K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Barreling into Recession
The latest economic news is striking. The U.S. economy has come to a
"virtual standstill." The bubble has burst and, with anxious global
markets registering the shock, other bubble economies worldwide
continue to shudder at the possibility that American consumers might
be forced to rein in their decade-long buying spree of imported
goods.
Though any reader of newspaper business pages has surely noticed that
oil news, oil deals, and oil prices have been front and center, the
role of oil in our new economic moment has been underemphasized of
late. It's hard even to remember -- now that the price of a barrel of
crude oil has hit the $100 mark and still hovers around $91 -- that,
in the week after September 11, 2001, oil was still under $20 a
barrel. Think of this as another modest accomplishment of the Bush
administration, helped along by its rash war in Iraq, which actually
took oil off the market. In a mere six years, we've gone from the era
of cheap oil to the era of pricy petroleum or "tough oil", with a new
spike at the gas pump expected as early as this spring. The results
are now there for all to see -- in growing misery at home as well as
stunning global financial and power shifts.
Michael Klare has long been ahead of the curve. In the late 1990s, he
was already writing about "resource wars" in the coming century; as
that century dawned, his next book, Blood and Oil, arrived; and now,
just in time for a new global era, his latest book, Rising Powers,
Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, is ready to appear.
You could say that he saw much of this coming and here he offers us an
assessment of the missing role that energy played in the bursting of
the American bubble. Tom
Something Had to Give
How Oil Burst the American Bubble
By Michael T. Klare
The economic bubble that lifted the stock market to dizzying heights
was sustained as much by cheap oil as by cheap (often fraudulent)
mortgages. Likewise, the collapse of the bubble was caused as much by
costly (often imported) oil as by record defaults on those improvident
mortgages. Oil, in fact, has played a critical, if little commented
upon, role in America's current economic enfeeblement -- and it will
continue to drain the economy of wealth and vigor for years to come.
The great economic mega-bubble arose in the late 1990s, when oil was
cheap, times were good, and millions of middle-class families aspired
to realize the "American dream" by buying a three (or more) bedroom
house on a decent piece of property in a nice, safe suburb with good
schools and various other amenities. The hitch: Few such affordable
homes were available for sale -- or being built -- within easy
commuting range of major metropolitan areas or near public
transportation. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for example, the
median sale price of existing homes rose from $290,000 in 2002 to
$446,400 in 2004; similar increases were posted in other major cities
and in their older, more desirable suburbs.
This left home buyers with two unappealing choices: Take out larger
mortgages than they could readily afford, often borrowing from
unscrupulous lenders who overlooked their overstretched finances (that
is, their "subprime" qualifications); or buy cheaper homes far from
their places of work, which ensured long commutes, while hoping that
the price of gasoline remained relatively low. Many first-time home
buyers wound up doing both -- signing up for crushing mortgages on
homes far from their places of work.
The result was metastasizing exurban home developments along the
beltways that surround major American cities and along the new feeder
roads that now stretched into the distant countryside beyond. In some
cases, those new homeowners found themselves 30, 40, even 50 miles or
more from the urban centers in which their only hope of employment
lay. Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2004 showed that
virtually all of the fastest growing counties in the country -- those
with growth rates of 10% or more -- were located in exurban areas like
Loudoun County, Virginia (35 miles west of Washington, D.C.) or Henry
County, Georgia (30 miles south of Atlanta).
At the same time, cheap oil and changing consumer tastes -- pushed
along by relentless advertising campaigns -- led many of the same
Americans to trade in their smaller, lighter cars for heavy SUVs or
pickup trucks, which, of course, meant only one thing -- a significant
increase in oil consumption. According to the Department of Energy,
total petroleum use rose from an average of 17 million barrels per day
in 1990 to 21 million barrels in 2004, an increase of 24% -- most of
it being burned up on American roads.
Let the Good Times Roll (into the Exurbs)
In 1998, when the bubble was taking shape, crude oil cost about $11 a
barrel and the United States produced half of the petroleum it
consumed; but that was the last year in which the fundamentals were so
positive. American reliance on imported petroleum crossed the 50%
threshold that very year and has been rising ever since, while the
cost of imported oil hit the $100 per barrel mark this January 2 for
the first time, an all-time record (though the price was once briefly
higher, as measured in older, less inflated dollars).
