Sharon July 13th, 2009
Scott Adams has often seemed to grasp that we can’t go on acting like greedy pigs forever, but it seems that he’s turned himself to the project of designing the ideal AIP community. Excellent! And thanks to Brad K. for tipping me off on this.
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/cheapatopia/
The only problem with “Cheapatopia” is that Dogbert will immediately conquer it 
.
Sharon
Sharon July 13th, 2009
Ok, I have to admit, I’m really loving this weather. Now that the non-stop rain has stopped (it is now raining every third evening, which I can live with ), the fact that the summer is cool and breezy and pleasant is actually making me very happy. I am not a hot weather person. I love this – days in the mid-70s, maybe hitting 80 once in a while, nights in the 50s (and sometimes high 40s). The bad news is that the melons, the peppers, the okra all hate it. The good news is that I’m still eating the last of my lettuce planting from the spring – first time that’s ever happened in July.
Earlier this week, Eric went up to water the sheep, and came down announcing that there was a newborn lamb on the pasture – which was something of a surprise to all of us, not least their owner. The little guy, first sheep born on our farm, was from the bottom of the pecking order sheep, one that my friend didn’t think had bred. He’s happy, bouncy, healthy little dude, and we’re delighted to have him – he brings the total to 15 woolies up on the pasture, plus the guard donkey.
We’re short on eggs, since two of my hens are setting – we want the replacements, so we’re sucking it up. Meanwhile, the next batch of chicks – white rocks and cuckoo marans, arrived to replace our aging layer flock. We’re expecting still another batch in early September, since we’re going to go back to selling eggs in the spring.
The fruit is exploding – we’ve harvested cherries, blueberries, raspberries and apricots this week, and the black and red currants are just about ready. I’m going to make black currant wine, so I’m spending some of my free time reading wine recipes.
We are rich with summer squash, and the cherry tomatoes are coming on slowly, slowly, mostly from lack of heat. Our neighbors down in the valley have tomatoes in larger quantities, though, so we’ve been eating pesto, tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with wild abandon – the pesto and goat cheese are ours.
Not much else to report here – I’m still revising the gardens, since two years in a row of unusually heavy rains (we’ve had almost 18 inches since May) have proven that my drainage is inadequate – I’m simply going to have to build up higher. The boys are at camp this week, so Eric and I have three and half hours every morning to work uninterrupted – so expect not to hear from me in the mornings this week.
Plant something: Sea Holly, California Poppy, Marshmallow, valerian, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, beets, carrots, peas, arugula, turnips, tickseed, catnip, soapwort, nettles. Also moved a hazelnut and some catmint that were getting shaded out in our gardens.
Harvest something: Milk, Eggs, Beets, Summer squash, green beans, kale, chard, collards, broccoli, burdock, daikon, chinese cabbage, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, apricots.
Preserve something: Cherry-Amaretto jam, strawberry rhubarb jam, blueberry jam, rhubarb sauce, dried blueberries, dried cherries, meadowsweet tincture, kim chi, pesto, red clover tincture, dried clover blossoms, made goat cheese and mixed it with some red currant jelly, which was astonishingly good.
Waste not: Made ice cream topping from mixed jam jar remnents (was really good, actually) , made sour milk biscuits, collected a trellis by the side of the road, made wheat gluten out of some old flour found in back of cupboard – was surprisingly successful.
Prep/Want Not: Picked up more cat and dog food to add to storage, ordered bulk peaches from a farmer a bit south (peaches don’t do well here) for canning, ordered more dried cranberries, also finally cleaned out my closet, and discovered all sorts of useful things buried in there.
Build Community Food Systems: Signed up to work my synagogues local summer lunch program for kids, arranged to do a few more talks, the usual.
Eat the food – wheat gluten in stir fry, aforementioned goat cheese and jam mixture on bread (in large quantities – yum), blueberry ice cream, and pesto.
How about you?
Sharon
Sharon July 12th, 2009
A few weeks ago we had guests for Shabbos dinner. The friends we gathered there were ones who had come to our table before – a couple of our own approximate age and life stage with three children who are my children’s friends; a couple in their 50s who have been kind to us and who we’ve shared meals with at other friends, and a couple in their sixties who first helped welcome us to the community, who have been our friends since we arrived. In many ways the meal wasn’t that unusual – we love to have guests, and have them frequently. In one way, it was very different indeed – Josh, one of the oldest of the three couples, was very ill, and we all of us knew that it was probably the last time we’d come together at our table.
