The Steampunk Future | John Michael Greer

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Feb. 5, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- For those of us who’ve been watching the course of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.

To begin with, as noted in last week’s post, the specter of peak oil has once again risen from the tomb to which the mass media keeps trying to consign it, and stalks the shadows of contemporary life, scaring the bejesus out of everyone who wants to believe that infinite economic growth on a finite planet isn’t a self-defeating absurdity.

Then, of course, it started seeping out into the media that the big petroleum companies have lost a very large amount of money in recent quarters, and a significant part of those losses were due to their heavy investments in the fracking boom in the United States -- you know, the fracking boom that was certain to bring us renewed prosperity and limitless cheap fuel into the foreseeable future? That turned out to a speculative bubble, as readers of this blog were warned a year ago. The overseas investors whose misspent funds kept the whole circus going are now bailing out, and the bubble has nowhere to go but down. How far down? That's a very good question that very few people want to answer.

The fracking bubble is not, however, the only thing that's falling. What the financial press likes to call “emerging markets” -- I suspect that “submerging markets” might be a better label at the moment -- have had a very bad time of late, with stock markets all over the Third World racking up impressive losses, and some nasty downside action spilled over onto Wall Street, Tokyo and the big European exchanges as well. Meanwhile, the financial world has been roiled by the apparent suicides of four important bankers. If any of them left notes behind, nobody's saying what those notes might contain; speculation, in several senses of that word, abounds.

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