Consumerism

-Will rising oil prices derail the recovery?
-Banks Hasten to Adopt New Loan Rules
-Finite Resources: One Possible Explanation for the Financial Crisis
-What Is Inflation and How Does One Measure It?
-They can make this rally last for years

-Obama and Hu aim to agree greenhouse gas targets
-China's empty city
-China's Blunt Talk for Obama
-Market cornered for rare minerals
-Chinese credit card debt mounts

-The Jobs Doom Loop
-Consumer Liquidity Special Report
-Minsky to Bernanke: "Size Matters!"
-Bailouts for dummies

The retail price of gasoline in the U.S. is extremely low, not just compared to the summer of 2008. Subsidies both direct and hidden create a true cost at least a few times higher than the visible price. The actual cost is paid largely through income taxes (such as for wars in the Middle East and domestic infrastructure), in the purchase of goods and services associated with "free" parking, and even medical care for car/fuel related mortality and morbidity. When the average gasoline price is $2.66 a gallon, according to news reports on the most recent Lundberg Survey, the message to the consumer is "Buy that big vehicle."

At the Denver ASPO conference, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Albert Bartlett. Afterward, Dr. Bartlett e-mailed me some material he had written over the years. The "Laws of Sustainability" were included in this material. They are part of Al Bartlett's contribution to the anthology The Future of Sustainability by Marco Keiner, published in 2006.

As a high-school teacher, I wanted to give my thoroughly-industrial, suburban-NJ students a more detailed peek at their upcoming post-industrial future. I felt the need to challenge their prevailing mindsets regarding our resource-depletion predicament: the “shorter showers & change the light-bulbs” crowd, the “engineers will surely come to our rescue” folks, and the “problem? -- what problem?” people. This essay and the before/after comparison chart that follows are part of my ongoing (unsanctioned) attempts at doing so.

-I'm Too Sexy for This Footprint: Eco-Designers Take on Fashion's Carbon Footprint
-French make cars from flax
-Farmers Arrested Planting Hemp On DEA Headquarters Lawn (Video)

-Wall Street's Naked Swindle
-Where Will the Jobs Come From?
-New School of Thought Brings Energy to 'the Dismal Science'
-The greatest theft in American history
-Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
-Revolutionizing Economic Thought

Even as we've been going through years of hand-wringing about security of supply, and about how Russia was an unreliable gas supplier, it comes out the European gas buyers are themselves increasingly refusing to pay the price that underpins the security of their Russian supplies, and are breaking their contractual obligations towards Gazprom, making Europe, erm, a less reliable customer...

The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call "the abyss." At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining "tomorrow," and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.

The American economy has reached a dangerous new phase. We are now in the “recovery” period, but what kind of rebound will we have? In No L, Professor James Hamilton (along with Paul Krugman) takes note of some positive news from the Fed.

Yesterday was World Food Day, and the media dutifully paid a tiny bit of attention to the 1 billion plus people who suffer from chronic hunger. All the usual problems were trotted out, including multiple quotations in many media from the Australian National Science Director Megan Clark’s observation that to feed a growing population, we will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in all of human history.

-A tale of how it turned out right
-Investor alarm as Finance Minister blasts corporate Japan's ethics
-Memo to Investigators: Dig Deep
-A year after the crunch, it's boom time again for bankers
-Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
-Stiglitz and Sen's Manifesto on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress
-The sound of one bank not banking