Forecast for 2008

      For the tiny fraction of people who actually pay attention to real events -- those, for instance, who know the difference between Narnia and Kandahar -- the final hours of 2007 leading into the fog-shrouded abyss of 2008 must induce great racking shudders of nausea. Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.

      The inertia holding everything together that I described in last year's forecast finally melted away at mid-summer and events began spooling out of control. Specifically, the massive tonnage of debt-backed securities circulating through the financial sector stood revealed for the mostly worthless bales of paper they truly are, and the investment community was left suspended in mid-air, grinning unconvincingly, like Wile E. Coyote thirteen yards beyond the edge of the mesa, with a sputtering grenade in each hand and an anvil tied to his ankles.

     The whole second half of 2007 in the ranks of finance was a desperate rear-guard action to stave off the inevitable work-out. The fiasco over at Bear Stearns was instructive. Not long after two of their hedge funds blew up in August, the company announced that the funds had been chartered in the Cayman Islands and were therefore beyond the reach of official US legal machinery -- meaning, forget about lawsuits, you losers, chumps, and suckers who bought into our jerry-rigged scams... submit your complaints to the Tough Noogies desk and begone with you! This dodge might have benefited Bear Stearns in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to see why anybody would ever after cast one red cent in Bear Stearns' direction (in the life of this universe or several like it).

     The summer's blow-ups were followed by truckloads, boatloads, and helicopter loads of rescue "liquidity" delivered through autumn by the Federal Reserve and other central banks in a continuing effort to allow investment houses, mortgage originators, reinsurance firms, and other companies trafficking in suspect paper to avoid declaring greater losses. Then the foreign sovereign wealth funds jumped in with five billion here, ten billion there, coming away with big chunks of ownership, but of what? Of companies with liabilities in excess of assets? Mostly, these desperation moves worked to paper over virtual bankruptcy through the crucial Christmas holiday, when yearly bonuses are doled out, which spared the boards of directors from having to explain why executives were lined up at the loading docks filling their Lincoln Navigators with stupid dope piles and knots of the shareholders' loot.

    On the ground out in the heartland, in the anxiety-drenched, over-valued beige subdivisions of California and the ennui-saturated pastel McHousing tracts of Florida (not to mention the pathetic vinyl outlands of Cleveland and Detroit) a mighty keening welled forth as mortgage rates adjusted upward, and loans stopped "performing," and "for sale" signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with the rolls of yellow foreclosure tape, and actual ownership of the re-poed collateral entered a legal twilight zone somewhere north of the Florida State Teacher's Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils' investment portfolios. What a mighty goddam mess was left out there by the boyz at the Wall Street genius desks, who engineered a magical system for eliminating risk from the capital markets -- only to see it leak back in from a million holes and seams and collapse the greatest bubble ever blown.

     In the background, the US dollar sank to record lows against the euro and the pound sterling, the price of oil jumped 56 percent across the year just grazing the $100-a-barrel mark, drought punished the American southeast and Australia's grain belt, floods ravaged Texas and England, the polar ice shrank dramatically, but the US escaped any major hurricane action for a second year in a row.

    Except for the murder of Mrs. Bhutto just a few days ago, the international scene was supernaturally quiet. Even Iraq fell into a torpor, variously attributed to utter exhaustion among the warring factions or to the US troop "surge" under general Petreus. Iran got a surprise clean bill-of-health on its nuclear bomb-making activity from America's own investigators, to the consternation of Mr. Bush & Co. The non-human denizens of Planet Earth didn't have such a good year. Honeybees, Yangtze river dolphins, and house sparrows took big hits, and Al Gore went up another suit size (as well as winning part of the Nobel Prize for his Powerpoint show). Which brings us finally to the heart of the matter: what's coming down the pike starting tomorrow, January 1, 2008?

   

Down and Dirty
    I shudder to imagine how things will play out now as we turn the corner into 2008. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my little walnut brain can't imagine any scenario in which the US economy doesn't end up on a gurney in history's emergency room. It's not necessary to rehash the particulars of the Greenspan bubble-blowing disaster. The outcome is what concerns us. The web cables have been blazing for months with arguments as to what form the workout will take. There's little disagreement about the fundamentals at the housing end of things.

