Wile E. Coyote and Current Economic Trends

January 31st, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 10:35 am

Following Jim’s Modest Proposal for saving the USA from itself, I came across this satisfyingly splenetic bit of crystal-gazing from Jim Kunstler, which outlines some of the major symptoms of the next few colds the UK will be catching from across the ocean.

Kunstler remembers that the problem of sustainability is about more than carbon footprint moralising:

Others have said (and I concur) that 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the “modern” way-of-life.

It’s also inseparable from the directions economic growth takes, along with the foundations on which it rests:

The housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually, the median price of a house will have to fall back to the median income, and it has a very long way to go, perhaps 50 percent. Until that happens, houses will be generally unsellable. At the same time, of course, an anxious finance sector will be offering fewer mortgages and on much more rigorous terms, so there will be far fewer qualified buyers even for distress sales. And the median income itself may soon not be what it has been. The whole equation has changed.

…and has for its backdrop the quiet end of 40 years of market-led housing and amenity development:

One thing the public doesn’t get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle — it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won’t be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America’s dwindling manufacturing economy