Anyone still think the stock market is not a gambling venue?
Great day yesterday! Today, not so good.
“We have no idea where things are going.” Robert F. Engle, finance professor and director of the Center for Financial Econometrics at New York University.
Is NYU near Wall Street?
Cool graphic on the front page of WaPo’s Business Section portraying the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s Volatility Index (VIX) aka, the “Fear Index.”
There is reason for fear. This is not your fathers recession. It is not your grandfathers depression.
This is a punctuation in the 200 year equilibrium that has been based on the Agrarian to Urban Transformation. The punctuation is caused by the mass consumption of natural capital and borrowing from grandchildren and global trading partners.
A technologically driven consumer based society costs far, far more than citizens have been paying. Even worse, the small percentage they have been paying – for goods and services and in fees and taxes – has been paid with debt and consumption of nonrenewable resources.
Agencies run by pandering politicians and governance practitioners as well as Enterprises and Institutions run by self-serving “leaders” and all supported by MainStream Media have convinced citizens they can have it all for next-to-nothing. All boats cannot rise indeffinitely on escalating consumption in a finite environment.
This was clear to many in the ‘20s and should have been clear to all in 1973.
We have noted the lynchpins of the current Global Meltdown in prior posts. Tonight, we summarize two human settlement pattern indicators that show how Agencies, Enterprises and Institutions are preparing to address the need for Fundamental Change in settlement pattern.
In summary they are creating plans to taking actions that might have helped in 1973 but are now just pipe dreams.
We have suggested in columns and posts that rebuilding Tysons Corners around an armature of 19th century boulevards, retrofitted for early 20th century Large, Private Vehicles rather than a Balanced Community with Alpha Villages with Ziggurat METRO station-areas in foolish. See “All Aboard” and “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Lies.” Also see over a score of Jim Bacon and EMR columns on Tysons Corner and METRO to Dulles since 2003. (Note where the “Fear Index” cited above was going from 2003 to 2006. Bacons Rebellion was NOT Chicken Little speaking in settlement pattern tongues.)
There are two paths to cut dependence on foreign energy, an imbalance of trade and consumption of natural capital:
1) Fundamental Transformation in human settlement pattern, and
2) Start a long recession / depression.
The second path does not lead to safety and happiness, much less prosperity and the preservation of a democracy with a market economy.
Now the second shoe drops. Maryland’s Montgomery County is planning to “improve” Rockville Pike by turning The Pike into a 19th century boulevard, retrofitted for early 20th century Large, Private Vehicles.
If Tysons had been rebuilt when it was obvious those 1,700 acres would not work as boxes in an asphalt desert – say in 1973,
And if Rockville Pike had been rebuilt when it was obvious The Pike would not work as a string of boxes along an asphalt desert – say in 1973, then
There would been open land outside the Clear Edge in Eastern Loudoun County, VA and in Frederick County, MD.
Now?
Too late.
Every day the resources needed to evolve functional human settlement patterns and replace papier-mache infrastructure are melting away.
According to a CNN pole released today, 75 percent of the citizens of the US of A think things are going badly in this nation-state. If they only knew how badly and for how long the voices of reason had been drowned out by the advocates of Business-As-Usual that supported an unsustainable trajectory, they would be even more concerned.
EMR
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