      The housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually, the median price of a house will have to fall back to the median income, and it has a very long way to go, perhaps 50 percent. Until that happens, houses will be generally unsellable. At the same time, of course, an anxious finance sector will be offering fewer mortgages and on much more rigorous terms, so there will be far fewer qualified buyers even for distress sales. And the median income itself may soon not be what it has been. The whole equation has changed. As the painful re-pricing process plays out, many owners/sellers will be upside-down and under water in what they owe on the mortgage in relation to the value of the house they occupy. Quite a few may have lost jobs and incomes along the way. Most of these unfortunates would be better off just mailing in the keys and walking away. But in so far as these awful liabilities are peoples' homes, full of all their stuff and their childrens' stuff, not to mention being the repository of all their previously-imagined wealth, as well as their hopes and dreams, walking away is psychologically more easily said than done.

      Surely in this election year, schemes will be advanced to bail out these poor suckers. But the beneficiaries of such a putative bail out would be far outnumbered by the home-owners still making mortgage payments, plus property taxes jacked up during the recent orgy by greedy public officials, and I don't think this majority would stand for the unfairness of seeing their neighbors simply let off the hook on their obligations. Perhaps the one thing that congress could do is change the insane law that treats foreclosures like some kind of bizzaro capital gain and piles additional huge tax demands on people who can no longer afford to buy their kids a frozen burrito. The issue of what to do about the dispossessed will be so politically red-hot that it could upset the election process --but I get a bit ahead of myself.

     One thing the public doesn't get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle -- it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won't be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America's dwindling manufacturing economy. This stratagem ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil, which not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital.
     But to return to my point, something like 40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion -- everything from the excavators to the framers to the sheet-rockers, and then the providers of granite countertops, the sellers of appliances and furnishings, and cars to service the far-out new subdivisions, and so on. This is the end, therefore, not only of the production "home-builders," but perhaps everything from Crate and Barrel to WalMart, too, eventually.

    By the way, the housing collapse was only one phase of a more generalized real estate debacle, because the commercial side of the business has also begun a nauseating slide into non-performance and equity destruction. In other words, we built way too many strip malls, power centers, and office parks. God knows what will happen to the owners of these white elephants, or the mortgage and lien holders of these things -- but as one wag remarked to me some years ago as we both gazed upon a forlorn abandoned strip mall outside of Tulsa, "...we don't need that many evangelical roller rinks...."

     What happens out there on the housing market scene will certainly redound in banking and finance and whatever still constitutes the US economy generally. The fears and uncertainties surrounding all credit-backed tradable securities derive first from the millions of troubled home mortgages dangling slowly in the wind. These fears and uncertainties will multiply as defaults commence in commercial real estate, and desperate individuals next enter a wave of credit card default, all of it, too, securitized and sprinkled all over the world. None of this stuff has yet been priced into the public disclosures of the many troubled banks and bank-like companies holding it. Nor does anyone really know how this is affecting the hedge funds, and their staggering leveraged positions in things that are looking more and more like quicksand. I can't imagine that quite a few major banks will not collapse in the first half of 2008. It is hard to escape the conclusion that many hedge funds will also blow up, given the unsoundness of their counter-parties' positions, not to mention the frailty of the bond reinsurers. But the death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system -- meaning a period of destructive chaos followed by a set of severely different institutional arrangements, with untold loss of imagined capital wealth along the way and big changes in everyday life. The world has never really been in a situation like this before and it is impossible to say what it might lead to. But there is no doubt that the American public has enjoyed an artificially high standard of living in relation to the value of what we actually produce -- fried chicken, hair extensions, and the Flaver Flav Show -- so the conclusion is pretty self-evident.

     Others have said (and I concur) that 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the "modern" way-of-life. There is every reason to believe that the world has arrived at its all-time oil production peak -- and some statisticians would even pin-point the exact moment as July 2006. Since then a few new and crucial story-lines have emerged to allow us to understand what is happening out there on the world oil scene.

     One story-line is that only "demand destruction" among the world's poorest nations has kept the oil markets functioning "normally" among the OECD nations and the rising Asian players. Even so, oil priced in US dollars more than doubled in 2007. It remains to be seen whether demand destruction in a wobbling US economy -- with the suburban builders crippled -- will keep oil prices from jumping into the uncharted territory beyond $100-a-barrel. But two other forces are in operation now.

