“We’re in a nasty environment,” said Tim Bond, the bank’s chief equity strategist. “There is an inflation shock underway. This is going to be very negative for financial assets. We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth.”
“This is the first test for central banks in 30 years and they have fluffed it. They have zero credibility, and the Fed is negative if that’s possible. It has lost all credibility,” said Mr Bond.
The bank said the full damage from the global banking crisis would take another year to unfold.
Meanwhile those who decided it was a good idea to run everything that runs on oil, continue to believe that the answer to our current problems is to simply drill for more oil. And, as they have been every inch of the ways -- they are wrong about that.. dead wrong:
Simmons says market forces driving crude to $600
Press/Journal/ UK. 1 July 2008: The chairman of energy investment-banking firm Simmons and Company International has predicted that oil prices could double or more within a few years.
Matt Simmons said that in his view oil was “dirt cheap at $140 a barrel”, and with supplies having peaked and demand growing prices were bound to go higher.
He said: “It is not beyond the pale of imagination to see oil at $300, $400, $500 or even $600 a barrel within a relatively short time, much less than 20 years. It is not speculators who are driving oil prices. It’s simply about supply and demand.”
So, what's it all mean to you and I? I have no idea. This is uncharted territory. Over the next five years we may see what happened to communism in 90s happen to capitalism. If so it will be the fault of those who allowed the gap between rich and working poor expand into a yawning chasm. On one side live the once upwardly mobile middle class, now mired in debt and crushed by inflation.
On the far side live a smaller group -- the super-wealthy -- who benefited from the shift in taxation and other preferential fiscal and policy changes. These folks, in living in their McMansions, don't care about the housing crisis plaguing the millions on the other side.
Nor do they give a fig about deteriorating commercial air travel, as they have their, separate and unequal, jet fleets.
This rich minority also has the best medical care their money can buy, while those on the other side are left to meager graces of charitable medical organizations -- if they're lucky.
What we are witnessing develop is one of those historic social divides we used to read about in history classes. You know, the kind of "let-em eat cake" thinking that lead to the French Revolution and a couple of centuries later, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
And what about the collapse of Communism nearly 20-years ago? Why would the collapse of a non-capitalist system have any relevance to what we are seeing unraveling here today? Because both systems, begun as egalitarian breakthroughs, devolved into two classes, separated by wealth and privilege.
Right wingers like to give Ronald Reagan credit for destroying Soviet communism. But that fat was in the fire already. By the time Reagan came to office those living on the Soviet side of that wall increasingly chaffed at their declining conditions as the elite lived well. As hard-working Soviet citizens stood daily in long lines for food, the elite had their own well-stocked grocery stores. As citizens used run-down public transport, the elite whizzed by in limousines. As two generations of families crowded into cramped apartments, the elite spent their holidays at their country dachas.
The worse things got for the Russian people, the better they got for the well-connected party elite and those they did business with. But most of all ordinary Russians were deeply offended and outraged by a clearly bifurcated legal system that allowed the well-connected to skirt -- or entirely avoid -- the law, while the same legal system fell like a sledgehammer on ordinary Russians.
By the late 1980s the Russian people, and those occupied by Russia, had had it right up the here with the system. So much had been taken from them and given to the communist elites that they no longer had anything left to lose. So, Reagan or no Reagan, the Soviet Union's days were numbered. The truth is that the Soviet Union's undoing was its own doing. All Reagan did was grease those skids and hasten the inevitable.
“This is the first test for central banks in 30 years and they have fluffed it. They have zero credibility, and the Fed is negative if that’s possible. It has lost all credibility,” said Mr Bond.
The bank said the full damage from the global banking crisis would take another year to unfold.
Meanwhile those who decided it was a good idea to run everything that runs on oil, continue to believe that the answer to our current problems is to simply drill for more oil. And, as they have been every inch of the ways -- they are wrong about that.. dead wrong:
Press/Journal/ UK. 1 July 2008: The chairman of energy investment-banking firm Simmons and Company International has predicted that oil prices could double or more within a few years.
Matt Simmons said that in his view oil was “dirt cheap at $140 a barrel”, and with supplies having peaked and demand growing prices were bound to go higher.
He said: “It is not beyond the pale of imagination to see oil at $300, $400, $500 or even $600 a barrel within a relatively short time, much less than 20 years. It is not speculators who are driving oil prices. It’s simply about supply and demand.”
So, what's it all mean to you and I? I have no idea. This is uncharted territory. Over the next five years we may see what happened to communism in 90s happen to capitalism. If so it will be the fault of those who allowed the gap between rich and working poor expand into a yawning chasm. On one side live the once upwardly mobile middle class, now mired in debt and crushed by inflation.
On the far side live a smaller group -- the super-wealthy -- who benefited from the shift in taxation and other preferential fiscal and policy changes. These folks, in living in their McMansions, don't care about the housing crisis plaguing the millions on the other side.
Nor do they give a fig about deteriorating commercial air travel, as they have their, separate and unequal, jet fleets.
This rich minority also has the best medical care their money can buy, while those on the other side are left to meager graces of charitable medical organizations -- if they're lucky.
What we are witnessing develop is one of those historic social divides we used to read about in history classes. You know, the kind of "let-em eat cake" thinking that lead to the French Revolution and a couple of centuries later, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
And what about the collapse of Communism nearly 20-years ago? Why would the collapse of a non-capitalist system have any relevance to what we are seeing unraveling here today? Because both systems, begun as egalitarian breakthroughs, devolved into two classes, separated by wealth and privilege.
Right wingers like to give Ronald Reagan credit for destroying Soviet communism. But that fat was in the fire already. By the time Reagan came to office those living on the Soviet side of that wall increasingly chaffed at their declining conditions as the elite lived well. As hard-working Soviet citizens stood daily in long lines for food, the elite had their own well-stocked grocery stores. As citizens used run-down public transport, the elite whizzed by in limousines. As two generations of families crowded into cramped apartments, the elite spent their holidays at their country dachas.
The worse things got for the Russian people, the better they got for the well-connected party elite and those they did business with. But most of all ordinary Russians were deeply offended and outraged by a clearly bifurcated legal system that allowed the well-connected to skirt -- or entirely avoid -- the law, while the same legal system fell like a sledgehammer on ordinary Russians.
By the late 1980s the Russian people, and those occupied by Russia, had had it right up the here with the system. So much had been taken from them and given to the communist elites that they no longer had anything left to lose. So, Reagan or no Reagan, the Soviet Union's days were numbered. The truth is that the Soviet Union's undoing was its own doing. All Reagan did was grease those skids and hasten the inevitable.
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