 2001 gave us 9/11.

[gold_dredger_phd]

There’s no such thing as a “social cost.”

Social is a word that negates whatever term follows it and is used by leftists in politics and academia. Sorry, “leftists in politics and academia” are a complete redundancy.

Examples:
social security
social costs
social justice
social product
social democracy
social studies
social statistics
social republic
social solidarity

[gold_dredger_phd]

Your kids will have a Third World standard of living!
There will be inflation in commodities and the money supply, but no meaningful rise in wages for most people.

People in this country will have to learn to pick fruits and vegetables like they did in the 1930’s in California since those will be some of the jobs available during the Greater Depression.

I know a guy that sleeps in the laundry room of a house that he owns. He’s renting out the available rooms just to make the mortgage payment. He makes over $100K per year at his day job.

How’s that for living standards in today’s California?

[gold_dredger_phd]

The US dollar is just paper, like toilet paper. They can print $100 bills for 4 cents at the Treasury or mint or wherever they “make” money. It’s all phoney, just like the statistics given out by the government, professional wrestling, sit-coms and much of the news we see on TV.

Buy gold or silver and store it for a rainy day as insurance. Make sure it’s in a place where the government won’t look for it.

[gold_dredger_phd]

If you’re so against free trade or don’t understand why it’s such a good thing, then why don’t we just prohibit the importing of oil into this country as well? That would allow the domestic producers to charge $200 per barrel of oil and help bail out our domestic oil industry. Who needs cheap crude from Canada, Russia, the Middle East or Venezuela? We need to keep our money at home.

We could save all of our domestic industries this way and even save the UAW’s job bank at the big three auto companies. I love the idea of auto workers having jobs for life, even if they don’t have to work on the assembly line! Driving around in shodily-built, union-bum mobiles from the early 1970’s makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside. These guys had an entitlement mentality and were able to extort white-collar wages from the manufacturers. The manufacturers had a huge fixed cost in plants and other capital-intensive equipment that could not be moved to Mexico, the South or offshore and would just acquiese to get some labor peace. They raised their prices to cover the cost simply because at that time the US had about 50% of the world’s manufacturing capability and little of the world’s populace.

Another factor that led to this unusual prosperity was that about 3 billion people were mired in socialist/communist utopias and so would never be able to compete with the capitalist world. That era has been ending since 1980 up to the present time. Everyone in Asia wants your job or at least your money. They need it more than you. If you want more money, then go get a second job, get your wife a second job or go mortgage your house again.

I agree that the people in the US will have a lower standard of living than we would otherwise had these people in the former communist countries, China, India and other former socialist countries not cast aside their irrational economic policies. The 1950’s are over. Forever. Get used to it. Free trade or Fortress America, the American century is over.

[gold_dredger_phd]

I don’t understand why this idiot doesn’t rent out the two remaining rooms in his house and get *any* job. He’s a big man and could get a job as a security guard or something. It’s not like he has to please his wife or worry about rooms for the kids or pets. He could probably get $500-600 per month per room renting. Then half of his mortgage would be paid for. It never seems to occur to these people to get a job.

He’s like that guy from, “Iamfacingforeclosure.com” who always ignores any advice to get a job. I guess they consider themselves too clever to get a job to pay the bills. What a total loser.

I love the fact that he invested in “dot-com” stocks and then commodities. Looks like he caught the tail end of each of those trends just like the housing trend. People like this should not own houses anyway.

[gold_dredger_phd]

Dream on. People can switch to electric cars and there will always be automobiles. One of the first things that poor people in Third World countries do when they have enough money is they go and buy a car. It might only be a few thousand dollars, but they can offset that expense by giving rides to hitchhikers for money.

I’ve been to third world countries and if they can switch from gasoline to cheaper, for them, fuels (propane, butane), then so can we.

If you want an intelligent discussion about this topic and not some Doomsday (wishful leftist thinking) scenario, then read, “The Methanol Economy” written by George Olah, et al. He discusses Peak Oil, methanol, ethanol, hydrogen and other fuel alternatives to oil.

No one is going back to the horse, bicycles or Conestoga wagons. Sorry to pop your bubble. This sounds like another James Howard Kunstler fantasy. He’s also predicting a massive die-off of humans.

[gold_dredger_phd]

Falling interest rates, speculation, and the total abandonment of lending standards has caused the price to balloon. If interest rates on mortgages were 8%, do you think that these houses would have high prices? The Fed panicked and lowered interest rates to obscene levels that were not justified.

Plus, the bank of Japan has been flooding the world with cheap money to avoid deflation.

[gold_dredger_phd]

There was no change in the lease, number of people in the place or taking up smoking. The other apartments near there charge more than they do, so they probably thought it was time for an increase.

I think they only want dual income professionals living there.

It’s near a school and in a good school district, so they have families moving in. The houses around this area all have asking prices of at least 800K, so they feel they can justify the rent.

[gold_dredger_phd]

My rent was increased by 25% from last year. I live in Carmel Valley.

[gold_dredger_phd]

He should have written a self-help book, “Write and grow rich.”

If you don’t like your day job, become a self-help guru and attract a bunch of paying idiots.

[gold_dredger_phd]

Iraq is a multicultural society. Isn’t multiculturalism wonderful?

[gold_dredger_phd]

Get a foreign currency brokerage account through interactivebrokers.com and hold stocks that pay dividends in foreign currency. Euros/Canadian dollars/Swiss Francs, whatever. The Dow hardly went up this year when priced in Euros.

Your wages are denominated in dollars and so is everyone else’s in this area. Get foreign currency income and be partially insured against the dollar implosion.

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