After leaving the Bahamas for dead, Hurricane
Dorian barely grazed the US mainland en route to the Canadian shoals of
oblivion, perhaps saving America’s insurance industry. But the steamy west
coast of Africa is hurling out a cavalcade of replacements as the high season
for Atlantic storms commences, so better keep the plywood sheets at hand. Lots
of things are looking stormy around the world just now: nations, markets,
politics — everything really except all three divisions of the American League…
yawn….
The world is in a nervous place these days
The US is something like the world’s crazy old auntie, whom everyone else would
like to lock in the attic. Except she happens to be cradling a bazooka, so
they’ll go on trying to ignore her a while longer, hoping she doesn’t launch
any rockets at the neighbors.
Britain
courts chaos in its attempt to keep staving off the Brexit quandary, which
itself seems to promise a hearty dose of chaos as thousands of unresolved trade
issues threaten the country’s economic future walking out on Europe. The
majority who voted Brexit feel that the EU is already crushing them under
bureaucratic diktat and immigration quotas. New Prime Minister Bo-Jo has tried
one ploy after another in his quest to reach the Halloween Brexit ramp. Everyone
is ganging up on him, even his own brother, Jo Johnson, who has quit the
cabinet and is ditching his seat in parliament. Bo-Jo wants to call an election
because there is no one else to take his place, and many of those piling on him
also detest the opposition Labor Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Events are
outrunning anybody’s ability to see what happens next. Street violence is not
out of the question.
What’s at stake behind all the
pushing-and-shoving is the question of national sovereignty. Does it matter
anymore? I suspect it will matter increasingly for everyone in many nations,
and at a smaller and smaller scale of political divisions so that, for
instance, Great Britain itself will be faced with surrendering its dominion
over Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is churning in the zeitgeist now,
actually has been for some time since the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia cracked
up. Even the United States finds itself increasingly disunited and it’s not
inconceivable that before the century ends some regions may go their own way.
Texans have been talking it up for years, and California is already acting like
she’s started divorce proceedings.
China,
meanwhile, is whipping its quasi-vassal Hong Kong like a dog because Xi Jinping
is not in a position to bust Donald Trump upside the head and Xi’s got to take
it out on somebody.
Everything was looking so rosy for China as it burst out of its medieval cocoon
into industrial adulthood, and now Mr. Trump is ruining the global arrangements
that turned the sclerotic old outfit into a global super-dragon. They’ve had a
blast driving down the capitalist road — even if they’re actually ruled by
communists — but a storm of bad debt is coming up on them from behind, and if
it catches up, the joyride is over and some kind of dreadful crackup happens.
All
the abiding normality of the past seventy years is slipping away into flux.
Modernity is finally yielding – to what? Nobody knows. And nowhere is this more
obvious than in the realm of money and economy. Beyond all the other
quarrels of modern times — democracy versus communism, Islam versus the West,
the wealthy north versus the poor south — one thing remained pretty steady: the
flow of oil into the engines of economy. Turned out, the world didn’t have to
run out of oil for that normality to fray badly; the oil just had to become
marginally unaffordable, and voila!
It’s hard for people to grok, especially here in the USA with oil production so
far above the old 1970 prior peak that the proposition seems absurd.
But it is so. The companies chasing shale oil
have done it on tons of borrowed money, and now having demonstrated that it’s
not a profitable business, investors have soured on them and they can’t get new
loans. A contagion of bankruptcies is underway among them and it’s going to get
worse because the business model for shale oil is a joke.
But the business model for the nations
of the world is also a joke: borrow as much as you can from your own future and
pray for a happy ending. It is driving the whole world insane. It’s exactly why
people in the USA think it’s a good idea for trannies with arrest records to
read stories to six-year-olds. These delusions and the financial head trips
that spawn them will also get worse as the nations of the world go deeper into
the alternative universe of zero-interest financing and Ponzi pretense. Without
that cheap oil, growth is impossible, and without growth, crackup is
inevitable.