Possibilities discussed include:
Of course it could be simply that the Fed can set prices for T-bills and not for T-bonds...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The US grows more food than is consumed domestically and China has a lot of people to feed and their per capita food production is heading south.
The EU is the same. If anything the EU is slightly ahead of the US in that the techniques and practice of horticulture are still twitching, barely.
In China, they're screwed. They can't feed themselves now, there's no hope of increasing food production domestically, and they will go through the transition period with falling per capita food consumption.
I expect minimal deaths from starvation in the US and EU. I expect mega-death in China from starvation and external and internal conflict (war) stemming from food scarcity.
Notrogen fertiliser is only a part of the array of products used in the "modern agriculture" I see all around me, and they are mostly composed of oil-derived fuels and petrochemical substances (pesticides). And, until the industry has been totally revamped, ammonium nitrate etc are petroleum products.
Thomas:
even in the most pessimistic of all possible futures, the world simply ends up buying fertilizer from places like Iceland and New Zeeland.
Because in your oh-so-evident future, it is sustainable to go on running agriculture the way it is (but with a differently-powered support industry)?
.. and as for the actual machinery.. even if it proves impossible to build a battery sufficiently powerful to power a tractor - well, post peak oil does not mean no oil, and what is available or synthesized is going to get allocated to critical applications like heavy machinery first, and the car loving public can putter around in electric minis and like it.
No-till, genetically engineered crops, soil databases linked to computerized and GPS/gallieo enabled farm machinery - all of this increases yield
"No-till"
Fine, but in what way does this necessarily link with
"genetically engineered crops"?
Which currently produce lower yields than non-GM cultivars...
"computerized and GPS/gallieo enabled farm machinery"
Why do we bother with this if we're doing no-till? Just to get rid of a harvester driver or two? Just so everything sounds hi-tech like the world you imagine?
If you have the right to produce this catalogue of wonders of an imaginary future, organic, peasant-farmer agriculture has every right to present a view of the future that some qualify as "unrealistic".
More specifically, what makes you labour under the delusion that organic farming cannot be industrial farming with comparable yields per land area to what you can get with conventional farming?
I think the likelihood of a failed auction is pretty low, and even if it weren't, it isn't the huge embarrassment people think it is. We've seen failed auctions in Britain, Germany, and many others over the past two years. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
So maybe China uses U.S. paper to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, which uses it to buy wheat from Ukraine, say, while the greenbacks used in daily U.S. transactions are devalued in accordance with the economy... I have no idea how you would make the division, though...
Currencies make it a damn sight easier to trade but they aren't necessary for trade.
Even if, during a panic, a flight to the US$ is a flight to junk, US$ denominated assets are useful in such a situation.
i'd love to understand why, if you don't mind taking some time to explain... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Less flippantly, if most major market actors "know" that the US$ is "safe" then that is what they will buy during a panic.
Moreover, if everybody knows that everybody else "knows" that the US$ is "safe" then the US$ really will be safe during a panic, at least compared to everything else. That's an unstable sort of "safe," though, because any time a sufficiently serious actor decides to call the emperor on his nakedness, it stops being safe.
Oh, and then you have the fact that most transcontinental trade is denominated in US$, and it takes time to change denomination on all your trade contracts, so you want to have a war chest in order to avoid being squeezed between short-term contracts with your suppliers and long-term contracts with your customers, if the reference currency goes down (or vice versa if the reference currency goes up, but for the US$ that does not seem a serious prospect...).