It was a lovely evening – we ate a lot – my friend Alexandra made Trifle and we all indulged in too much whipped cream. We talked and laughed until Asher fell asleep in my arms. Josh told me that night that they’d just learned he was not eligible for the clinical trial they’d hoped to enter into, and said very calmly “You hear this kind of news, and you don’t know how to react.” I told him I was sorry, and he told me that he was more sorry for his wife, that it was harder for her than for him. I didn’t know quite what to say, but he did – that morning he’d received what amounted to a death sentence, and he greeted it as calmly and gracefully as he approached his whole life.
When Eric and I moved here, we knew we needed a Jewish community – in the city, we’d been able to get by with university groups and small minyans and prayer groups, mostly made up of people like us, because, well, Jewishness was always near, we were young, we did not have children and there were many such groups. It didn’t matter that the members were always shifting, that grad students left and people moved, that families changed and there were no commitments, just a good times and good food now.
But when we moved here, we knew we needed a shul – which was something very different, something heavier, stronger, with an institutional memory and a long past, sometimes a weighty one. It seemed overwhelming to me – it was easier to be part of a light and shifting community in which there was no deep commitment to one another’s lives. But the children needed a Hebrew School, and we could see, dimly, that there were things missing from our old approach.
Being part of a community, rooting ourselves in one place and with particular people, was harder. And better. That is, it wasn’t always easy to fully enter into the community, it wasn’t always easy to fit into something that has its own life. Sometimes it would have seemed more fun to pray only with people in our stage of life, people who never complained when the kids made too much noise and who got all the Gen X jokes.
But what we got was worth more. It included the members who had been here for generations. It meant dinner guests of 90 along with the dinner guests in their 30s. It meant more kinds of laughter, and watching other people’s children grow up, and getting their advice on ours. It meant being supported through my pregnancies by women grown elderly for whom the blessing of a new life was long since shorn of any ambivalence. It meant being part of lives that began after we arrived, of brisim and birthday parties, and of lives that began long before the world we live in now began. It meant substitute grandparents, and people to tell us what having teenagers was like.
Most of all, it meant experiencing all of the stages of life at once – there were always babies being born, always children making their way into the classrooms for the first days of Hebrew school. There were always bar and bat mitzvahs, young girls in their first long dress and boys with cracking voices standing up and reading Torah alongside the grownups who do that good work each week. There were always a few weddings, and children going off to college. There were always people retiring, devoting more time to the community, and there were always elders becoming frail, and then loss, and mourning, and the routine of Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Life is like that, of course, but only in a strong community, religious or secular, can you be part of all of life at once, and see it all as a whole. Even the hard parts lose some of their fearfulness, exposed to the light, lived in people you admire.
Once, an older woman in the congregation told me a joke. She named the person who had told it to her, went on, and then stopped, and named him again, saying with emphasis “of blessed memory!” We both went on to laugh, and I was struck by that emphasis – she was not saying the name by rote, with a conventional reference, she was literally stopping to acknowledge that his memory was a blessing, and to remind me that the laughter she was passing on to me was a memory, a gift by transmission from a man now dead. She wanted to be sure that I remembered, when I told the joke again, from whom it came.
Josh and his wife, Celia helped us join in the community – they were among our first friends, among the first guests from the shul we ever had to our home. They were older than we, but like us – Josh was a Professor of Physics like Eric, with a dry sense of humor and a deep kindness, Celia had been an English Ph.d candidate and was merry and lively and brilliant. They were good friends to us, and helped us navigate the loss of Eric’s grandparents, always kind to the children and welcoming to them.
Last night, Josh died. Eric and I grieve for him, and for Celia and the children and grandchildren he leaves behind. And it feels rather strange to be saying that this grief we feel is one of the gifts of community – how, after all, are we to attract people to the sometimes hard work of making community by telling them this – if you stay in place long enough, you will grow to love people and they will get old and die or you will. It would look bad on a brochure, so this is the part they don’t tell you.
And yet, that’s a part of the truth, and maybe they should, because there’s something to tell about the gift of this - community, real community that invests all the people in it, old and young, comes with this gift – the gift of blessed memory.
