Oil prices are now as high as they have been for three years. At this writing, Brent is $74.14 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate is at $68.76. These prices aren’t really very high, if a pe...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2018/04/19/why-oil-prices-cant-rise-very-high-for-very-long/
Our economy is a mystery to almost everyone, including economists. Let me explain the way I see the situation: (1) The big thing that pulls the economy forward is the time-shifting nature of debt...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/12/07/what-has-gone-wrong-with-oil-prices-debt-and-gdp-growth/
We have been hearing a great deal about IMF concerns recently, after the release of its October 2016 World Economic Outlook and its Annual Meeting October 7-9. The concerns mentioned include the...
Usually, we don’t stop to think about how the whole economy works together. A major reason is that we have been lacking data to see long-term relationships. In this post, I show some longer-ter...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/09/14/how-our-energy-problem-leads-to-a-debt-collapse-problem/
The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article called, Glut of Capital and Labor Challenge Policy Makers: Global oversupply extends beyond commodities, elevating deflation risk. To me, this is a...
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why cheap fuels act to create economic growth. In this post, we will look at some supporting data showing how this connection works. The data is over a ve...
We know the world economic pattern we have been used to in years past–world population grows, resource usage grows (including energy resources), and debt increases. The economy grows fast enoug...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/08/02/oil-limits-reduce-gdp-growth-unwinding-qe-a-problem/
We are used to expecting that more investment will yield more output, but in the real world, things don’t always work out that way. In Figure 1, we see that for several groupings, the increase ...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/02/08/our-investment-sinkhole-problem/
Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from burning wood or fossil fuels. While the evidence is not 100% certain, it ...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/17/humans-seem-to-need-external-energy/
The usual assumption that economists, financial planners, and actuaries make is that future real GDP growth can be expected to be fairly similar to the average past growth rate for some historica...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/07/13/plan-for-lower-growth-in-real-gdp-going-forward/