The End.

[Arbiter]

Or...they globally reinstate the gold standard after the crash of '10 or '11 and then cap the price at half what it is today. Fits beautifully with the globalised government intervention and socialist ideology floating around.

Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Barclays, all one big web of syphillis and trillions.

 

[StrongTurd]

Yup, indeed.

 

[StrongTurd]

20 reasons Global Debt Time Bomb to explode soon

We've already covered almost all of these 20 points earlier in this thread but here's a very nice little article putting everything in point form. I might add that the author failed to include a few notable time bombs merrily ticking away namely climate change, population growth and the real possibility of a Middle Eastern war.

This bit was new to me:

But now fears about the Great Recession are giving way to worries about something else: The Great Reckoning" when massive debts come due. Then the debt bomb explodes "and the results won't be pretty for investors or elected officials."

Forbes discovered the trigger mechanism in "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff: The "90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth." For 800 years "you increase it over and beyond a high threshold, and boom!" Well guess what? "The U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio is 84%." Soon, Ka-Booom! Depression. Kiss your retirement goodbye.

So going back 800 years, every time government debt exceeded 90% of GDP, the system crashed. Interesting.

This part is very well put:

Historians and behavioral economists tell us most investors are blind optimists. Investors cannot see bubbles from inside their bubble. Nor Fat Cat Bankers from inside their mega-bonus-bubble. Nor politicians from inside the beltway bubble.

Why? The optimist's brain filters out bad news. They know their dreams of prosperity will come true. Then, when they finally do see that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, it's always too late.

I will say it again, gently: A new meltdown is coming. The Great Depression II is coming, soon. And yet, I know your mental filters are working, blocking warnings of a bomb. I can even hear you calling me "the fool on the hill who sees the sun going down, the world spinning round" ... sees you kissing your retirement goodbye.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

And the end will be when somebody will try to enrich him/herself by doing some underhanded trading and stuff on the stock market, and everything will crash and burn...

 

[StrongTurd]

And the end will be when somebody will try to enrich him/herself by doing some underhanded trading and stuff on the stock market, and everything will crash and burn...

Quite possibly, yes. It would only take one large central bank like the Chinese or the Japanese to panic and start selling US$ assets to create a dollar crash.

 

[StrongTurd]

Double post.

 

[Nod]

Some reading on Britain's debt (25 Dec 2009): http://www.fxstreet.com/fundamental/market-view/britains-inflationary-debt-spiral/2009-12-25.html

The Labour government announced in the recent Queens speech with much fanfare a LAW to halve the public sector net deficit over the next 4 years. Lets leave aside for the moment that the Labour party is confusing calling an objective a law for purely political electioneering purposes in an attempt to place a burden around the next Conservative governments neck. The objective of the Law is to halve the deficit and NOT to pay down the total accumulating debt. What this amounts to is that the annual budget deficit of approx £185 billion for 2009/10 being halved to an annual deficit of approx £93 billion by 2013/14 which suggests Britians National debt is expected to increase by a further £510 billion to an approximate total of £1,300 trillion or 100% of GDP by 2013/14.

 

[StrongTurd]

GULF OIL LEAK CATASTROPHIC

There seems to be much more to the recent explosion on the BP oil rig in the Gulf than what was previously reported. It is now claimed that the leak is not a mere couple of hundred barrels per day in size but rather 25000 bpd. That's a massive number and it will be extremely hard to stop.

Whatever the outcome, this incident comes at a very inopportune time for the Obama administration which has only very recently jumped on the "drill baby, drill" bandwagon and it might well have far reaching implications for future offshore drilling projects and indeed even for the downslope at the back end of peak oil production.

The oil slick is now the size of Delaware. It will be Ohio-sized within days. Florida has declared a state of emergency. All commercial fishing in the Gulf is threatened. All widlife is threatened.

...

What might happen if the oil ignited? Oil should be at $100 before the end of next week. I suspect between $150 and $200 (maybe higher) this summer.

Worse: Napolitano and Salazar are already talking about huge claim funds. Massive class-actions against BP are starting. Insurance claims may well dwarf Katrina. The economy of the entire Gulf Coast is in jeopardy. From what I heard there is no real plan to stop the leak and no estimation as to when that will happen. (I might have missed that.) What happens when the slick hits Cuba? The rest of the Caribbean?

If the insurance claims resulting from this incident really become Katrina-sized (I've got no further info to substantiate this claim) then the US economy might well never recover.

I like the final paragraph:

It would be so poetic if history recorded that this was the event that marked the cliff edge of human industrial civilization. Maybe then someone will get the point. Maybe then we will find our hundredth monkey... And maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her -- and killed each other -- for... "You want oil?... I'll give you oil."

Source.