You get to be part of a whole life – you get to be there when people are celebrating, and there when they mourn. You get to live the good parts, and the hard and painful ones, and be richer for it. You get to know what it is like to be helped and to give help, to see people face death and grief, and come through it with courage, and when the time comes for you, perhaps you are a little better for it. You get to be part of a living thing – the community, the whole, which exists not because of one person, but because of all of them, which transmits the past, those lost, forward to those still to come. No death can kill it, as long as memory remains. You get the stories, and the memories of the past, you get the comfort of knowing that others have come through hard times and gone on. You get people in all stages of their lives – the ones with time on their hands and those with none, the ones who give everything and those who can give less, and those who need you. You get to give and receive in perpetuity as part of something bigger than you. You get to know people you would never have known, to be part of their lives and memory, and in turn, they of yours. You get, someday, the best we all can hope for – that someone will say your name, tell a story of you, and add sincerely, with feeling, “of blessed memory.”
We will take my sons to make a shiva call – it will be the first time they have been called upon to make formal expressions of mourning to others. They do not fully understand why their father and mother are so sad, but that’s ok – what matters is that they be a part of the cycle as well, at least for a few minutes, before they run and play. And I will talk to them, as they grow, about the people they knew that are not here any longer, but linger, in blessed memory.
Sharon
Sharon July 10th, 2009
Note, this is a re-run – I’m trying to get the final contract arrangements for the AIP book done, and don’t have time for a post today. Hope you enjoy it!
I know all of us with kids or grandkids, neices or nephews or just beloved child-friends are deeply worried about their future. We want to help them have a good one – and it is tough to realize that sometimes the way we can give them the best possible future isn’t by insulating them (although doing some of that is good too) but by helping them adapt to the world they’ll be living in ahead of time. This is a big topic, and one that I can’t do more than brush against today, but here are the things I think might be the most important stuff we can do for our kids (and here I refer to the young ones, not grownup ones, who have different issues).
1. BE THE GROWNUP. This sucks. I hate it a lot of the time. Every parent knows the feeling of wanting not to be the responsible one, not to have to deal, and suck up their pain and frustration and fear. Tough.
This is the Mom and Dad (and Grandpa and Grandma) job – to bear the brunt of things, to do the hard stuff so the kids don’t have to suffer, to not make your kids parent you or deal with your emotional inadequacies any more than strictly necessary. This doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, noble or never feel anything, or never cry in front of them – it just means you don’t indulge yourself at their expense. It just means that except when you just can’t (and those moments can’t be too often) you can’t ask your kids to take care of you – it isn’t their job. And if you are scared, they are too. If you are sad they either are sad or scared because you are sad. Your ability to control yourself and be a grownup even when you don’t want to, to say “I’m sad, and sometimes I cry, but now we’re going to go forward” makes a big difference.
This is a hot button subject for me, because I think honestly a lot of our present problems can be summed up as “no one was willing to be the grownup.” It is time for all of us who are grownups, whether we have kids or not, to act like we care about the future, and to be the grownup, not just when it is convenient but all the time – that means dealing with reality, not with self-indulgent versions thereof. We will probably not enjoy this, but who cares? That is, we have to live our lives asking “does this hurt the ability of future people to live and have a decent life?” And if the answer is yes, then no matter how many good excuses we have for doing what we’re doing, things have to change.
I have no doubt that someday the four of my kids will write an expose of “advice my Mom gave online and didn’t always live up to.” I suspect it will be a long and vibrant essay . I don’t always find it easy to follow this advice, which is why I suspect it isn’t easy for most other people (although I shouldn’t assume most of y’all aren’t better folks than me). But this is, I think, the first and most important job of preparing children for the future - giving them models of real adulthood. And the models they’ve got are us – so we’ve got to do better. I’m hoping my kids won’t be able to say I screwed this one up too bad when the time comes – I’m trying.
2. Involve your kids – in a kid appropriate way. There is no need for children to know all the bad news, or your worst fears about the future. Sometimes, with teenagers, this may be appropriate, but I don’t think younger kids need to be scared by things they can’t fully understand. But the choice is not “do I wait until they are 15 and spring Peak Oil and climate change on them” or “do I start them reading Savinar at three ” Most of my readers are probably already doing this, but some may wonder how to get started.
Obviously, you can bring them into the garden, you can bring them into the kitchen, give them chores helping you with your home economy, get them to help in your home business, teach them about ecology and environmental issues. I hope all of us are doing these things, at age appropriate levels. And there’s more - one of the things we tend to think in our society is that children should not work – I think this is absolutely wrong. I believe children, like adults, need good work.