When that steady price climb, combined with growing dependence on
imported petroleum, was translated into the new exurban landscape the
economic bubble began to shudder. As a start, there was that ever-
increasing outflow of dollars needed just to pay for all those barrels
of crude and the resulting surge in America's foreign-trade deficit.
Consider this: In 1998, the United States paid approximately $45
billion for its imported oil; in 2007, that bill is likely to have
reached $400 billion or more. That constitutes the single largest
contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit and a
substantial transfer of wealth from the U.S. economy to those of oil-
producing nations. This, in turn, helped weaken the value of the
dollar in relation to key foreign currencies, especially the euro and
the Japanese yen, boosting the cost of other imported foreign goods
and so threatening to fuel inflation at home.
Meanwhile, two critical developments kept the cost of oil rising: a
dramatic increase in global demand, largely driven by the emergence of
China and India as major consuming nations; and a pronounced slowdown
in the expansion of global supply, due mainly to a dearth of new
discoveries and recurring political disorder in key oil fields already
in production. This meant that American energy consumers -- including
all those long-distance commuters with crippling mortgages and gas-
guzzling SUVs -- had to compete with newly-affluent Chinese and Indian
consumers for access to ever more costly supplies of imported
petroleum. Something had to give.
As the oil import bill kept rising, the value of the dollar kept
falling, and inflationary pressures kept building, the country's
central bankers responded in classic fashion by raising interest
rates. This naturally resulted in substantially higher monthly
payments for homeowners with variable-rate mortgages. For many
families already stretched to the limit, this would prove the final
blow. Forced to default on their mortgages, they then precipitated the
subprime crisis by, in effect, puncturing the bubble.
Even then, the economy might have had a chance had that crisis not
come in tandem with the $100 barrel of oil. By December, consumers
were cutting back on nonessential purchases, producing the most
disappointing holiday retail season since 2001. When questioned, many
indicated that the high cost of gasoline and home-heating fuel had
forced them to economize on Christmas gifts, winter vacations, and
other indulgences. "If gasoline prices go up, that means there's less
to spend on everything else," said David Greenlaw, chief U.S. fixed-
income analyst at Morgan Stanley.
The high price of gasoline was bad news for another pillar of the
economy as well: the auto industry. While Japanese companies were busy
rolling out hybrid vehicles and small, fuel-efficient conventional
cars, Detroit stuck doggedly to its now-obsolete business model of
producing large SUVs and light trucks, which had, in recent years,
been the source of most of its profits. Once the price of oil went
stratospheric, of course, Americans predictably stopped buying the gas
guzzlers, signing what looked like an instant death certificate for an
improvident industry. In 1999, for example, Ford sold more than
428,000 mid-sized Explorer SUVs; in the first 11 months of 2007, the
equivalent number was 126,930 Explorers (and even that puts a gloss on
the corpse, as November was one of the worst months in recent
automotive history). An auto industry in decline naturally means that
many ancillary industries will be facing contraction, if not
disaster.
Popping the Bubble
Then came January 2. Although oil retreated from the $100 mark by the
end of that day on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the damage had
been done. Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted, suffering
their worst loss on a New Year debut since 1983. Gold, meanwhile,
soared to an all-time high -- a sure indication of international
anxiety about the vigor of the U.S. economy.
Since then, stock market panics have hit major financial centers
around the world. Only a dramatic last-minute decision by the Federal
Reserve to reduce overnight lending rates by three-quarters of a point
before the markets opened on January 22 averted a further, potentially
catastrophic slide in stock prices. Many analysts now believe that a
recession is inevitable -- possibly a long and especially painful one.
A few are even mentioning the "D" word, for depression.
Whatever happens, the American economy will eventually emerge from
this crisis significantly weaker, largely because of its now-
inescapable dependence on imported oil. Over the past decade, this
country has squandered approximately one and a half trillion dollars
on imported oil, much of which has been poured down the tanks of
grotesquely fuel-inefficient vehicles that were conveying drivers on
ever lengthening commutes from the exurbs to employment in center
cities.
