SUBHEAD: "Ding Ding! - Margin Call USA". Reality is about to bite us in the ass.
By James Kunstler on 31 December 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2019-ding-ding-margin-call-usa/)
Image above: The Greenleaf subdivision near Dawsonville Georgia was abandoned several years ago after it was found to be at the center of a mortgage fraud scheme. The developers knew the project was doomed from the start, as there were no public sewer lines anywhere in the area they could hook up to, and the lots were too small for septic tanks.From (https://imgur.com/gallery/G6SIf).
[IB Publisher's note: Two books published in 2005 transformed my understanding of the real world. The books were Jared Diamond's "Collapse" and James Kunstler's "The Long Emergency".Both identified the mortality and suicidal tendencies of human civilization. Together they provoked a reevaluation of my understanding of how the world works and our future in it. I am indebted to their clear thinking. Over time I came to personally know Kunstler. My wife Linda and I visited him twice in upstate New York. I even worked briefly with his agent on a movie proposal for his novel "World Made By Hand" (2008) that describes the unwinding and aftermath of a collapse of America as we know it. Over subsequent years we have kept in touch. I realized our thinking was wandering apart over our differences of opinion about the TV series "Treme" that premiered in 2010. "Treme" follows the lives of people in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Many of the primary characters were black and/or female. Kunstler could not "get" the show at all. He could not getr through half the premier episode because it seemed to him incoherent and foreign - a zombie apocalypse. Since then I have come to realize Kunstler holds a resentment that many white male Baby-Boomers about increasing emergence of women and black people into positions of American privileges. Did they earn it? Did George Bush? Anyway, with that caution in mind I continue to read Kunstler with a bit of caution. I think he is still spot-on in his understanding of money and energy - the grease on the gears of Western Civilization. This post is an excerpt from his predictions for 2019, hopefully less the white male screed. Happy New Year!]
Markets and Money
The jig is really up. The big bad bear market is already underway, even if it rallies in January. The debt bubble engineered by the Federal Reserve is blowing up and thundering through the system.
The epic market instability of December 2018 on the heels of persistent Fed rate hikes points to major credit problems and especially an inability to roll over old debt into new loans at higher interest rates — in particular loans to zombie enterprises that need to borrow to keep paying interest on previous loans (a lot of that among the shale oil companies).
The US government can’t take higher interest rates either. It’s already paying about as much in annual interest on US debt as we pay for our war machine. There are only two ways out, both of them nasty.
Either suck up debt defaults, which will induce an impoverishing disappearance of money; or provoke high inflation, by injecting more Central Bank QE “money” into the system, which can destroy the value of money.
Inflation is typically the choice of governments because it reduces the face value of debts while it allows government to pretend that it is taking action.
In the end, you may have plenty of worthless money, which is no different from having not enough money that retains value. The latter was the main feature of the Great Depression.
So, inflation is the usual choice, but it also typically leads to incendiary resentment among the citizenry when they realize they’ve been played and it takes a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.
I suppose that Fed chief Jerome Powell knows all too well he’s popped the Mother-of-All-Bubbles. He can blame it on Mr. Trump. Everybody else will, of course.
Sometime in the second quarter of 2019, the Fed will resume the money-for-nothing gambit of “quantitative easing” in the hope of arresting the damage, but this time the dollar will lose value uncontrollably and catastrophically. Many people will be ruined, especially retirees at the mercy of insolvent pension funds.
Before 2019 is out, the US could find itself in a situation worse than the Great Depression. Supply lines are much longer now than they were then.
If suppliers can’t get paid because trust has collapsed in the short-term corporate paper system, they won’t deliver supplies, which means you may not eat, or fill your gas tank, or heat your house, or get whatever else you need.
Also, the USA in 1931 had not yet transformed itself into the fiasco-waiting-to-happen called suburban sprawl. How is Dallas going to work for people who spend a substantial chunk of their income on mandatory motoring (if there’s little or no income)?
Stock market activity may appear to stabilize in January, but it will go south again later on in the first quarter and the Bear will growl louder for the rest of the year.
Civil Disorder
Be prepared for it in 2019. There are going to be a lot of pissed-off people around the country. They are liable to attack Federal property and their fellow citizens (and their property).
The hungrier they are, the worse it will be. They will not understand the forces that are destroying the money system.
There are a gazillion small arms out there and the government will not be able to control them or confiscate them. Any attempt to do that will only inflame the situation.
