Politicians, bankers, wall street-ers, or sheeple?  No good news recently…

The G20 are meeting in London amidst rioting.

GM is likely going bankrupt with Rick Waggoner being removed as CEO by U.S. gov’t.  Chrysler is in bad shape, too…

AiG is still a mess, though many have given back their mulitmillion dollar bonuses.

The Fed is buying Treasurys with money is has created, so the gov’t is loaning itself money.  What an (inflationary) racket.

The Social Security outlook has gone from bad to worse.

Unemployment is still advancing.

I guess the brighter side: I’m going to Romania & Block Island this summer.  Let’s hope that TSdoesn’tHTF when I’m in Eastern Europe!   I don’t wanna live there!

I’ve been reaing about chess lately as a distraction from reality…

My spending habits haven’t changed much.  Still driving around the same amount, still going out to eat at least weekly, now I have a 2-yr. committment to DISH Network…

Congress passed yet another $800 billion partisan stimulus bill this week.  Good luck trying to raise that kind of cash, even with T-bills!

Chris Martenson was on WGBY (a PBS station in Springfield, MA), and you can view this abbreviated version of the Crash Course right here:

-33.84% The percentage loss in the Dow industrials, worst since 1931, third-worst in history.
-38.49% The percentage loss in the S&P 500, worst since 1937.
-40.54% The percentage loss for the Nasdaq Composite Index, worst in history.
126 The number of up days on the S&P 500 in 2008.
126 The number of down days on the S&P 500 in 2008. (The difference, of course, is that on the down days, the market lost an average of a kajillion points.)
28 The number of Dow industrials components ending lower on the year. The outliers were Wal-Mart Stores and McDonald’s.
15 The number of Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index members that ended the year in positive territory. This is the worst breadth for the S&P going back to 1980; second-worst was 2002, when 131 stocks, or 26% of the issues, rose on the year.
18 The number of daily 5%+ moves on the S&P 500 in 2008.
17 The number of 5%+ moves on the S&P 500 between 1956 and 2007.
280.80 The daily average point range on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
421.01 The daily average point range on the Dow Jones Industrial Average between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31.
-7.87%. The worst one-day percentage change on the Dow in 2008, which ranks ninth all-time.
-87.14% The performance of General Motors in 2008, making it the worst among Dow components. (There are issues here of survivorship bias — American International Group was removed from the 30-stock average during the year, and that stock lost 97.31% in 2008, making it the worst performer among the members of the S&P 500.)
1.78 The percentage-point decline in the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield, which fell to 2.253% by the end of the year.
6 The number of days in 2008 that rank among the Dow’s top 20 up days and top 20 down days in terms of percentage change. (The leader, with 10 appearances, is 1932.)
-17.7%.The performance of the S&P’s consumer staples sector — the best performer among the S&P’s 10 industry sectors.
24.03% The gain in the Barclays long-term Treasury Index in 2008.
15.66 The difference, in percentage points, between the lowest spread over Treasurys for the Merrill Lynch High Yield Index for the year, and the highest spread over Treasurys. (At its peak, the index was at 20.68 percentage points over comparable Treasurys.)
$61,000 The cost of insuring $10 million in U.S. Treasurys against default for five years. At the beginning of 2008, this cost was $6,000.

Sources: Dow Jones Indexes; Markit; Standard & Poor’s

Posted by David Gaffen at http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2009/01/02/by-the-numbers-how-2008-shakes-out/

Chris Martenson’s Crash Course is available on (free ISO) DVD now, so I’ve been cautiously sharing it with others.  I’ve also been volunteering to help setup his YouTube channel http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

The economy has stabilized–kind of–but is doing horrible.  The Dow has been bouncing around 8500-9000 for the past month, foreclosures are up, unemployment is up, and people are actually trying to save more and spend less.  There is a psychological element to it all as people are tightening up on bad economic news, even if they aren’t personally affected yet.  Also, most retailers struggled to break even this year and many bankruptcies and store closures are expected.

I appreciate Kathy’s post over at peakoilblues.com that looks at 2008 in review and how to have a decent 2009: http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/?p=1065

I plan on computing less, relaxing more, spending more time with the family, and  loving deeply.  Ask me how I’m doing in a few months! 

Blessings in ’09,

Jason

It’s good to be back home.  Gas is only $1.93/gal., a price I never thought I’d see again, and the Dow is around 8000, which means we’ve lost about 10 years of gains in recent months.

The only drawback of being home is that I’mm back to reading all the bad news–and Black Friday ads!–again!