Today, a large share of this money is deposited in so-called sovereign-
wealth funds (SWFs). Americans should get used to that phrase. It
stands for giant pools of wealth that are under the control of
government agencies like the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Abu
Dhabi Investment Authority. These SWFs now control approximately $3
trillion in assets, and, with more petrodollars pouring into the petro-
states every day, they are projected to hit the $12 trillion mark by
2015.
What are those who control the sovereign-wealth funds doing with all
this money? For one thing, buying up choice U.S. assets at bargain-
basement prices. In the past few months, Persian Gulf SWFs have
acquired a significant stake in a number of prominent American firms,
giving them a potential say in the future management of these
companies. The Kuwait Investment Authority, for example, recently took
a $12 billion stake in Citigroup and a $6.5 billion share in Merrill
Lynch; the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority acquired a $7.5 billion
stake in Citigroup; and Mubadala Development of Abu Dhabi purchased a
$1.5 billion share in the privately-held Carlyle Group.
These acquisitions are just a small indication of a massive,
irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the
petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia. These
countries, notes the International Monetary Fund, are believed to have
raked in $750 billion in 2007 and are expected to do even better this
year -- and each year thereafter. What this means is not just the
continuing enfeeblement of the American economy, but an accompanying
decline in global political leverage.
Nothing better captures the debilitating nature of America's
dependence on imported oil than President Bush's humiliating recent
performance in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He quite literally begged Saudi
King Abdullah to increase the kingdom's output of crude oil in order
to lower the domestic price of gasoline. "My point to His Majesty is
going to be, when consumers have less purchasing power because of high
prices of gasoline -- in other words, when it affects their families,
it could cause this economy to slow down," he told an interviewer
before his royal audience. "If the economy slows down, there will be
less barrels of [Saudi] oil purchased."
Needless to say, the Saudi leadership dismissed this implied threat
for the pathetic bathos it was. The Saudis, indicated Oil Minister Ali
al-Naimi, would raise production only "when the market justifies it."
With that, they made clear what the whole world now knows: The
American bubble has burst -- and it was oil that popped it. Thus are
those with an "oil addiction" (as President Bush once termed it)
forced to grovel before the select few who can supply the needed fix.
Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, is a
professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College.
His newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics
of Energy, will be published by Metropolitan Books in April 2008.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174888/michael_klare_barreling_into_recession
The latest economic news is striking. The U.S. economy has come to a
"virtual standstill." The bubble has burst and, with anxious global
markets registering the shock, other bubble economies worldwide
continue to shudder at the possibility that American consumers might
be forced to rein in their decade-long buying spree of imported
goods.
Though any reader of newspaper business pages has surely noticed that
oil news, oil deals, and oil prices have been front and center, the
role of oil in our new economic moment has been underemphasized of
late. It's hard even to remember -- now that the price of a barrel of
crude oil has hit the $100 mark and still hovers around $91 -- that,
in the week after September 11, 2001, oil was still under $20 a
barrel. Think of this as another modest accomplishment of the Bush
administration, helped along by its rash war in Iraq, which actually
took oil off the market. In a mere six years, we've gone from the era
of cheap oil to the era of pricy petroleum or "tough oil", with a new
spike at the gas pump expected as early as this spring. The results
are now there for all to see -- in growing misery at home as well as
stunning global financial and power shifts.
Michael Klare has long been ahead of the curve. In the late 1990s, he
was already writing about "resource wars" in the coming century; as
that century dawned, his next book, Blood and Oil, arrived; and now,
just in time for a new global era, his latest book, Rising Powers,
Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, is ready to appear.
You could say that he saw much of this coming and here he offers us an
assessment of the missing role that energy played in the bursting of
the American bubble. Tom
Something Had to Give
How Oil Burst the American Bubble
By Michael T. Klare
The economic bubble that lifted the stock market to dizzying heights
was sustained as much by cheap oil as by cheap (often fraudulent)
mortgages. Likewise, the collapse of the bubble was caused as much by
costly (often imported) oil as by record defaults on those improvident
mortgages. Oil, in fact, has played a critical, if little commented
upon, role in America's current economic enfeeblement -- and it will
continue to drain the economy of wealth and vigor for years to come.