A major principle of
The Long Emergency is that government becomes increasingly impotent and ineffectual as it rolls out. We’re already seeing that in Washington, and it is not at all just because Mr. Trump has inspired such an impasse between the branches. The states, too, will be hard-pressed to do anything useful.
Many of them, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, are already technically insolvent. The federal government may have to pretend to rescue them financially, which will only make the national predicament worse.
Oil
The shale oil “miracle” was an impressive stunt. For a while, it goosed US production way above the former all-time production peak of 1970, and it achieved that with astounding speed — about a decade. But this is oil that is very expensive and complex to produce. It was made possible by massive borrowing at artificial low interest rates, which are now rising.
Something like three-quarters of the shale operators never made a red cent in net profit, and many of these companies will find it hard or impossible to roll over their existing debt, especially with oil under $50-a-barrel.
But the price is a deceptive metric. If it zoomed up to $100-a-barrel tomorrow, the effect would only be to crush economic activity, because industry requires cheaper oil to pencil out its operations and citizens can barely afford to drive when gasoline hits $4-a-gallon at the pump.
At the lower $45-a-barrel, the price crushes the oil producers. Take your pick. There’s no “Goldilocks” price.
The other problems with shale oil have to do with the nature of the shale plays. The Permian Basin in Texas is very large, but the best plays are developed in the so-called “sweet spots” and there’s a limited amount of them.
They are the places that the producers developed first, and when they are played out, the next round of plays will be in spots not-so-sweet (or productive) — possibly not worth drilling. The character of the shale oil wells is also way different from the old conventional classic oil wells. The old wells cost about $400,000 (in current dollars). It involved just sinking a pipe into the permeable source rock.
The oil came out under its own pressure at the rate of thousands of barrels a day. Eventually, you put a simple pump-jack on the well (the “nodding donkey”) and it produced for decades, like running a cash register. Shale oil wells cost between $6- 12 million.
They require technically demanding horizontal drilling and fracking, with additional costs in highly technical labor, water for fracking, sand to hold open the fracks, chemicals to aid the process, and a gazillion truck trips to deliver all the water and sand (and take the oil away).
Shale wells produce maybe a few hundred barrels a day for one year, after which they typically deplete by over 60 percent.
After four years, they’re done. The oil is also different. Shale oil is typically ultra-light. It contains little-to-none of the heavier diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, and heating oil distillates, making it less valuable.
Trouble in the credit markets could shut down shale production for a period of time and create dire problems for the American economy. That could happen in 2019 as poorer-performing companies fail to get new financing.
As mighty as it seems to be, the industry is fraught with fragility.
Meanwhile, discovery of new, producible oil has fallen to the lowest level since the 1940s, after three recent previous record low years. Current low oil prices at around $45-a-barrel may give Americans a false sense of security.
Low prices are mostly indicative of the collapse of the demand for oil at the global margins and among the large US demographic that cannot afford it anymore — that is, the impoverished former middle class.
As the damage becomes more obvious, we could hear calls to nationalize the oil industry. The attempt to do that would collide with the aforementioned trend for government to become more strapped for revenue, more impotent, and more incompetent.
Geopolitical
The Golden Golem has gone an extra mile to antagonize Russia the past two years. Is it to demonstrate how
not Putin’s puppet he is? If so, it’s pathetic.
For instance, heaping ever more sanctions on Russia, tossing Russian diplomatic staff out of the country because of the laughable Novichok poisoning of the Skripal father-and-daughter in Britain. Nobody believed that set up — who recovers from the world’s supposedly most potent, high-tech military toxin?
The larger Russia hysteria, ginned up by the US “Intel Community” to cover the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton’s election loss, has destroyed the brains of thousands of Washington insiders and infected whole sectors of the educated coastal elites who really ought to know better.
Meddling in elections? Is that something the US has never entertained?
Recall that 1996
Time Magazine cover with the headline that bragged, “Yanks to the Rescue: the Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.”
And now we’re wetting our pants over a baker’s dozen Russian Internet trolls on Facebook?
Yes, this is what
the brightest people in the room have been doing for two years. The net result is a new cold war, pushing Russia into the arms of China, giving both of those countries an incentive to construct a new framework for global relations that excludes the toxic US as much as possible.
That new framework, by the way, will not be the same as the late, unwinding Globalism Release 2.0 (Release 1.0 was 1870 – 1914) that allowed America to exchange IOUs for flatscreen TVs lo these many years. Let’s call that Tom Friedman Globalism, after the pundit who said it would last forever.
