It seems my contributions to these sort of threads are not all that popular with some people.
popular with me... carry on please, I've noticed you seem to be well ahead of most on a range of stuff from peak oil to grain shortages to global warming trends to this credit crunch stuff.
sometimes I think maybe it takes someone who's not actually embroiled in the day to day business of different bits of the markets to be able to properly take stock of the situation. Besides those working in the markets aren't exactly renowned for letting joe public know the shits about to hit the fan until they've had time to unload as much of their dodgy stock etc as possible themselves, by which time it's usually a bit late for joe public to do fuck all apart from wonder what the fuck just happened and how come nobody warned them about it.
without going into the specifics, my feeling generally is that we're somewhere between the start and the middle of a seismic shift in global economic and political power. IMO history will judge Bush as being the guy who presided over, and exacerbated the demise of the period of US dominance that essentially began with their astute dealings in WW2, and the brown / blair legacy isn't likely to be much better.
the daft thing is that it needn't have been this way at all. They could have heeded the warnings in the 90's, and future proofed our economies by investing heavily in the inevitable next generation of technologies to move us away from our unsustainable oil dependence, making us not only less vulnerable to the oil price rises (which would have been lower anyway if we'd lowered demand enough), but also giving our alternative energy sectors a massive injection to make sure they were sufficiently ahead of the game to ensure we were world leaders in what's certain to be the biggest growth industry of this century.
instead we blow it all on pointless unwinnable wars that do nothing apart from pushing the price of oil up even higher... which'd be ok if we were a net exporter of oil, but we're not. The UK and US are both now in debt upto our eyeballs - personal debt, national government debt (inc northern rock and pfi's), and corporate debt - and that's at the start of a probable recession, so there's fuck all way we borrow enough to spend our way out of it this time.
basically we're in the process of losing the 'great game' badly at the moment due to arrogance and utter stupidity... this whole credit crunch thing is obviously the immediate cause of the current problems, but there are much bigger underlying issues at the route of it all IMO... that's a little insight into how i see it anyway for what it's worth.
btw, as a little aside, wtf's going on with the exchange rate with the euro? I get posters printed in germany & the price for the same job has risen from around £90 a few months ago to £120 now. The other week it went up £10 (10%ish) in the 5 days between me placing the order and receiving the delivery.