The great economic mega-bubble arose in the late 1990s, when oil was
cheap, times were good, and millions of middle-class families aspired
to realize the "American dream" by buying a three (or more) bedroom
house on a decent piece of property in a nice, safe suburb with good
schools and various other amenities. The hitch: Few such affordable
homes were available for sale -- or being built -- within easy
commuting range of major metropolitan areas or near public
transportation. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for example, the
median sale price of existing homes rose from $290,000 in 2002 to
$446,400 in 2004; similar increases were posted in other major cities
and in their older, more desirable suburbs.
This left home buyers with two unappealing choices: Take out larger
mortgages than they could readily afford, often borrowing from
unscrupulous lenders who overlooked their overstretched finances (that
is, their "subprime" qualifications); or buy cheaper homes far from
their places of work, which ensured long commutes, while hoping that
the price of gasoline remained relatively low. Many first-time home
buyers wound up doing both -- signing up for crushing mortgages on
homes far from their places of work.
The result was metastasizing exurban home developments along the
beltways that surround major American cities and along the new feeder
roads that now stretched into the distant countryside beyond. In some
cases, those new homeowners found themselves 30, 40, even 50 miles or
more from the urban centers in which their only hope of employment
lay. Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2004 showed that
virtually all of the fastest growing counties in the country -- those
with growth rates of 10% or more -- were located in exurban areas like
Loudoun County, Virginia (35 miles west of Washington, D.C.) or Henry
County, Georgia (30 miles south of Atlanta).
At the same time, cheap oil and changing consumer tastes -- pushed
along by relentless advertising campaigns -- led many of the same
Americans to trade in their smaller, lighter cars for heavy SUVs or
pickup trucks, which, of course, meant only one thing -- a significant
increase in oil consumption. According to the Department of Energy,
total petroleum use rose from an average of 17 million barrels per day
in 1990 to 21 million barrels in 2004, an increase of 24% -- most of
it being burned up on American roads.
Let the Good Times Roll (into the Exurbs)
In 1998, when the bubble was taking shape, crude oil cost about $11 a
barrel and the United States produced half of the petroleum it
consumed; but that was the last year in which the fundamentals were so
positive. American reliance on imported petroleum crossed the 50%
threshold that very year and has been rising ever since, while the
cost of imported oil hit the $100 per barrel mark this January 2 for
the first time, an all-time record (though the price was once briefly
higher, as measured in older, less inflated dollars).
When that steady price climb, combined with growing dependence on
imported petroleum, was translated into the new exurban landscape the
economic bubble began to shudder. As a start, there was that ever-
increasing outflow of dollars needed just to pay for all those barrels
of crude and the resulting surge in America's foreign-trade deficit.
Consider this: In 1998, the United States paid approximately $45
billion for its imported oil; in 2007, that bill is likely to have
reached $400 billion or more. That constitutes the single largest
contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit and a
substantial transfer of wealth from the U.S. economy to those of oil-
producing nations. This, in turn, helped weaken the value of the
dollar in relation to key foreign currencies, especially the euro and
the Japanese yen, boosting the cost of other imported foreign goods
and so threatening to fuel inflation at home.
Meanwhile, two critical developments kept the cost of oil rising: a
dramatic increase in global demand, largely driven by the emergence of
China and India as major consuming nations; and a pronounced slowdown
in the expansion of global supply, due mainly to a dearth of new
discoveries and recurring political disorder in key oil fields already
in production. This meant that American energy consumers -- including
all those long-distance commuters with crippling mortgages and gas-
guzzling SUVs -- had to compete with newly-affluent Chinese and Indian
consumers for access to ever more costly supplies of imported
petroleum. Something had to give.
As the oil import bill kept rising, the value of the dollar kept
falling, and inflationary pressures kept building, the country's
central bankers responded in classic fashion by raising interest
rates. This naturally resulted in substantially higher monthly
payments for homeowners with variable-rate mortgages. For many
families already stretched to the limit, this would prove the final
blow. Forced to default on their mortgages, they then precipitated the
subprime crisis by, in effect, puncturing the bubble.