The world will become a wider place again as the Great Powers are increasingly bound to their own regions for trade relations in a world growing short of energy and capital resources. The exception to that is in weaponry, now that Russia has demonstrated its ability to launch hypersonic rockets that can reach the US in little more than a few Noo Yawk minutes.
Do we have anything like that?
I suppose we wish we did. The media is not even talking about it, the implications are so dreadful.
Has Mr. Trump actually accomplished anything with his deal-seeking in China while beating it on the snout with his tariff stick?
Well, he got a lot of US companies loading up on inventory of goods they feared will carry costly duties a year hence, so they’re all stocked up just in time for a vicious bear market and the recession / depression that it entails. A lot of that stuff may end up being distributed by the bankruptcy judges.
How does our antagonism against China work with the campaign to “normalize” the behavior of North Korea. I doubt it helps. In 2019, North Korea will be the whoopie cushion that China places under America’s seat at the negotiating table.
Mr. Trump defied the conventional State Department wisdom by meeting face-to-face with Kim. It got the two Koreas actually speaking with each other for the first time in 60 years, with some concrete steps toward ending the de facto state-of-war.
Will Li’l Kim play the role China assigns to him? I think so. They can squash him like bug. And, of course, everything that the US congress and Mr. Mueller do to injure and weaken Mr. Trump will make further progress in Korea unlikely.
How about the second greatest economy in the world? That would be the European Union.
The EU’s financial system is way more dysfunctional than even ours, with no mechanism or provision for regulating each country’s spending vis-à-vis the debt generation of the Union as a whole.
There’s no way it can continue and no prospect for debugging the set-up. What’s more, decades-long shenanigans of the European Central Bank have created imbalances that will never be corrected.
Even the attempt to normalize operations — as the ECB ceases its debt monetization routines starting in the first quarter of 2019 — is guaranteed to crack up the EU economy, which is a horror show of zombie companies and zombie banks. They will suffer particularly in the recession / depression to come.
The next domino to fall, theoretically Italy, will take the EU down, whatever happens with the dithering over Brexit. Without the ECB vacuuming up unwanted EU paper, nothing really pencils out over there. In 2019, expect a substantial fall in the value of the Euro, and possibly its demise as a currency.
In fact, expect wholesale disintegration of many structural arrangements all over Europe beginning in 2019, along with more political violence that exceeds the simple street actions of the Yellow Vests in France.
NATO has been staging war games on Russia’s border for two years, apparently with no awareness that the NATO members are deeply dependent on Russian oil and natural gas to remain advanced nations with comforts and conveniences, like heating their homes. Perhaps that recognition will hit in 2019. But there will be plenty of noise for that signal to cut through.
Climate Change
Something’s going on ‘out there’ though the picture is deeply non-linear and is being confused for the moment by an extraordinary low level of cyclical sunspot activity. Not being a scientist, I have only two salient points worth considering about the issue:
The first is, we’re not going to do anything about it — because nothing can be done about it. Whatever’s happening, we’re going to have to roll with it. I’m also not persuaded that many of the proposed mitigations — carbon taxes, seeding the upper atmosphere with reflective particles — will accomplish anything.
The second thought is this: the civilized world has experienced many many instances of climate change over the past several thousand years. Civilizations rise and fall with these changes, but the human project as a more general matter continues, with periods of history that appear to be restful time-outs.
The Roman Optimum (warming period) segued into the Dark Age Cooling, and then the Medieval Warming (viniculture in England!), and eventually the Little Ice Age comes along with Isaac Newton and skaters on the Dutch canals.
The difference this time is that our civilization is so deeply complex that successful adaptation to new conditions is a low percentage outcome, at least in the form of salvaging many of our current arrangements.
In other climate disruptions, people adapted, sometimes with very severe changes in customs, practices, political arrangements, and life-styles.
It will be especially stark this time, and the broad pop culture of
Collapse suggests that we intuit this — everything from
Game of Thrones to
The Road, to my own
World Made By Hand novels.
It begins with the wobbling of the most abstract and fragile of our systemic arrangements, finance, which is mostly based on ephemeral trust (that the other fellow will pay you).
From there, the trouble proceeds to politics and culture.
[IB Publisher's postscript: And that is the most optimistic view possible. I personally think we are closer to extinction than that. As a reminder see this 2011 "Scientific American" article One Time Through the Bottleneck - "Almost 200,000 years ago humans faced extinction. Only a few hundred were saved along the coast of Cape Horn"]. Happy New Year!
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