Energy Efficiency

Previously I’ve commented on the crash of the US$; where America started as a world saviour (or was it just our first taste of spin-doctoring) when they entered the second world war.

Americans (and for that matter the rest of the world) were warned by USA President Eisenhower that corporations and the military were positioning themselves to take over, however, the relief of the war ending probably made people less concerned, the lessor of to evils.

But ‘world hegemony’ is not new, where tribes expanded and took over new territories.

The way the Americans did it was by a) disbanding the League of Nations and funding the United Nations, which basically was a group who drew new lines and divided the world up amongst themselves and as the USA was the major funder, the US% became the world’s reserve currency, the measuring stick and for every transaction, they took their cut.

However, greed being what it is, the new found wealth meant they could ‘afford’ more (usually at other people’s and countries expense as the USA has less than 5% of the world’s population yet uses over 25% of the world’s resources); as the population grew, so too did the need for more income to pay for the additional hangers-on.

But reality is that everything is finite; there is only so much potable water on the planet, arable soil and the energy and materials to make fertilizers; growth or more importantly population growth is required to drive demand and as more money was created by various schemes in America, this soon outstripped the real money; people no longer are able or willing to borrow from their future to buy stuff today.

So what does someone do if they can’t get the money they need to keep the system going … well in the USA’s situation, they just borrow more and if they can’t borrow it, they just print more and of course others looked away, but the doubt is there.

The Arab states were looking to the ‘Gulf’ as a new / replacement currency similar to the Euro; China – now the most affluent country – is looking for ways to have the Yuan as a more stable reserve currency and we see various fluctuations where we compare the AUS$ to the US$ but more importantly the Yen and the Euro; the English £ will soon follow the US$.

Banks look for trends or better still emerging opportunities where they can make money, regardless of the ramifications. One must wonder what backdoor deals are being done, the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’, the secret little clubs. Waring bells rang for me when the National Australia Bank invested heavily this year in an already collapsed American financial institution.

David Bloom (the HSBC bank’s currency chief) obviously believe the US$ is about to lose favour as the world’s reserve currency.

The global credit boom is bust but the financial crisis temporarily masked the effect; but as new markets emerge, non-productive countries like the US, UK and other old world orders will fall behind, Australia’s only saving grace at present is resources, we now import more food and other goods than we grow or manufacture.

The loss of relative wealth and economic power of the old guard is slipping irreversibly; the Euro, Yen, £ and Swiss franc and more ‘established’ currencies will be relegated along with the US$ as the world economy re-balances and China, Brazil or Latin America compete.

So what could go wrong?

Well the Yen is lent out less the 1% and the US$ is even less, China is using its money (a lot of it actually US$’s) to buy ownership in resource companies around the world, so where does the investment $ head, Europe is struggling with lower demands of goods, so Australia looks like the next best bet, problem is though, as experience shows all to clearly, when you have access to more money than you need, the value of things loses proportion and eventually that artificial growth ends and those at the end of the currency ‘chain mail’ pay, so we continue to boom, but eventually this bubble will also burst.

With much of our arable land under dams (to wash dust from our cars), or dozed aside to extract more coal and no income from resources, what will our children’s children be left with other than an even bigger dust bowl than it is today … only then will we rue the day …