They don’t have the cards?!?

I remember that when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis happened, there was this undercurrent (from the heterodox analysts) that what precipitated the inability to kick the can on debt repayments was an uptick on the cost of energy / oil.

So here was the simplified model of the idea: before 2008 Joe Plumber drove out of town and kept going until he could afford the home prices. He works remotely and he commutes 45 miles back into town to work where the clients live.

Joe could afford to live X miles from his customer as long as the transport costs are stable. Now, as the price of oil creeps up, it outpaces the amount he can charge customers squeezing his profits. When he can’t afford to fill his gas tank from the profit on his jobs, there are more and more further out jobs he just doesn’t accept to do. This basically crushes a LOT of marginal businesses at the same time it demolishes the stability of the home values farther from urban areas.

So basically, Joe plumber can’t pay his mortgage and living in the boonies sucks, and because the commute is so expensive for anyone else also, nobody else wants this house and he can’t sell it easily and not lose money. In the background a bunch of wall-street types have leveraged the whole financial / lending system…and hence the 2008 crisis.

the 2008 financial crisis wasn’t really a bubble after all. In fact, they suggest, house prices were rising rationally because too few houses were being built in places people most wanted to move to, not because of irrational speculation

The whole airbnb / zoom-boom / zoom-town thing is like an even larger out-migration than the lead-up to 2008 GFC. People weren’t driving further in the close enivrons around high cost of living cities, they were moving even more distances to low cost of living areas (sun belt + continental interior) that had been losing residents and had cheap land and houses. They don’t really live a daily commuting distance from their jobs.

https://www.cbre.com/insights/briefs/motm-the-zoom-housing-boom-is-coming-to-an-end-in-the-us

So…this shuffle was fueled by affluent young people who can work remotely and it was accelerated by covid. There is some evidence that people / economies who are tied to goods production + distribution / manufacturing / physical tangible goods could not flow towards cheaper areas. Most of the moves went out to 100-500 miles away from the original town not clear across the entire country.

Anyhow, I don’t know what I’m saying, but I somewhat wonder if the Return-to-Office mandates will end up being the exact same rug-pull that happened to Joe Plumber in 2008. It’ll trigger a crash. Now all these tech workers who bid up real estate need to flock back to their coastal cities and the current drive is WAY too far and the house they bought is dropping in value…and…and…

Rate of change

This is an informative graph, which charts the rate that the planet is heating. If the line is higher, it is increasing faster (acceleration).

Interesting quote for our times:

the additional buying power made available by added debt tends to lead to inflation rather than more finished goods and services. This inflationary tendency is the problem the US has been contending with recently.

Seems like you can’t print your way out of resource and energy limits.

…and make Mexico pay for it.

There is a whole branch of management theory about “narcissistic leadership”.

Narcissistic leaders are not always dysfunctional narcissist personalities…it’s also a style of leadership where the people in charge push their own ideas / agenda and dont really care about other people. Its essentially a leader who is in the job for their own selfish personal gains.

The benefit of narcissistic leaders is that they can be very magnetic people who become very popular. In management schools they basically accept that these people are useful for rallying support.

The danger is that if there is a power vacuum, they often step into top positions where there is no longer oversight / supervision. This is the cardinal rule: you NEVER let these people run anything. NEVER.

Once in a top position, they tend to discard rules, disregard others, do a lot of bad things in secret, sabotage all rivals etc etc, eventually leading to major corruption problems for any organization they head.

You can change the region area view to ‘nino 3.4’, which is a 5-month running trend of the nino area.

Explanation of the nino 3.4 tool is at this page:

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/nino-sst-indices-nino-12-3-34-4-oni-and-tni

This is one driver of the big disasters like storms, droughts, floods, heat waves and other bad weather that is all being amplified by climate.

The newest month for which there is a full 5-month run would be October/24 which showed a cooling trend, but in the past 60 days it kicked back to a dramatic warming /el nino conditions. Supposedly they forecast a 60% chance of a switch back to neutral conditions in March-April-May.

Under the line graph, there is a small button labelled “show T2 anomaly map”.

If you click that (terrifying) it visualizes how hot the polar regions are getting. Today is about 10-15° above trend.

16" of rain in 8 hours. Wow.

It is expensive (the most expensive in North America *) because it is low in fossil fuel generation AND uses a lot of renewables with variable production.

The only way to keep the system stable is to rely on fossil fuel generation outside the jurisdiction to offset the peaks and troughs that happen on short time scales.

Ontario actually pays the bordering states to take away excess energy, and they can do it because their gas fired generation can act in seconds to balance supply and demand.

The power EXPORT from the windmills costs the ratepayers in the province over $1B a year…

Similarly, many of the hydro projects rely on seasonal foreign demand. For example BC produces a lot of extra hydro in summer season, and there is air conditioning demand in California during those months. Its not as if the province can hold that water and use it for heating homes during winter.

(* because of unreliable supplies, large consumers like industry can’t actually operate in the province because they cannot get reliable contracts… This is about 1/2 million jobs. This is a big part of how Ontario became a have-not province, actually. I had multiple clients from Ontario’s generating sector who told me that they “did not want” to enter power contracts with penalties around outages, so if a car plant loses power they can lose millions per hour, and the power companies didn’t want to commit to anything. All things equal, big factories can move to Buffalo NY and pay half the price for Ontario energy… )

Basically, it’s expensive because of the costs of remote jurisdiction dependencies and the lack of true self sufficiency.