Depression Is Inevitable

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An economic depression the likes of which the world has not seen ... ever ... is headed our way. This will be an L-shaped economy, drudging along for the better part of a decade, wreaking havoc among the plans and dreams of people across the planet. Some areas are already depressed and will remain so for not less than five bitter, miserable, hungry, desperate years. Other areas will feel the heat, but life will go on. The total number of unemployed should reach 8.5% by July 1st, perhaps sooner. Ten percent, perhaps 12.5%, is not out of the question by July 2010. It is guaranteed that the total number of unemployed seeking work will exceed the highest number of unemployed at any time during the 1930's. The destruction of parts of the economy will be complete. There will be nothing left. The native American automobile industry will probably not survive and the two pillars, Honda and Toyota will be brought to their knees in North America and, yet, will probably survive. Yes, it's depressing! Banks will be nationalized before school is out in May. Emergency banking regulations will be ordered by the FED and FDIC. The stock market will impose emergency regulations goring the oxen of the "put" traders. There will be suicides (again). We will never, ever allow banking to regulate itself or for the markets to trade in risk dilution instruments. We have already left all the opportunities for "restoration" convulsing in the dust. There's no going back to the heady days of wine and roses. Consumerism is an academic subject now. The only route available ... (and that is not so clearly mapped that GPS is going to help much) ... is "reorganization." Whatever it turns out to be, it will be an international decision with some governments teetering on and over the brink. The geopolitical fortunes of this calamity are going to be dire. Iceland's and Latvia's governments have already fallen. Berlusconi's Italy will fulfill the Marxian dictum that "the first time is tragedy, the second time farce." But Italians and their friends will not be happy and tragedy lurks up every alleyway. We will read about Africa twenty years hence in horror at what will happen there in the next months and years under the dictatorships that will inevitably arise amid the economic chaos. South America will be not much better off. A third Russian Revolution will take out Vladimir Putin and much else. India will falter. China will falter. The United States will falter, and only great courage and an end to the Republican hate machine will bring surcease. That will not be easy and some people are going to get outrageously killed in Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Why is depression inevitable? The following is the thinking not of Marxist discontents, but of market analysts providing advice to their investment clients. It is the compilation and synthesis of several such analysts. The depression is inevitable because American debt now is on the order of $300 trillion and almost impossible to refinance. The alternative ... you guessed it ... default. All the wealth (admittedly a bubble of wealth) created since 1990 is gone. 100% gone! Understand that this has put a hurting on some people that they will never recover from. Household incomes at all levels are plunging or remaining static. Buying power, therefore, is eroding like levees in Louisiana. The two-thirds of the economy dependent on household spending is winding down like a mechanical monkey playing a tin drum. The TARP and the Stimulus are too little, too late, and too slow. 80% of the stimulus will not reach the economy until 2010. Confidence is eroding under the realization that the radical economists were right and the Republican conservatives and free-booting free-marketeers were utterly wrong. Government intervention is going to become increasingly expensive and challenge the courage of even liberals in Congress and in the administration. These are the reasons and they are indisputable. The DJIA will go below 5,500. Did I mention there will be more suicides? Elderly who have lost their nest eggs will choose to not go on. Financiers with a taste for deluxe will choose de revolver in the bedside table drawer. Industrialists will see their enterprises grind to sickening halts and decay; the human resources will dissipate and never to assemble again. Infrastructure will crumble faster than it can be saved as local economies grind to a sullen halt. Demand for goods that wear out will go unmet and eventually, despite what Dr. Krugman says, this demand will be replaced by more urgent needs, like nutrition. Pent up demand for consumer goods will rise initially and then fall back as we realize that the consumer society is dead. PT Cruisers are not the only commodity that will become collector's items. But, no one will think to preserve these machines-the vehicles of our petroleum addiction, which will linger like any other addiction in the background of our national psyche. The worst will be the shattered dreams and the dreams undreamt. Colleges and universities will strain at first to accept the rush of people who will take some time off to improve their chances in the next employment market. Schools will try, but their own funds are dropping off and endowments will beat an ugly path to 50% or less of peak value. Higher education will see a contraction greater than that of the 1980's. We could lose 500 colleges nationwide to insolvency. Public education will suffer and drop-out rates will skyrocket as children are put to work helping to keep food on the family table. Dreams of parents and teens to rise by force of intelligence, talent, and hard work will go aglimmering. The waste of human spirit during this time will be the greatest toll ... unless there is war ... and war is almost inevitable as countries descend into self-pitying bellicosity. War will exact a greater toll. Some few people will emerge a decade from now virtually unscathed. They will be the people whose footprint today is not deep or large. These will be the people who demand less of the world than they put into it. The next Earth will be a place where horror at all who starved will slowly give way to planet of tentative renewal and hope, but it will not be like it is now. We all have lessons to learn and habits to break and expectations to leave behind. JB