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Category Archives: Financial Implications
An Energy and the Economy Forecast for 2025
In this post, I share a few thoughts on what might lie ahead for us in 2025, in the light of the hidden inadequate world energy supply. I am predicting major turbulence, but not that things fall apart completely. Stock markets will tend to do poorly; interest rates will remain high; oil and other energy prices will stay around current levels, or fall. Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
1,405 Comments
Oil shortages lead to hidden conflicts–even war
Governments may want to reduce long-term interest rates, but they cannot do so without having the market for these loans disappear. In this part of the economic cycle, it appears that high interest rates, indirectly due to inadequate inexpensive-to-extract crude oil supplies, act as a brake on the economy instead of high oil prices. Continue reading
Crude oil extraction may be well past peak
The situation is far more complex than the models of economists make it seem. World crude oil supply seems to be past peak now; it may be headed down significantly in the next few years. Central banks have been working hard to keep oil prices within an acceptable range for both producers and consumers, but this is becoming increasingly impossible. Continue reading
Today’s economy is like that of the late 1920s
Today, there is great wage and wealth disparity, just as there was in the late 1920s. Recent energy consumption growth has been low, just as it was in the 1920s. A significant difference today is that the debt level of the US government is already at an extraordinarily high level. Adding more debt now is fraught with peril. Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged debt levels, interest rates, low oil prices, US election
1,968 Comments