The problem is that everyone wants more services, more education, more welfare, more health care, bigger military, and more corporate bailouts (from banking, to insurance, and on to auto makers), but we want lower taxes and even a stimulus check now and then, too.  In case you haven’t done the math, let me help you: it just doesn’t work!

Some of the news doesn’t make sense and other most is pretty depressing, so I’ve deleted most of my RSS feeds from my Google homepage.  I pretty much only read The Oil Drum and Chris Mortenson’s blog.

Interesting developments,  gasoline is at a three-year low.  It’s $1.99 per gallon not far from my house.  I never thought we’d see sub-$2 gas again!   Crude oil is down, unemployment is up, interest rates are down, and the Fed is still throwing fistfulls of play money around.  The exciting thing for the Fed is that when it creates play money, it magically becomes real money.  I wish I had that power! 

Anyway, these are certainly interesting times to be alive.  And to semi-quote James Howard Kunstler, “Pity the fool who gets elected to the Oval Office!”

One more thing: Chris Mortenson is releasing his Crash Course as a free (bittorrent) DVD soon.  Everyone on my Christmas list will be getting a copy!  Stay tuned for more info! 

The Dow has lost over 36% of its value so far this year… 

Of course, the economy has tanked, and banks that survived the Great Depression are falling.  Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and others are hurting or in dire need of a bailout.  The question is: should we bailout these companies that took on subprime mortgage risk?  Ideally, we shouldn’t, but it sounds like if we don’t then our economy will truly fail.  Maybe the next question is: Should we let the economy fail so we can start over from scratch?  It will sure be interesting to see what comes out of Congress this week.  It sounds like we’ll be selling our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.  How sad.

We can’t forget about the recent hurricanes that blazed a path of destruction through the Gulf of Mexico.  Many are still without power and at least one drilling platfrom sunk to the bottom of the Gulf.  Again, it will be interesting to see what the long term effect on crude and gasoline prices are.  There has been talk of at least some short-term shortages, but no one wants any hysteria.

I’m probably going to send an email to some friends tonight with a link to chrismortenson.com so people can watch his awesome Crash Course videos.  I’m still a Peak Oil disciple and think our economy and potentially our way of life is in jeopardy.  I don’t like to be a doomer, but that’s just how the evidence looks to me.  I’m just glad I don’t have any money.  I don’t trust Wall St., banks, or the dollar to be safe places to save!  Until next time..!

Last week, my wife and I went to Las Vegas.  Talk about a way of life that is unsustainable.  It truly is a patch of desert that has been brought to life with the help of cheap fossil fuels and the highly stressed Lake Mead (Colorado River) water supply.  Jim Kunstler is right that the Sunbelt (Southwest U.S.) will soon be in big trouble!

So, I just took one flight and over the course of the trip earned six additional free round-trip plane tickets.  I hope AirTran can stay in business long enough so we can use them!  When you pair all of this flying (my wife just went to Minnesota) with the fact that we own a big SUV and want to soon buy a hot tub, I question my own commitment to ‘living green,’ or at least preparing for the peak oil crisis I believe to be imminent.  I really don’t like the idea of unnecessarily consuming anything, especially precious jet fuel, but on the other hand, traveling around the world and ‘living it up’ while I still can still does have a certain appeal to it!

I would like to ‘do’ more in terms of preparation, but I’m not even sure where to start.  Interestingly, a non-peak oil book that I just reread yesterday had serious peak oil implications for me.  I just read Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter.  It’s a fable about a colony of penguins who were enjoying life as they know it until one penguin, Fred, discovered that their iceberg was melting and in danger of breaking apart.  This book goes through the process of doubt, skepticsm, and denial that many experience, and more importantly the process of how to communication the real problem effectively to come to a solution.

At a national and even local level, we are back to ‘denial mode’ as gasoline is less than $3.50/gallon.  I’m afraid that in the short to medium term (less than five years) we are going to see a major collapse cause by our floundering economy and a peak oil energy crisis.  A part of me prefers ‘denial mode,’ but in the back of my mind I feel that I need to be like Fred the Penguin and get the word out about Peak Oil so that preparations can be made and solutions can be found.  I guess I’ll find out soon enough if the book had any lasting impact on me…

2.  Another site related to our debt-based economy has a series of twenty (the last few are coming soon) videos that show how our economy, peak oil, and the environment will all soon come crashing together.  Not the most encouraging stuff, but it does show how there are many factors that will contribute to life as we know it in the next twenty years.  Check out the videos and articles at chrismartenson.com.

3.  Finally, it’s official: I suffer from Hubbert Schizophrenia.  I lead a double-life of being a peak oil doomer and hoping for a continuation of life as we know it (or an even better one!).  Thanks for the diagnosis Zachary Nowak!