     One is the growing oil export problem, soon to be a crisis. It now appears that exports, in nations with surplus oil to sell, are going down at an even steeper rate than production declines.  Why?  They are using more of their own oil.  The population is growing robustly.  The Saudi Arabians are building the world’s largest aluminum smelter and many chemical factories. This takes a lot of oil. Russia, another big exporter, saw its car sales jump by 50 percent in 2007.  Mexico is depleting so rapidly, and using so much more of its own oil, that it might be out of the export game altogether in three years. That will be bad news for the US, since Mexico is tied with Saudi Arabia as America's number two leading source of oil imports. Remember, the US now imports close to three-quarters of all the oil we use.

      The second new factor on the Peak oil scene is "oil nationalism." It is prompting countries like Norway and Russia to husband more of their own resources as the awareness hits that they are past peak and might want to keep their own motors humming further into the future. Oil surplus nations are also trending more toward selling their oil on the basis of long-term contracts with favored customers rather than just auctioning the stuff off on the futures market. This makes oil a much more important element in geopolitical power politics. Note that the US may not enjoy "favored customer" standing among many of these nations.

      Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, predicted at a major conference in October that the US is much closer to encountering a problem with chronic spot shortages of oil (and gasoline, of course) than the public realizes, and Simmons says that this supply problem will be extremely disruptive in every imaginable way -- economically, politically, and socially. Most of the commentators I take seriously see the price of oil oscillating in 2008 between $80 and $160-a-barrel. Simmons says Americans will keep sucking up the price increases, but they will probably freak out over spot shortages.

     I have no idea how presidential election politics will play out in 2008. It must be obvious that so many nasty pitfalls lie out there in the months ahead that something's got to shake up the current scripted mummery among the contenders. The current batch of candidates will soon find their story-lines and pre-cooked messages out-of-date as the nation faces crises in finance and energy (at least). Given the uneventful geopolitical scene of the past 18 months (since the Hezbollah-Israel War and up to the murder of Mrs. Bhutto in Pakistan), odds are that the US will have more rather than less trouble from the rest of the world in 2008-- especially if our own financial recklessness trips up the global economy.

     Back in the early days of George W. Bush, even before 9/11, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return as the Emperor Bill the First. The joke doesn't seem so funny anymore with Hillary off and running. I never liked the way she muscled her way into a US senate seat -- sending the message, in essence, that there was not one genuine New York resident qualified for the job. But there is so much more about her I dislike now, starting with her presumption of dynastic entitlement to the annoyingly phony way she nods her head (like one of those old "drinky-bird" toys) to put across the idea that she is a fabulous "listener." I write this a few days before the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primary. New York's Mayor Bloomberg is suddenly making noises again about entering the race as an independent. That might lead to a situation as fractured as the one in 1860 that saw a multi-party scuffle send Lincoln into office (or the election of 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt made a credible run on the independent Bull Moose line). At the moment, I'd like to see both John Edwards and Barack Obama roll on. The mere thought of a president Huckabee gives me the chilblains, and the rest of the Republican pack I would not want to have as my county supervisor.

     In any case, whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck. In the immortal words of TV's erstwhile "Mr. T," I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess. There will be a whole continent full of bankrupt, re-poed, and idle former WalMart shoppers, many of them with half of their skin tattooed and many of that bunch all revved up to "roll heavy and gun up" against the folks who screwed them.

      Which leads me to my penultimate observation of the moment: 2008 will be the year that celebrity wealth goes into hiding. A land full of people crying into their foreclosure notices will take a dim view of the Donald Trumps and P. Diddys luxuriating out there and may come looking for scalps -- though in the case of Mr. Trump they'll be sorry they woke up the wolverine that lives on his head. Basically, though, I'm not kidding. Conspicuous displays of wealth will be so "out" that Mr. Diddy might take to club-hopping in a 1999 Mazda. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have to double-up living in a minuteman missile silo to keep the angry mobs of fans-turned-vengeful-berserkers away.

     Okay, my final comment. After being chastised endlessly about mis-calling the DOW in 2006 (I said 4000), I have learned my lesson about making numerical predictions for the stock markets. So let's just say there is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over. That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.
 

