Energy, Finance and the End of Growth
* Report: perfect storm: energy, finance and the end of growth. By Tim Morgan. Tullet Prebon. 2012.
URL = http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
Contents
part one: the end of an era
the four factors which are bringing down the curtain on growth
The economy as we know it is facing a lethal confluence of four critical factors – the fall-out from the biggest debt bubble in history; a disastrous experiment with globalisation; the massaging of data to the point where economic trends are obscured; and, most important of all, the approach of an energy-returns cliff-edge.
part two: this time is different
the implosion of the credit super-cycle
The 2008 crash resulted from the bursting of the biggest bubble in financial history, a ‘credit super-cycle’ that spanned three decades. Why did this happen?
part three: the globalisation disaster
globalisation and the western economic catastrophe
The Western developed nations are particularly exposed to the adverse trends explored in this report, because globalisation has created a lethal divergence between burgeoning consumption and eroding production, with out-of-control debt used to bridge this widening chasm.
part four: loaded dice
how policies have been blind-sided by distorted data
The reliable information which policymakers and the public need if effective solutions are to be found is not available. Economic data (including inflation, growth, GDP and unemployment) has been subjected to incremental distortion, whilst information about government spending, deficits and debt is extremely misleading.
part five: the killer equation
the decaying growth dynamic
The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel."