- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

But a drop of the external value of a currency by 50% is far from an economic collapse.

As to why the US$ should need propping up to trade in the neighborhood of purchasing power parity against the €, that has been covered above - 30 years of doing nothing but pushing the wrong direction in basic economic policy tends to weaken your economy's future prospects.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

higher arable land to population ratio

we have far more oil internally than Europe does (and while we use far more per capita we'll have more available to keep the minimum energy required to keep urban societies operating)

when things are getting quite bad the world over (when we're steep on the downslope of oil production) I see tribalism making a vengeful return, and for geographic reasons I think that bodes worse for Europe (it will certainly be bad for someone in north and south America, but no one can compete with American power locally, whereas Europe has a number of countries with equal weight to throw around, in my opinion meaning higher risk of social breakdowns, war, and thus damage to infrastructure that will be harder to repair post peak-oil).

Hard to know, though, as now days "little" proximate events like a nuke launch can easily wind up defining the next 10,000 years of human existence.

you are the media you consume.