 

Comments

[Dave]

yeah dale, like doom sez, fuck off. besides i'm tired hitting myself with this brick, maybe i'll try a rock. they're usually a little harder.

[thal]

Doom,

I'm starting to buy into dave's logic about keeping a brick at hand whenever I get the urge to answer a certain idgit. I composed, but did not post, five of them yesterday. Reading Scott's, Nudge's, and yours, I came to the conclusion that yours were better written anyway.

Got brick?

[ethanol4u,gas4me]

"I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess..." Isn't that the truth.

BIS warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/06/25/cncredit125.xml
So economic malaise is at the doorstep. Will the vinyl house masses hoist up JHK as the great seer? Will his friend who called him crazy now hold him in great regard? In a word... no.

Enjoy the bubbly.

[Dr.Doom]

Dave, thal, I recommend a sample of Colorado oil shale, the rock the burns, as most appropos for head wacking.

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

JHK thought his Christmas was bad since G thinks he's crazy. Well, yeah, I can sympathize, but Robert Schoff *really* had a bad Xmess Eve:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22399164/?gt1=10645

[dale]

Dr Doom,
It must be tough, being one of your students, having to deal with someone who's ego is so outsized he considers himself able to forecast the future of mankind. That sort of thinking is only possible in the cloistered little world of academia, enjoy your isolation. Clearly, you have a lot more to lose than I, if any of your babbling comes true.

We've already heard your prediction, "end of society" by 2012 wasn't it? Damn.....wish I could trust you, I'd make a bet, easiest money I'd ever make.

[Dave]

hey laughing,

pretty good. we spend a lot of time talking about shit around here, especially soluable fish. he's very anal, in more ways than one, if you know what i mean.

[Dave]

dale,

i keep telling you, it's easy.

joohn rhee, would you hand me my brick please, thank you.

[Dave]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=u2LvZd_9aMU

my new years resolution is to stop watching utube reruns of gg allin on jerry springer. the only condition is that SF has to quit along with me. you know he can't, at least not cold turkey.

[Dave]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aQej27tSpY0&feature=related

i have it on good authority that the big guy in the blue shirt is named dale. just sayin'.

[mark]

Jim,

I never miss a Monday morning peek at your comments. I have more than once yelled “right on.” Thanks for all your efforts through the years to help the rest of us think about some unthinkable things.

I’m beginning to feel (not think, because I’m not that smart) that 2008 will be a quiet year, at least in comparison to what is likely to follow. With some new oil production scheduled and an election year I believe the PTB will try to keep things smooth and the populace comatose. The housing mess and collapsing credit bubble will be handled by the central bankers the world over. Lies will grow more desperate from those charged with feeding us more and more pabulum, most will not notice. It really doesn’t matter who is selected to assume the despots chair, events will soon overpower him/her. The price of oil is no consequence as most people only know the price of gas. Around here (Chicago) we’ve had the highest prices in the US, couldn’t tell from the traffic.

Everything must come crashing down eventually and I expect one ‘black swan’ event or a series of smaller events to throw the PTB a curve they can’t hit. Of course no one will be prepared. Or, I’m wrong about it all and somehow the society at large finds a way to deal with our multiply problems and we skate through again. Possible, but not something to bet on.

Given your well known aversion to conspiracies I offer up one more thought with reservation. Many times I’ve said to myself, “can’t they see what they’re doing.” I can’t come up with a reasonable excuse for some of the obviously stupid things Greenspan, and now Bernanke, have done. If they are not the stupidest bunch of morons to walk the planet then maybe this really is a setup. If the largest economy in the world that use 25% of the world’s resources were to suddenly go belly up, that sure would reduce demand for everything. And, give the world more time to develop alternatives to oil, coal and gas.

Please keep writing, I really enjoy what you say and the way you say it.

[Dave]

still prefer boxing to ultimate fighting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRZWMF430NQ&NR=1

[Dave]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt60kHTUji4

i just never liked ground fighting myself, always wanted to stay on my feet. maybe that's my bias.

nothing beats a gg allin show, booyah!

[Dave]

bas rutten, old school.

please note, very few ground techniques, avoid being on the ground. you can't react to what's going on around you. like when it's time to run away and shit.

my own rule, don't fuck with the guy with a gun. you might be forced into it, don't know.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=D3K-mrlYG7Y

[Dave]

And, give the world more time to develop alternatives to oil, coal and gas.

keep dreaming.