It goes without saying that young children should work appropriately and have lots of time for learning and play, but children not only can work, they should. What they should not do is have to do the kind of work that drives adults to despair – that is, they need good work, and to understand why their work matters. They should get pride in being able to help their household, and know that their accomplishments matter, not in a fake self-esteem sense, but in a serious way. They deserve, to the extent they are able, to earn respect and serious attention for their work, and if they work with you, once they are old enough, they should have a say in how things are done, and a share in the rewards.
3. Respect what matters to them. I know it feels like you are trying to save their lives, and they are worried about how crazy it looks that you are storing all this food, or doing some other weird thing. But that matters as much to them as your concerns matter to you. Try and be respectful. Sometimes the needs of kids simply have to be subsumed to family priorities, or their needs/wants aren’t good for them. But sometimes they need to know that they count, and that you care about how they feel. So maybe it makes sense to do your shopping only at the store where your neighbor’s son doesn’t bag groceries, or to stockpile lip gloss and zit cream for the apocalypse. Just because you don’t consider it essential doesn’t mean they don’t – and let’s be honest, you have a few things in there that might not totally be essential too .
4. Without taking everything away, make their new normal ahead of time. This is tough – on the one hand, we want our kids to be regular kids, we don’t want our preoccupations to affect them, and since we know all this abundant cheap energy probably isn’t forever, we may want to do a lot of special things now. That’s not bad or unreasonable. But your kids will probably do best if they keep their lives generally about the same as the lives they lived before whatever happens occurs.
That means that most of the time, you should probably model the life you expect to live, with a balance of some things you want them to have that they won’t later. Too much of the latter, and the new life is a huge deprivation. Too much of the former, and the child realizes your family is insane a bit too early, plus, you end up with losses you don’t have to have.
Everyone’s family is going to be different – but it helps if your routines and sense of what is normal is fairly adaptable – that is, it is tough to replace the “Christmas at Disneyland” routine in a post-peak world – you just have to lose that one. But “We all stay up late and decorate the tree at midnight on Christmas eve, and then open presents” can work whether you decorate with electric lights and tinsel or just your old ornaments, and whether the presents are purchased or handmade. The more susceptible to adaptation, the better.
5. Kids need the people in their lives. I grew up in a family where my parents did a remarkable job of essentially creating joint custody long before it was widespread, but where in relationship to other extended family, the issues adults had with other adults in the family frequently intruded into the relationships kids had with those other adults. That latter is not something I approve of, except in the case of genuine danger to a child.
That is, I think kids who are related to people by biology or long connection, have a right to those connections being maintained and kept up. The kids have a relationship that can and should be separate from the relationships the parents have with each other or other adults in their lives. They shouldn’t have to lose people because the grownups can’t get along. This goes for divorce (and yes, I know some exes are assholes, and sometimes the courts choose badly and sometimes there is no good choice) as well as larger extended families. That is, what your kids may have going into this is their parents and the other people who love them. Don’t take those people away lightly.
I realize that sometimes this is unavoidable – parents have to move, people really can’t find a good compromise. But in a lower energy world, being far away from people you love is going to be a much bigger thing – divorced parents living across the country from one another who could afford to fly back and forth, or moving for that new job and uprooting the kids from Grandma and the cousins mean taking away from your kids one of the primary sources of comfort, security, even long term health and safety that they will have. Don’t do it lightly. If you are divorced or divorcing, please try and stay near one another, and as difficult as it is, play nice. And if you can, get along with your relatives – because your annoying, intolerable FIL may be their beloved Grandfather, and there are enough losses coming – try not to make more for them.
6. Be prepared to educate your children. I was struck by Dmitry Orlov’s observation that in a crisis, education isn’t less important, it is more. Because you may end up digging ditches, but a person who also knows poetry or music and has a head full of ideas can live in their minds while their bodies work. One of the most common misconceptions, I think is that the future means that we should concentrate only on professional, manual or technical education, and that every other kind of education is fundamentally useless.
I think this isn’t true at all – it is true that certain kinds technical degrees may still result in a high paying job when everyone else is poor, and it is true that people will need a career. But they also need critical thinking skills, a relationship to the world of art, literature and music, ethical and moral principles, good reasoning skills, a deep knowledge of history, religious training for them that want it, the ability to understand what the world looks like from other perspectives, the ability to understand other languages. Now it is true that college is probably too expensive a way for most kids to do this – I honestly don’t think that even if you can get student loans, I’d recommend putting a kid into college to get a degree and come out with tens of thousands in loans – period. But you don’t have to go to college to learn these things – there will be plenty of unemployed people who know about them, and books are cheap now – you can stock up.
