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Triple Threat

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What’s the right thing to do to help the economy?  Clearly, Congress has no idea, making bizzy with games designed to impress their constituents.  Major economists don’t agree, either, with at least three different views on what is going on and the appropriate remedies. How can it be so chaotic and disorganized?

It’s always been Barataria’s creed that if you complain about how things are you have to stick your neck out and offer a better solution.  Our answer has always been that there is a totally new economy forming around us as we work through the Managed Depression, and that there is a dire need for public and private leadership to help us create that new world dynamically.  That’s a bit too hard to define , but we can offer is a different way of looking at the situation we’re in.  It doesn’t directly point to courses of action, but it suggests things that should be tried.

Here is a description of the Triple Threat to the US Economy – Business Cycles, Globalism, and Demographics – and how they are working together to make this a once in a lifetime change.

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Containerized Cargo

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Stop for a moment and look around you.  In front of your nose might be the aroma of coffee from Sumatra steaming inside a mug made in China.  The table  you are sitting at may be from South America or Canada.  Your clothes could be made of Egyptian cotton.  What do all of these things have in common, other than your life?  Nearly all of them spent some time in a metal box, 20 feet by 8 feet by 9 and a half feet tall – a Twenty foot Equivalent Unit (TEU).

Containerized cargo has changed the world more than any other technology over the last 30 years, maybe or maybe not excluding the internet.  Yet few people stop to consider this phenom and what it means

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Convergence

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The big story of the last 20 years has been a tale of two worlds coming together.  While the developed world experienced a decade of growth in the 1990s followed by stagnation and decline in the 2000s, the developing world saw nothing but growth.  The two phenomena are related in the tremendous expansion of credit and general money supply over this time, and are now starting to come together.   The developing world is feeling the pinch the same as the developed world.

This story first appeared in Barataria back in September 2012, but it’s now quite fashionable to talk of the end of the great boom in “Emerging Markets” (EM).  They have, simply, started to either mature or fall back.  And investors are trying to find the next wave of fantastic growth stories to invest in.

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With a Moslem Beat?

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Looking back through history may not seem like a good way to determine our future, but it’s all we have.  We can reasonably guess that if all the trends continue the current Depression will run its course by 2017, give or take a few years or a major meltdown. We can also be pretty sure that this current period of evening out between the developed and developing world will be followed by relatively low growth as working age populations flatten across the planet.

Where this gets tricky is the realization that Western finance, including stocks and bonds and constant price inflation, is not remotely set up for a low-growth world.  Something has to change.  The best recommendation any of us can make is what is working in economies built around sustainability and resilience today as well as strategies that functioned well before the great wave of industrialization.  And that’s where I’m going to start with a few suggestions and predictions as to how finance as we know it could change.

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Growth is … Good?

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Growth is good.  That’s been the mantra of just about every society at every point in human history, at least until recently.  More people means more to work the land and higher productivity.  If it gets a bit out of hand, high growth can create a larger army to go knock off the neighbors and open things up even more.

The pattern held through the industrial era and right up to the point where large undeveloped nations started to have trouble feeding themselves.  There were incidents of mass starvation in some empires, likely even the Mayan, but until the 20th Century growth has always been something that everyone relies on.  Peaceful societies have put growth to work taking care of the vulnerable and generally enjoying the few years we all have on this Earth a bit more.

But what if growth slows down, or even stops?  One of the defining features of the next generation is likely to be dealing with declining growth across the planet.  It’s also one of those issues that no one is ready to talk about.

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