[Dave]

knives are a very deadly and effective weapon. better(?) than a gun in close quarters, imho as always.

[Holmes, I presume]

http://www.iuj.ac.jp/media/stokes/goethe.htm

“In our time Goethe is especially noted for recognizing the dehumanizing demands of the industrial epoch, particularly the demand for specialization, and for successfully meeting them without forfeiting his humanity. He was able to do so largely through the synthesizing power of his intellect and his great personal candor.”

***

“As determinism ceases to characterize science, however, it is finding greater tolerance for a Goethean world in which all phenomena tend to merge.”
------------------

XER, poetry and science happily coexist and collaborate in quite a few minds (IMHFO).

dave, pass the brick.

Happy New Year!

[Dave]

knives are good things to have.

[Dave]

holmes,

you seem to have both the intellect and, uh, what's the word? sensibility? to understand the phenominal(right word?) viewpoint. you should study. maybe? back into it.

jensen (i think you started in the wrong place with him.)

niel everndon

john livingston

david abrams

you might enjoy.

dave

[Dave]

i'm off, into the night.

[Mark]

JHK often talks about how clueless Americans are regarding topics such as peak oil etc. (and I heartily agree). Well here's an example I heard on NPR: The folks who make flat screen TVs couldn't understand why up to 20%(!)of HDTV sets sold are returned for refunds by unhappy customers. Why? Up to 40% of buyers were completely unaware that you have to have an HD signal to get HD performance! In other words they had no idea how the technology works and that without a digital HD signal the sets are no better (actually worse) than a good old CRT. 30% of buyers didn't realize that you not only had to have cable but digital cable as well. So, Americans are plopping down upwards to three large for giant sets that they have basically no understanding of how they work. And like babies bring them back demanding their money back. And we expect the nation to "get" what is coming down the road? Oy!

[Holmes, I presume]

Dave, thanks for the reading list... you know that I will look these up.

From the woods to blogging to into the night he goes... godspeed Jung fellow.

Of course, as I've said before, the trusty ball penn hammer -- I've got one in a holster mounted to the side of the computer monitor -- remains (still after all these years) fresh and as relevant as ever in the Ongoing Self-Administration of Induced Cranial Trauma Qua Idiocy Tsunami Relief Effort.

[Scorpio]

C'mon. Ever since New York elected Bobby Kennedy as the "third Senator from Massachusetts" it has been evident that New York voters are notoriety sluts. They will elect anything with a name.

Hil just took advantage of their well-known proclivity.

[Chris Rich.]

Jim, I figure this flailing mess is toast. I live in Bedford Mass, an old revolution town where you can walk to Boston in 2 hours but it is still a congested wreck. I hate cars. I have never owned one and barely know how to drive.

The fossil fuel era was a bridge point to something better and there are amazing sustainability options everywhere. It will be the new wealth maker, bridging us out of fossil fuel and restoring a human scale.

McLuhan hated cars. He was very wise in describing the amputations that tech imposes. Most of the SUV Bloat Mobiles I see here are driven by neurotic, fearful trophy wives who want a lot of metal between them and everyone else.

Moron American women decide most purchases in a household and are actually the most powerful force in environmental degradation.

They need perfect energy wasting climate control to walk around their McMansions in tight flimsy outfits as imaginary supermodels when no one is looking or cares.

If we are going to move toward a sustainable world, and I think it will be inexorable given what we CAN do, the first order of biz is convincing airhead American women to get on board. Their manipulated boob companions who want to validate themselves by getting laid will follow.

The nation has amazing women like Susan Faludi or Juliet Schor but they are atypical. How do we get the vaginal shock troops of planetary destruction to stop being idiots? The men will follow.

[ethanol4u,gas4me]

Homles quotes "In our time Goethe is especially noted for recognizing the dehumanizing demands of the industrial epoch, particularly the demand for specialization, and for successfully meeting them without forfeiting his humanity..."

The downslope will be more dehumanizing than the upslope. Unless of course you're camped out in the middle of nowhere fantisizing about guns and knives. In that case in might be a very liberating experience. What say you Davle?