Expert Warns: “Peak Oil Will Cause Transition Into a Slow Growth Economy.”

Why do we measure our success with those little bits of paper money? For that matter, how does one measure wealth? Do you measure them in investments? Tangible assets or resources? I ask these questions because it seems the people who run the central banks and our government seems to think otherwise. They run the country with the belief that when they run out of money, they print more and this somehow creates more resources. How sustainable can this be?

Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity points out that “any fourth grader will tell you, a finite system will not yield unlimited resources. But that perspective is not shared by those controlling the printing presses. And so they print and print and print, yet remain flummoxed when supply (and increasingly, demand for that matter) does not increase the way they expect. Is this any way to run an economy? Or a finite planet for that matter?”

He interviews energy and environmental expert and author Kurt Cobb who warns that our current economic policy suffers from a fatal degree of magical thinking: sufficient new resources will emerge if the price is high enough.

I think you put your finger on it: people who run our central banks and run our government policy think that money manufactures resources. If we just put enough money out there, it will call forth the resources. There is a little bit of truth to that, because very cheap finance made it possible for us to lift this $100 barrel oil out of the shale formations of North Dakota, Texas, and other places. That is not endless, and the high price puts pressure on the economy. I think this is where we are going to have problems.

We cannot sustain those high prices in the long run. We have structured an economy for cheap energy and that is not what we have. It has resulted in a slowdown that I think is the beginning of that transformation from a high growth economy to a low growth economy. In fact, we probably already began that in 2008.

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Source: http://readynutrition.com/resources/expert-warns-we-are-transitioning-into-a-slow-growth-economy_29092015/