The Great Depression II: Bigger and better than the last one!

If you have been watching the news right now, you might be scared. Or even confused. You might be hearing about the constant losses in the Chinese sharemarket and wondering why people are freaking out, and more importantly: what it means for you. This might be further muddled with a bunch of talking bobble-heads who are trotted out to repeat “don’t panic, everything is fine. Keep your money in the bank. Go out and buy that new iPhone. Consume!”

So here’s what it means. It involves a little history lesson. We go back to the end of the roaring twenties, specifically 1929. Throughout the decade thousands of ‘investors’, through a series of fraudulent methods, been inflating bubble after bubble of speculative enterprises that sucked the savings of Americans and through their demand, people across the world into a financial black hole (literally, because no information escaped about what was actually going on). The exact details are excellently laid out by the famous John K. Galbraith in his book “Great Crash 1929.” In fact while you’re waiting to see what happens, you might want to search that book in your local library and give it a read. It doesn’t take that long. If you want a dry synopsis, the Wikipedia page does a relatively decent job of it as well.

By 1929 this façade of economic stability reached gargantuan proportions. From 24^th October to 29^th October 1929, now the infamous ‘Black Thursday’ and ‘Black Tuesday’, the stock market plunged repeatedly, beginning at a drop of 11% of its value at the opening bell. That amounted to $30 billion dollars of perceived wealth, wiped out in 5 days. Repeated attempts to close and re-open the market and confidence measures such as the Rockefellers and other notable businessmen buying millions of shares failed, leading to the Great Depression.

Does this sound familiar? Yes if you have been following the news. On 12^th June the first shocks puncturing our most recent bubble appeared on the Shanghai Stock exchange – one of the major financial centres of the entire world, when it lost 5%. On the 7^th and 9^th January of this year, the market fell 18%. The Chinese government repeatedly closed the markets and most of the time, it has ended trading the day lower than it started. World markets, including Dow Jones, are also sucked into this quagmire, since most of the speculative finance heading into China is from western investors. Add to that, the extreme deflation in oil prices (which aren’t a good thing at all) and its mounting losses in the fracking industry means that a major depression is now on the horizon.

There are many people who will insist that everything is alright and that this is all normal. A good read of J.K. Galbraith’s book that I mentioned earlier will remedy any thought of that. For the last 7 years, ever since the recession of 2008, vast amounts of imaginary wealth (they call it quantitative easing) has been pumped into the world economy, where again it mostly got invested in speculative enterprises that inflated the value of investments to over a thousand times their actual worth.

People will send Bloomberg articles saying ‘look, so-and-so bobble head economist says everything is fine. You must be wrong!’ I answer: Nonsense. Economists have the liberty of being constantly wrong and yet taken legitimately to criminal levels. The so called fraudulent investors and supporting government cronies have been lying to leech their profits and cover their asses for decades – they lied about the massive delusion of America’s housing market in 2008, they lied about the actual productivity of all the oil bubbles since, and they’re still lying. If you want to take a person’s word seriously, check the accuracy of their previous statements. Most of the ‘respected’ financial authorities will turn out to be complete charlatans.

I travelled arounds parts of China mid-last year, and saw the effects of the bubble coming first-hand. Bridges half built and left derelict. Flyovers where the foundations were the only things built. Bullet rail lines that were only marked out. And to top it off, massive ghost cities where not a single person lives, the houses of which were priced in hundreds of thousands of Yuan.

The only difference is that instead of private market personalities such as the Rockefellers, the desperate market-saving attempts are being made by the Chinese government, itself heavily involved in the speculative frenzy. Billions of dollars of investment money were gambled on China’s growth. There were nowhere that imaginary money could have gone apart from into dead-end malinvestments. The much-repeated fatal mistake of confusing money for actual wealth and GDP as actual growth resulted in the massive ghost-cities and hundreds of botched infrastructure projects that have marked Chinese growth over the last decade.

So what does this mean? It could mean Great Depression II. Great-er, I should say. In the previous great depression, massive infrastructure project as part of Keynesian economic philosophy were a viable option. In a world where we still had growing access to energy supplies and ample oil, putting people to work through extracting energy and investing in capital was an option. That won’t work this time, despite the almost religious chants of many of today’s leftists that Keynesian economics is still the answer. We live in a world with dwindling energy supplies, where shrinking economies is a matter of course, and any large investment in capital runs up hard against the increasing costs of extracting oil.

This depression is going to be a lot worse than the last one. I’m sure that almost every half-baked conventional economic strategy, ranging from insane Friedmanite fantasies to extreme Keynesian money printing (I mean, screen money typing) and massive state-planning will be tried, and every single idea will crash and burn, taking large chunks of the world economy with it. They will fail because every single ideology is unequipped for the realities of ecological overshoot and is blind to the reality that we have used up over half of all the oil reserves in the world and production from here on is only going down. You can bet that it will take decades for humanity to finally blunder into a level of abstract wealth and allocation of resources (particularly energy) that actually make a little more sense based on our actual balance.

In the meanwhile, there is plenty of pain for almost everyone who is alive right now. The previous depression was marked with widespread unemployment, starvation, destituteness, poverty and loss of hope. The following decade is likely to bring the same bag of things, probably a lot worse since today’s people aren’t as recently jaded from a world war like last time, are far less equipped to live on a shoestring budget, and more importantly, can’t cope with reality without cheap access to technology to sedate them.

Being a student looking at graduating soon, the coming years are set to take a hard toll on me and my peers. A realistic dialogue is needed now, before things start biting, to convince people to start making the tough decisions needed to survive the coming years.