Sounding an Alarm on Oil: In Search of a Presidential Energy Policy...

Michael Ruppert (FTW) Sounding an Alarm on Oil

Wall Street Journal

By Anthony Kaufman
04 November 2009

Michael Ruppert, at home with his friend, Rags, by Clara Tomkins. Star of Collapse, Author of A Presidential Energy Policy, et al

Independent journalist Michael Ruppert predicted the global recession. Now he's foreseeing an imminent energy crisis

Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Telegraph UK

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:12PM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Explosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

By Brian Murphy, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 2, 6:10 pm ET

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – When work began in 2004 to build the world's tallest tower, Dubai's confidence also was sky high with a host of mega-projects on the drawing board or rising from the sands.

That swagger seems positively old school these days. It's been tripped up by a debt crunch that has humbled Dubai's leaders and exposed the shaky foundations of the city-state's boom years — leaving the planned Jan. 4 opening of the iconic Burj Dubai with a double significance of hello and goodbye.

It will be both a debutante bash for a new architectural landmark and a farewell toast to Dubai's age of excess.

The Burj Dubai — a steel-and-glass needle rising more than a half-mile (800 meters) — may be the last completed work from Dubai's time of the giants. Most other of the unfinished super-projects announced in recent years, such as a second palm-shaped island or a tower to surpass the Burj Dubai, are either recession roadkill or being considered on a far smaller scale.

If they are still considered at all.

Dubai last week dropped what amounted to a financial bombshell — announcing its main government-backed development group, Dubai World, needed at least a six-month breather from creditors owed nearly $60 billion.

Peak Debt: A World Drowning in Debt

A world awash in debt

Globe and Mail

Kevin Carmichael
Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update
Published on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009 7:29PM EST


The financial crisis provoked a global front to stimulate economies through massive spending. But this was fuelled by a staggering amount of borrowing. Now governments are realizing that a new calamity looms - higher taxes and slashed social programs

or 220 years, through civil upheaval, global conflict and a depression, the United States largely kept its public debt under control.

But the world's largest economy may finally have met its match. In its bid to prevent the Great Recession from spiralling into a global depression, the U.S. government spent tens of billions rescuing financial institutions and automotive companies. In the process, the federal budget deficit swelled 220 per cent from 2008 to a record $1.6-trillion (U.S.).

The world's biggest economy has plenty of company: Seven of the members of the Group of 20 nations are on a trajectory that will leave them with debts bigger than 75 per cent of their economies by 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund.

It's hard to understate the fiscal cost of the financial crisis, which continues to send shock waves around the world. This week's move by Dubai World, a state-owned conglomerate that fuelled the United Arab Emirates' rapid growth, to withhold debt payments shows the financial crisis continues to put government finances at risk.

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

Dr. Frank Ellis vs Victoria Derbyshire on the Logic of Multiculturalism

by BNP: Standing Up For Great Britain
March 2006

BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in S. Africa & Zimbabwe

Multiculturalism under attack – again

Leeds University Lecturer Frank Ellis featured on last Wednesday’s (8/3/06) BBC radio Five Live phone-in chaired by Victoria Derbyshire, the theme of which was whether or not Dr Ellis should be fired for expressing views that challenge the prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

Dr Ellis had dared to question the logic of multiculturalism in an interview he gave to Leeds Student, the Leeds University student newspaper, and in an article that he submitted to the same publication [Time to Face the Truth about Multiculturalism, by Frank Ellis]. And for his pains he’s had loony-left students and amongst others the local LibDem MP for Leeds North West Greg Mulholland calling for his head.

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

Mail & Guardian, UK

Nov 17 2009 08:04

Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot. 18July 2006 :: PeakOil_RSA Briefing Paper

I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? 18 July 06 :: PeakOilRSA :: Briefing Paper

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.