 

[boramk]

Ohio? Holy- How big is this spill? I thought it was just a tanker, can a tanker carry so much oil?

EDIT: It's a rig... Damn hope they clean that up pronoto

Oh and oil at $100 to $200 is sensationalist at best. Seriously, the Gulf of Mexico isn't our only source nor the biggest

 

[StrongTurd]

No, the incident happened on a drilling rig called Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and not on a tanker. The major problem is that the well head is more than a mile down. No such a leak has ever been repaired at that sort of depth. The spill is probably going to eclipse the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster back in '89 if it hasn't already done so by now.

 

[StrongTurd]

This thing is massive.

"This isn't a spill," said Kerry St. Pe, who headed Louisiana's oil-spill response team for 23 years. "This isn't a storage tank or a ship with a finite amount of oil that has boundaries. This is much, much worse."

It's a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could run for two months or more. If that prediction holds, much of the state's southeastern coast will become a world-watched environmental battleground that hasn't been seen in the United States since the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska 21 years ago.

As I understand the only viable hope of stopping this "river" is to drill a number of relief wells in close proximity to the blown well. Being a deepwater site, such wells cost around $100 million each and they're going to need at least three of those to stop the flow from the damaged well. This will also take at the very least two months to achieve.

Here's some pics of the platform going down.

 

[StrongTurd]

Oh and oil at $100 to $200 is sensationalist at best. Seriously, the Gulf of Mexico isn't our only source nor the biggest

As you might be aware, markets operate on sentiment with only the slightest link to reality, at least in the short term. If investor sentiment turns south after this then the impact of this explosion on crude prices will likely be far out of proportion to its actual reduction in oil production would like one to believe at face value. There's no way of knowing what will happen to prices once people start panicking.

 

[ToxicBunny]

Wait... so it was a few hundred barrels a day.. then 25000bpd, now its over 210000bpd?

 

[StrongTurd]

You've got barrels and gallons confused.

 

[StrongTurd]

Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery, said there may already be more than 9 million gallons of oil floating in the Gulf now, based on his estimate of a 25,000 barrel-a-day leak rate. That’s compared to 12 million gallons spilled in the Valdez accident.

Interior Department officials said it may take 90 days to cap the leaking well. If the 25,000 barrels a day is accurate and it leaks for 90 days, that’s 2.25 million barrels or 94.5 million gallons.

Mr. MacDonald and his colleagues at the Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science Department have worked jointly with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the past on oil spill tracking, and have shared their estimates with NOAA scientists. He said the NOAA scientists didn’t dispute the calculations.

A NOAA spokeswoman said the government estimate of 5,000 barrels a day leaking from the BP PLC deep sea well was based on collaborative assessments produced by BP, NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard….

John Amos, a geologist who has worked as a consultant with companies such as BP, ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC on tracking and measuring oil spills from satellite data, said NOAA raised its estimates to 5,000 barrels a day after he and his colleagues published calculations that showed the original figures were far too low based on the NOAA data. Amos has also previously participated in a joint industry-NASA study using satellite imagines to detect and track oil slicks.

Mr. Amos said the 5,000 barrels a day is the “extremely low end” of their estimates. He said, based on NOAA maps, a more realistic figure is 20,000 barrels a day.

John Curry, a spokesman for BP working from their Gulf coast central command operations, said the 5,000 barrel a day was a “guestimate.” “There’s a range of uncertainty, and it’s very difficult to accurately gauge how much there is,” he said.

“Guestimate” is a euphemism for BP’s whole effort — from buying a rig without the latest backup shut off switch (one that even Brazil requires) to opposing Interior Department efforts to strengthen the voluntary, “trust me,” self regulation the industry got under Bush-Cheney to their rosy worst-case scenario that they sold to the Obama Administration to their post-disaster claims that they could handle a spill.

So much for a few hundred barrels a day.

 

[ToxicBunny]

Ahhh yes, I see i did get bpd and gallons confused..

I still question the numbers though, they're so vastly different...

 

[JHatman]

How does oil pump itself out of the ground?

 

[StrongTurd]

These deepwater reservoirs are often under lots of pressure and the likely cause of this disaster was indeed an uncontrolled pressure buildup in the well. This together with faulty or absent safety equipment on the ocean floor caused a massive gas explosion.

 

[StrongTurd]

It would appear that this spill has already exceeded that of the Exxon Valdez disaster (although the latter was not the biggest oil spill ever recorded, not by a long shot). This sad fact does however put this disaster into perspective. Also, unlike the Exxon Valdez, this time the oil reservoir is not finite and the amount of oil being released increases all the time.

Gulf Oil Spill - New Spill Calculation - Exxon Valdez Surpassed Today

 

[BBSA]

So when is it "the end"