He is good at putting the energy and deleveraging pieces together.
LINKThe majority of Americans may believe that the economic crisis knocked them off their destined course to wealth and prosperity, but the truth is that we were never as rich as we thought we were when cheap credit and cheap oil expanded our purchasing power unnaturally beyond the limitations of our productivity, of minds and machines, to generate an economic surplus.
If we were honest we’d admit, like a lottery winner who has spent all his winnings on cars and drugs, that the era of free-wheeling fun has come to an end.
We had a blast, but it’s over.
At least some of us had fun. The dot com speculators who sold at the top. The housing bubble speculators who got out in time. The Wall Street investment bankers who played it both ways, selling junk on the way up and shorting it on the way down.
Too bad for everyone else, for those who missed out, for the paycheck workers and the stock mutual fund buy-and-hold investors. The losers along with the winners will have to shoulder the burden of coping with cheap oil and credit era debris. The inherent unfairness of this outcome of the credit bubble era will pose yet another threat to the long standing presumption of American political stability and security that underpins the relative safety of US capital markets.
