Jim Kunstler's Forecast for 2010

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by Tightwad

While you're poking fun at the very idea Knustler might be right it often takes a dash of fear to wake people up to times that are a changing. I think that's what Kunstler is doing with his forecast.

There have always been oracles, sages, seers, sooth sayers and so-called wise men who predict doom and gloom. Harry Dent is another one who makes wild predictions. He once predicted Dow at 40,000 but it never happened. I was at Dent's public forum here in COLO SPGS early in 2009 where he predicted doom and gloom and market collapse by August 2009, but it never happened. As I said years ago when we entered this mess, we'll work our way out of it. There have been wars, famines, plagues, storms, recessions, diseases, volcanic eruptions, depressions, mania and various and sundry other man-made and natural disasters over the eons; we survived them all and we'll survive this stinking mortgage/credit bubble. I see Kunstler as another form of Fox News, i.e., make wildly outrageous claims and accusations just to see the insane reactions of those who prefer to believe that some ungodly horror awaits around the next corner .... and to make some money from this form of fiction.

[jazzlover]

I have to disagree with Mike here. Yes, we have had many tumultuous times in this country, and MOST of the people around for them survived them. That didn't mean that they weren't catastrophic events. As a country, we survived World War II--but if you were the one that came home from that war in a pine box, that likely was not much comfort.

I'm afraid what we're facing now IS different than the crises we've confronted in, say, the last century as a nation and a society. We are brewing a deadly "perfect storm" in this country and people like Kunstler at least recognize most of it for what it is. Depleting domestic resources, most notably oil, is something that neither we as a society or as a nation have really had to worry about up to now. A quote from a U.S. Joint Forces command-issued a Joint Operating Environment report states that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and that there could be serious shortages by 2015:

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day, While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.

It's hard not to wonder if the US would likely be a "fragile and failing state" in that environment.

We also have an exploding population, much of it only semi-productive or just non-productive, that has a complete sense of entitlement. That is also fairly recent. That they will behave in a civil and socially responsible manner when they are no longer handed what they have come to expect is not very likely.

Finally, our federal government's response to this in the last few years, but especially under the current Congress and Administration, is to pursue increasingly Nationalist/Socialist policies not at all unlike those pursued in Hitler's Germany, where an ever-more powerful federal government partners with and protects a corporate/big business elite while following a policy of redistributing the middle class's wealth to those individuals or groups from which it currys political favor.

Any one of the above circumstances should warrant serious concern about this country having a sustainable future anything like what we know now, but taken together, the threat to our continued national well-being has to be considered grave. Saying that "we've been through bad stuff before, so we'll survive this" reminds me of a reply a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam that I knew made when asked which war was the worst. "Hell, they all was bad. But the really bad one is the one you don't come home from; and the really, really bad one is the one that don't have a home to come home to."

[Grandpa Pipes]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

There have always been oracles, sages, seers, sooth sayers and so-called wise men who predict doom and gloom. Harry Dent is another one who makes wild predictions. He once predicted Dow at 40,000 but it never happened. I was at Dent's public forum here in COLO SPGS early in 2009 where he predicted doom and gloom and market collapse by August 2009, but it never happened. As I said years ago when we entered this mess, we'll work our way out of it. There have been wars, famines, plagues, storms, recessions, diseases, volcanic eruptions, depressions, mania and various and sundry other man-made and natural disasters over the eons; we survived them all and we'll survive this stinking mortgage/credit bubble. I see Kunstler as another form of Fox News, i.e., make wildly outrageous claims and accusations just to see the insane reactions of those who prefer to believe that some ungodly horror awaits around the next corner .... and to make some money from this form of fiction.

While it's true there have been soothsayers that miss the mark badly there is a class of what I call "Current Event Analyst" that take the information they find and by virtue of analysis forecast the likelest outcomes of those events. Every business has these gifted people as a means to guide the business.

James Howard Kunstler is one such person analyzing the event of the day.