This weekend James Vena posted a discussion on his LinkedIn group International Trade and Internet. He was refering to an article in Wall Street Journal on May 16th and announced the possibility of an important financial dip in Q3 of this year, a dip deeper that before.

The post did not come as a surprise to me nor the fact that shortages of raw materials would eventually bring the global speculative economies to a hold. In fact it was very simple to reach that conclusion. You simply have to apply the arithmatic that Dr Bartlett shows in his famous lecture posted on YouTube. If China has a steady anual economic growth of 9% and this extrapolates to a simmilar growth of consumption of raw materials, and doubling time of the exponential consumption is about 7 years of all these figures line up.

China’s growth started when western worlds had already dramatically and irresponsibly consumed their way through the Earth’s resources. Back in the early 70’s the Club of Rome already raised a flag to warn us that we could not continue our consumption rate as the Earth’s resources were limited.

Our global economies based on structural debt demanded growth and more growth to counter the evaporation of capital through interest. The consumer society was expanded world wide until the limits of today. We have reached the end of the line of the unsustainable global approach.

I myself announced that the big crash would occur somewhere before 2015. I still took one doubling time as a margin to fool myself in the hope to have time to contribute still with an alternative, Global Shift, that would be strong enough to become a global promise at the time the obsolete system collapsed. But the doubling time is indeed too far fetched and optimistic.

I never took the trouble to actually calculated the remaining Earth resources and plot them along the line of growing usage. Common sense learns us that the end of that line is nearby. How near has various variables, s.a. the growing pricing, the innovative push to reduce dependency, the reuse of materials that are already in circulation, the consumer reduction effect of crises, etc. But these would only delay the crash with months not with years or longer.

All the huge capital injections of governments were oriented to maintain the old system of consumption and allow for growth to continue without any consideration of its consequences on material consumption and its finite nature. Money is now made on speculation on shortages, keeping survival away and accessible only to the highest bidder. The power game of politicians may have postponed potential war situations but they were acting over the back of the global population without using their power to introduce a parallel system of sustainable progress. They are especially to be blamed for that. They have played the global game for the wealth of just a few and blocked out of individual greed and self interests the evolution of a new human organization based on true values but not money.

Money prevailed, not as a means for the large masses but as a goal for the greedy, supported by policy makers, politicians and executives of multinationals. Soon all the money they accumulated will be worth absolutely nothing, not even to buy a bread. Because to buy a bread someone will have to harvest the wheat, grind it, mix and bake the flour. Soon bread will be more valuable than all euros and dollars together. The true rich people are those who have grown used to be humbly self sufficient in food production, housing and clean drinking water. Back to universal basics will surely become the global issue in the next few months and years. China teaches us but are we willing to learn?