Recent events in Mumbai serve as a reminder, lest there was any doubt at this point, how fragile the world economy has become. The virtual center of globalization, Mumbai serves as call-center central for many of the world’s large companies. If stock traders are paying attention, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the major stock indices shed a quarter of their so-called “value” this week.
It seems I’ve touched a nerve. Maybe a couple of them.
As I indicated in my previous post, we’ve reached the end of economic growth. I pointed to the Financial Times article that leaked the results of the International Energy Agency’s long-awaited study of the depletion rates of the world’s 400 largest oil fields. The bottom line: “Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent.”
Change has arrived. After all the hate-filled, mudslinging nastiness, after soaring rhetoric and hollow promises, after lies, rumor, and innuendo, after poor predictions and poorer behavior, change has finally arrived.
Guest post by Emmanuela Mujica
I have new vision of the United States. I call it “Bucket-head Nation.” My inspiration came from a humorous scene in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Encounters at the End of the World. The scene portrays students in an Antarctic survival class wearing buckets on their heads to simulate the zero-visibility, white-noise conditions of the Antarctic tundra. The leader of the bucket-heads had the objective of leading the other bucket-heads to a location specified by the instructor. They failed this task twice because the leader of the bucket-heads misguided them. The scene ends with a shot of the disgruntled bucket-heads in a confused, clustered entanglement. Sound familiar?
Here’s an interesting story, if only to me. I submitted the piece below as a guest commentary (i.e., op-ed piece) to the morning daily in this benighted town.
The editors found it absurd, as expected. Actually, the editor who responded wrote, “there are many facts and statements in your article that appear to be wildly exaggerated” (exaggerated facts?), and asked for evidence to support a few of the statements. So I provided him a handful of links from the mainstream media, at which point he ran away. No great surprise there, I suppose. If you’re addicted to economic growth, as required by newspapers, the truth is damned inconvenient.