Still not a DEPRESSION, still green shoots. Dollar value dropping like a rock. Gold climbing like a shooting star. Unemployment officially in double digits, unoffically much higher. But Tings are Good. http://www.howestreet.com/articles/inde ... e_id=11425

To be honest, it really even isn't a recession at this point.



Yeah, but thats been happening for CENTURIES.




Not even as expensive yet as it was back in the 80's, by official estimates, let alone using shadowstats.




Unemployment is as bad as it was during the hangover from peak oil 1979. Tings are GREAT if you compare reality to how the post peak world was supposed to turn out. I haven't seen a single story on this site yet claiming that a Doomer has had the opportunity to use his guns and ammo hoard to fend off any suburban starving zombies....so compared to that predicted future, a little unemployment doesn't seem all that bad to me.

Raising the BS/Troll alert flag once again. STOP MIS- CHARACTERIZING the majority of Peak Oilers with your sweepingly BS claims of doomer paranoia. It is wrong and you cannot support it with other than a few folks who believe such crap.

IT IS NOT THE MAJORITY VIEW here and your being counterproductive to what this site is about by continuing it.

Heh heh Ok Shorty, whatever you say.....

AirlinePilot walks away with a big smile on his face gently shaking his head. No other response required.

Are you kidding me? Or do you REALLY not remember?

http://peakoil.com/open/the-mutant-zomb ... e%20hordes

The only thing which put a damper on nuke wars, zombie hordes and starving suburbanites was that peak oil happened....but none of the silliness which was wished for as a consequence.

As far as a MAJORITY opinion, I might disagree. I might suppose that hoping for these really cool consequences is part of the entire POINT of participating in someone elses peak oil fantasy.

Certainly, you can't point to a majority opinion that the result of peak oil would only be 10% unemployment? Certainly you can't point to a majority opinion that peak oil was supposed to cause people to be struck stupid and sign idiot mortgage documents...thereby causing or at least helping along those same 22 months of unemployment.

Please...I characterize completely reasonable positions...BEFORE peak oil happened, which everyone would rather forget for obvious reasons. Those being, it certainly looks silly in hindsight, don't it?

Yes I don't know if a recession or a depression for that matter are appropriate terms for whats going on in the United States in particular. I personally feel this economic catastrophe is just one big step down for the US as we decline from a world super power to a third world nation. Even not having peak oil in the equation factors like our massive deficits,lack of manufacturing and corresponding trade deficits,lousy education system and underinvestment in infrastructure are all starting to come together to take us down... and we will probably go down kicking and screaming for that matter.

Please do not confuse a lack of manufacturing jobs with a lack of manufacturing. The US is still a manufacturig superpower. We just use machines instead of people to do most of the work.

TF

That I'm not so sure about. Practically everything everywhere I see has a 'made in china" label on it. I specifically go to stores and TRY to buy US made, but I can't find any.
Sometimes I find "made in Mexico" or "made in Canada" and a few high end items are made in "Germany/Switzerland/Italy". Very very rarely I find made in US. On a lucky day I find "assmebled in US from parts made in whoknowswhere".

RE: US manufacturing.

After opening a small business a few years ago, we were on everyone's mailing list, so we get LOTS of auction ads from industrial auctioneers. In the past 3 years, we have seen, among many others, plant closing auctions for 50+ factories and an untold number of machine shops in southern Indiana, Ohio , Kentucky and Illinois. These include a GM plant in Dayton OH, Tokheim's 2 plants (gasoline pumps) in Indiana, Nutone (doorbells, OH), Reliance Electric (electric motors, IN), a gear plant in Muncie, IN, a major CNC machinery dealer, South Bend Lathe Co., South Bend, IN, (started in the 1920's) and others too numerous to mention.

I get at least one auction a week for small machine shops closing. I attend several of these, and find that in the past year, there are few if any industrial buyers for the equipment, but rather farmers and scrap dealers make up 90%+ of the bidders. These jobs are NOT coming back. This is NOT just layoffs. These are PERMANENT closings, and a vast majority of the equipment (often very good, accurate, useful machines), are sold for scrap to be melted down. Most of the real estate involved does not sell, but is retained by the leinholder, hoping to get more later, to no avail. Many of these properties have been sitting for a couple years now, and are deteriorating.

The old name for this area is the Rust Belt, and rust is what it is becoming, at an accelerating pace. So many small manufacturers have gone out of business that sources are gone for obtaining the equipment needed to rebuild industry, if that were to happen. My little farm repair shop and my son in law's small steel fabrication shop get offered huge bids we can't handle, because there is no one else to make it. The quantities (50 pallet rack units at $1,200 each) involved don't justify the capital investment ($300,000 to $1 million, + leased floor space) to set up to make this stuff. Nobody wants to stick their neck out to invest for a one-shot order of this sort.

I got a call from a government procurement office asking me to bid on a contract last month, but it was entirely unsuited to a one-man shop, and also being out of my area of expertise, which the procurement office should have known by due diligence before inquiring. Beyond that, I'd live in the city dump in a cardboard box before I would do business with them, having seen their ignorant practices bankrupt too many small businesses. There won't be any resurgence of manufacturing based on government contracts paid with printed money, and paid 120+ days late, at that, per normal practice.

The cornies and trolls on here can spout all the BS they want to, trying to minimize the impact of our industrial decline, but that does not change the facts. Manufacturing equipment is leaving the US at a terrible rate, not moving, just disappearing into the iron melting furnaces of Asia, to be sent back to the US as material for cheap mfrd. toys and worthless consumer stuff. The lost jobs this represents won't return in the foreseeable future. Better get used to the new unemployment rate, because it looks to be very much a permanent thing. Those factories that once supported towns and cities are gone, to be replaced with what? More nail salons and burger joints? Hope all you trolls and cornies enjoy flippin' burgers.

After a lifetime as an engineer in US manufacturing, thus intimately familiar with the internals of what is happening, I particularly resent the uninformed opinions I see here. Those ill-informed people won't like the results of the de-industrialization of the US any better than the rest of us, but that is inadequate satisfaction for their insults.

Brought to you by the Cato Institute:

"'Unfortunately, it looks as though indefensible assertions about the supposed long-term disappearance of U.S. manufacturing are going to become a familiar political complaint over the coming year (as well as a promising source of special interest campaign funds). This rerun of the old "downsizing" story will again bore us with many more efforts by bumbling business writers and their slumbering editors to trump up some sort of "public agitation." If the rhetoric gets too annoying, ask the authors for a few facts. They just hate that.'

This article originally appeared in The Washington Times on August 31, 2003."

http://www.cato.org/research/articles/r ... 30831.html

When does "jobs are a lagging indicator" become "jobs are not an indicator?"

When it's no longer important to TPTB if citizens are working or starving.

Oh yeah, that's now.

I wonder who funds the Cato Institute?

The scaly little troll has a small bag of tricks, most of them coded with double entendre so he can't be called out. His favorite is a false generalization--"the doomers" called peak in the past and were wrong. Another of the trolls arguments--"we've peaked but I don't care (he has a new sportscar), so it doesn't matter. What I have learned from this? Never turn you back on a slimy troll, as he will always try to latch on to your anus for a free lunch. If he does then kick him when he is down, or he will rise up again with a straw. Be vigilant. Do not let your body parts go unsecured.

By the way, I have have never been a "doomer."













I have been anything but a doomer at this site and have always tried to find a clear middle ground between hapless optimism and macho heavy-handed hysteria. Short is a lying little piece of work, and if he were in front of me . . . Short has mischaracterized my position here, just to pick a fight. He has it.