These reminds me of a policy taken by the soc dems here in Sweden back in 1990. All salaries, prices, dividends and so on were frozen. It wasn't very popular or successful back then. But the wage restraint of the responsible labour unions during the crisis made certain sense then, during a national fiscal crisis, austerity, floating exchange rate and an export boom. Today it makes no sense at all... except in the periphery countries which do not have competitive wages compared to either the core or RoW! So I actually applaud periphery labour unions in showing wage restraint. The periphery countries had wage inflation much faster than productivity growth, which taken together with the fixed exchange rate of the euro, is what got us here in the first place.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.