Theme: Productivity

Look. Go find data from three serious sources then talk to me.

I did a quick search for american economic independence and found a normie article for you that covers all the bases:
https://t.co/zmsHr4KMu3

Key Text (edited down)
“There are a couple of things going on simultaneously. First, because of demographic aging on a global scale, the United States is emerging as the only market over the long-term. Second, the United States is backing away from the world. It is reducing the American footprint overseas while its ability to intervene increases. What we have done with Special Forces, what we are doing with drones, what we are doing with satellite tech—the ability to reach out is higher than it has been for decades. But our need to do that with troops on the ground or maintaining the day-to-day order of the international system is going away. … We are already going through this period of new isolationism and here comes a trade warrior who wants to renegotiate every trade deal on the books, specifically fingering Mexico and China, two of our three biggest trading partners.

You put these three things together and you get a United States that is transitioning from being the global guarantor of security, global trade, and energy markets to one that, at best, has stepped back from it all and, more likely, even sees a vested interest in disrupting it to a certain degree.

At the same time, the U.S. is the only market. The split between successful countries and failed countries in the future is how well can you buddy up with the only country that matters? Everything else is going to be a free for all.

In the United States, you have the market, the financial capital, the labor system, the consumption base, the energy—and you can project power out, rather than have to defend your own borders.

That does not exist anywhere else on the planet, and is not going to exist anywhere else on the planet in the next fifty years. The only question in my mind for the last few years has been “What is the speed of the transition?”

Since the United States was the only country involved in the war that did not have fighting on its soil, it could impose a replacement system at Bretton Woods in 1944. Bretton Woods worked fundamentally differently. Instead of everybody having their own sequestered imperial economy, everything was put into a global bucket. Everyone who was represented at Bretton Woods could access that bucket for resources and markets. And the U.S. Navy guaranteed the security of the seas for absolutely everyone. This had never been attempted before.

The catch of Bretton Woods was if you wanted all this access, you had to allow the United States to fight the Cold War its way … and by the time we got to the end of the Cold War, you had over half the global system as part of this network.

Bretton Woods made … everybody in the same club. It told countries that they could not use military power to impress their will upon others. Free trade gave everybody access. Free movement of capital made the countries that were relatively capital poor, whether they are Brazil or India or Spain, the ability to function as strong secondary powers for the first time in history. All of these things in economic competition that had driven imperial competition for centuries were suddenly given for free.

You remove Bretton Woods and it all starts up again.

All of those secondary powers that used to be major empires all of a sudden have to start acting imperial again. And that is going to generate everything from energy crises to famines to military conflicts.

For the last twenty-five years, we have been backing away from that system. That has made the world a lot more chaotic and has allowed things like Syria, the Japanese financial crisis, and European financial crisis to happen. Had any of these things happened in the 1960’s or 1970’s, the United States would have stepped in with a massive financial and/or military involvement to stymie it. We are not doing that anymore so you have military conflicts around the world breaking out.

Today, we are at the verge of American withdrawal from active management. The secondary powers that have had their economic security provided to them basically free of charge now must start looking after their own affairs. Most of them are not ready. Of those that are, they are not the kind of countries that we normally associate with ones that we want to be world leaders.

This story is going to repeat over and over across the world.

Given the collapse of demographics around the world, every government on the planet is going to have to get along with a lot less income while they have to dish out a lot more payment for the retirees. There is only one country in the world that is an exception to that: the United States, because we are the only place where the boomers actually had kids. We come out on the other end all right because the millennial generation is large and by the time they are in their 40’s and 50’s, our demographics will have more or less fixed themselves. That does not happen anywhere else. Everywhere else, the population gets older every year, the population gets less skilled every year, and financial costs go up every year.

It is all downhill from here.  While the United States is losing interest in maintaining the global system, at the same time the global structure breaks down, the United States is becoming the only market in the world. And it is going to be keeping to itself. That is a triple hit to every economy in the world.

One way or another, the global system that we are all so used to—and that we just assume operates on autopilot—is going to break down.

In the big four shale fields in the United States, the breakeven price is about $40 per barrel. So U.S. shale—what we have always thought of as the really expensive stuff—is now cost-competitive with every energy basin in the world outside of the Persian Gulf itself.

“The United States is considered to be energy independent by the definition commonly used, which is that the country produces more energy than it consumes. (CD: note that we still trade different grades of oil but that’s a question of our refineries (eash to change) not our production capacity).”

Because of the demographic shift, the United States is the only country that is going to be generating a lot of its own internal financial heft. We have more of a balance between our retirees, our mid-age workers, and our young workers, whereas everyone else is aging into this mass retirement. The second piece is almost as important. As the world breaks down, money is mobile.

[Recently} Ninety percent of capital flight ended up in the United States. Because of American stability versus the rest of the world, we are basically importing everybody else’s capital and this is the only safe place to put it.”

(CD I wont cover the agricultural content because it’s too obvious already)