Education as it is practiced in the US is very energy intensive, and likely to get less so. Many of our kids may need to be educated at home, or in neighborhood cooperatives, may need to find substitutes for college. And while it is important that they learn the manual and technical skills many of us lacked, they will also grow up gardening and cooking and fixing things – so their needs may be for art and astronomy, poetry and history and the life of the mind that they can practice while they weed and build and hammer.
7. Let them be in charge sometimes. Turn some of the responsibility over to your kids – when they are young, they can help decide what non-essentials go in the emergency kits, or whether to make ketchup or salsa with the tomatoes. When they get older, give them more responsibility as they prove they can handle it. Let teenagers be in charge of the bulk order, or even the family budget if they have the relevant abilities. And when you let them be in charge, let them be. Let them make mistakes, but not life threatening ones. Treat them with respect, and when they make a mistake, let them fix it.
Also, if you want them to stay on a piece of land or in a particular place near you, help them see a future there. That is, they aren’t going to want to live their lives as your assistant farmer forever – make it clear that you will cede control. Help them start small businesses of their own, and grow them. Help them go forward, but also let them have their own territory, their own responsibilities and do things in their own realm as they see fit. If they have dreams you think aren’t feasible, well, help them get there anyway – but also insist that they have practical back-up plans.
8. Enter the pass-down economy now. In most poor societies, what children inherit is what their family collectively owns, and the improvements and investments that their parents and previous generations have put into something. They can’t afford to buy land – what land they have access to comes from the stewardship of previous generations.
It is disheartening in some ways to realize that what may most define our children’s future is what we can pass down to them – particularly when what we have is a bunch of debts and a lot of plastic. So it makes sense to shift into the pass-down economy sooner, rather than later. That means buying things that are of good quality, trying to keep your life unencumbered, and caring for what we do have of value, so it can serve future generations.
It also means our relationship to our children should be about passing on our values – not what we say we value, but what we really and honestly do care most about – and the way to do this is to live our lives according to what we believe.
9. Have fun with your kids. I’m not suggesting you should be their friend all the time – discipline is important, and being at the center of your parents’ world is a little too scary for kids. But joy and fun and play are important for kids even more than grownups (and they are awfully important for grownups as well). So make sure you allow time for fun – if not the kind of fun you were accustomed to, the kind that doesn’t cost money.
Moreover, *be fun* with your kids – don’t let your fear or anxiety take away the pleasures of laughing with them, or dreaming about the future, or just being with them. It is reasonable to be worried – but not to let it overwhelm your life now, and it isn’t fair to your kids. Heck, it isn’t fair to you, either.
Keep festivals and rituals in place, take time off even when times are hard, make jokes even when things don’t seem funny, make time for play even when it seems like the work is endless – especially when it seems like the work is endless. Do it even when they think the rituals are stupid and your jokes suck .
10. Help them up when they fall down. Let them fall, sometimes, either because they need to or you can’t stop them, but be there on the other end. Even in good times they are going to fall. In hard times, they may fall harder and longer. There may not be as many safety nets. You can’t protect them from everything, and sometimes you shouldn’t. But with exception of the occasional addict, what you should do is be there when they fall down, every time from those first steps to the first arrest (which ideally you’ll get to skip entirely, or it’ll be the kind of arrest that you can be proud of ;-)). Yes, it teaches them that you’ll be there to save them. And for some small percentage of children, that’s a bad message, that says they don’t have to be responsible.
But for most kids, I think that helping them up, and maybe resisting the temptation to tell them what an ass they’ve been, lets the stupid thing be the lesson itself. That is, all the lessons don’t have to come from you. All the judgement doesn’t have to come from you. At some point, we can take our hands off and let them know that they have to do their own judging. That, I think is that growing up thing we’re supposed to want them to do. And then maybe we’ll have some more people being the grownups to work on the future with.
Sharon
Sharon July 9th, 2009
Stoneleigh over at The Automatic Earth has done a really spectacular series of pieces lately on the nature and reality of deflation, and why hyper-inflation isn’t a real danger. I find her work very, very compelling, and I think she’s just plain wonderful to sit down and spell out the details, and answer the questions.
I think deflation is a hard concept for a lot of us, simply because we tend to associate flation of all sorts with price changes. Most of us are familiar with inflation when the cost of things starts going up. Indeed, there’s a credible case to be made the popular language of “inflation” as shorthand for “increasing prices” and “deflation” as shorthand for “decreasing prices” may actually have gained so much traction that we should stop using them in their technical meaning, and just talk about “expanding” or “contracting” money supplies.
That is, deflation and inflation, in and of themselves, are not about prices and affordability, but most of us think they are. And when enough people come to understand a word one way, it is often not very useful for economists or experts to go on say “but it doesn’t really mean what you think it does.” There is, for example, no point in my observing that 99% of the ways people use the words “ironic” or “tragic” aren’t actually “ironic” or “tragic” – I’ll just have to suck it up and accept that most people think something is ironic if it is a little bit coincidental and tragic if there’s any death involved.
But regardless, Stoneleigh does a great job of explaining why deflation is not falling prices, why most of us aren’t experiencing falling prices, and why we’re having deflation anyway. I really recommend you read all of this, and carefully. Here’s an excellent excerpt, on why credit doesn’t work in parallel when it is being extended and when it is being retracted:
“The period of time where money was chasing its own tail was adding to wealth expectations, and much of that wealth effect was propping up prices. Those who are of the opinion that they have a claim to a certain percentage of the real wealth pie will not readily concede that they do not. While currency inflation divides a wealth pie into ever smaller pieces, credit expansion creates multiple and mutually exclusive claims to the same pieces of pie. Everyone feels wealthier, but it is an illusion. Little or no wealth has actually been created, but the proliferation of claims has led to a very dangerous situation. Deflation is the process of extinguishing those excess claims once their existence has been generally recognized.As there are probably at least a hundred claims to each slice of pie, thanks to leverage, the vast majority of claims will face extinction. This will not be an orderly process following legal niceties. On the contrary, those higher up the financial food chain will reach down and grab whatever they can in the way of real wealth in the biggest margin call in history. In other words, say good-bye to anything owned on margin.”In practical terms, I think we are seeing this now – those of us with small claims on our assets – retirement and pension funds, etc… have already been cut out.
Here’s the first piece I recommend, in which she really covers the subject of deflation clearly and brilliantly: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-5-2009-unbearable-mightiness-of.html
Here’s her debate on the subject with another blogger – it is excellent: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-8-2009-stoneleigh-and-aaron-krowne.html
Her partner in crime, Ilargi, adds a good and useful commentary as well here: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-6-2009-inflation-least-of-your.html
I think his additional point is worth emphasizing, although I really, strongly encourage you to read both of Stoneleigh’s pieces. Ilargi writes:
“Perhaps I should clear up a point that Stoneleigh didn’t emphasize in yesterday’s The unbearable mightiness of deflation. We fully expect inflation to set in in the US, and likely in many other parts of the world. But that will become an issue only after debt deflation, propelled by a deleveraging that boggles the mind, will have run its course. And, as I’ve indicated before, the damage to our societies caused by this deflation scourge will be so severe that inflation will be the least of your worries.The deflation we’re talking about will be a scourge of truly Biblical proportions. And it won’t be so short that it can be brushed off, either, as I saw Peter Schiff contend recently. Our economic and financial system lived the high life off the credit expansion of the past few decades. Now the bill is presented in the (yes, predictable) form of a credit contraction, and there’s no way we can escape it, or wish it away, or outsmart it by creating more debt -as our political class tries to make us believe-. Yes, there is a huge risk of inflation, but it’s not now. And when we get there, we will all have completely different concerns from the ones we have now. Or, at least, that is, should have.We are not alone in warning of this debt deflation. Today alone, I can present Steve Keen, Martin Weiss, Hugh Hendry, Niels Jensen, John Mauldin, Antal Fekete and Minyanville’s Mr. Practical. They all predict deflation. Not bad for one day, if I may say so. And many more will follow, while most of those who don’t will be held back by the immovable stone their ideas are held captive in. “
My own analysis mirrors theirs in many (not all, but quite a few) respects - we are facing a deflationary spiral that will last for some time. And our preparations ought to take that into account – I’ve always said that our shared crisis will function mostly to make us much poorer, and I believe it is. I will write more about preparedness for a specifically deflationary crisis (oh, wait, a contraction in the money supply ), in the coming weeks, but I think first we have to understand what it is we’re facing.
Sharon