Even then, the economy might have had a chance had that crisis not
come in tandem with the $100 barrel of oil. By December, consumers
were cutting back on nonessential purchases, producing the most
disappointing holiday retail season since 2001. When questioned, many
indicated that the high cost of gasoline and home-heating fuel had
forced them to economize on Christmas gifts, winter vacations, and
other indulgences. "If gasoline prices go up, that means there's less
to spend on everything else," said David Greenlaw, chief U.S. fixed-
income analyst at Morgan Stanley.
The high price of gasoline was bad news for another pillar of the
economy as well: the auto industry. While Japanese companies were busy
rolling out hybrid vehicles and small, fuel-efficient conventional
cars, Detroit stuck doggedly to its now-obsolete business model of
producing large SUVs and light trucks, which had, in recent years,
been the source of most of its profits. Once the price of oil went
stratospheric, of course, Americans predictably stopped buying the gas
guzzlers, signing what looked like an instant death certificate for an
improvident industry. In 1999, for example, Ford sold more than
428,000 mid-sized Explorer SUVs; in the first 11 months of 2007, the
equivalent number was 126,930 Explorers (and even that puts a gloss on
the corpse, as November was one of the worst months in recent
automotive history). An auto industry in decline naturally means that
many ancillary industries will be facing contraction, if not
disaster.
Popping the Bubble
Then came January 2. Although oil retreated from the $100 mark by the
end of that day on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the damage had
been done. Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted, suffering
their worst loss on a New Year debut since 1983. Gold, meanwhile,
soared to an all-time high -- a sure indication of international
anxiety about the vigor of the U.S. economy.
Since then, stock market panics have hit major financial centers
around the world. Only a dramatic last-minute decision by the Federal
Reserve to reduce overnight lending rates by three-quarters of a point
before the markets opened on January 22 averted a further, potentially
catastrophic slide in stock prices. Many analysts now believe that a
recession is inevitable -- possibly a long and especially painful one.
A few are even mentioning the "D" word, for depression.
Whatever happens, the American economy will eventually emerge from
this crisis significantly weaker, largely because of its now-
inescapable dependence on imported oil. Over the past decade, this
country has squandered approximately one and a half trillion dollars
on imported oil, much of which has been poured down the tanks of
grotesquely fuel-inefficient vehicles that were conveying drivers on
ever lengthening commutes from the exurbs to employment in center
cities.
Today, a large share of this money is deposited in so-called sovereign-
wealth funds (SWFs). Americans should get used to that phrase. It
stands for giant pools of wealth that are under the control of
government agencies like the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Abu
Dhabi Investment Authority. These SWFs now control approximately $3
trillion in assets, and, with more petrodollars pouring into the petro-
states every day, they are projected to hit the $12 trillion mark by
2015.
What are those who control the sovereign-wealth funds doing with all
this money? For one thing, buying up choice U.S. assets at bargain-
basement prices. In the past few months, Persian Gulf SWFs have
acquired a significant stake in a number of prominent American firms,
giving them a potential say in the future management of these
companies. The Kuwait Investment Authority, for example, recently took
a $12 billion stake in Citigroup and a $6.5 billion share in Merrill
Lynch; the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority acquired a $7.5 billion
stake in Citigroup; and Mubadala Development of Abu Dhabi purchased a
$1.5 billion share in the privately-held Carlyle Group.
These acquisitions are just a small indication of a massive,
irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the
petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia. These
countries, notes the International Monetary Fund, are believed to have
raked in $750 billion in 2007 and are expected to do even better this
year -- and each year thereafter. What this means is not just the
continuing enfeeblement of the American economy, but an accompanying
decline in global political leverage.
Nothing better captures the debilitating nature of America's
dependence on imported oil than President Bush's humiliating recent
performance in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He quite literally begged Saudi
King Abdullah to increase the kingdom's output of crude oil in order
to lower the domestic price of gasoline. "My point to His Majesty is
going to be, when consumers have less purchasing power because of high
prices of gasoline -- in other words, when it affects their families,
it could cause this economy to slow down," he told an interviewer
before his royal audience. "If the economy slows down, there will be
less barrels of [Saudi] oil purchased."
Needless to say, the Saudi leadership dismissed this implied threat
for the pathetic bathos it was. The Saudis, indicated Oil Minister Ali
al-Naimi, would raise production only "when the market justifies it."
With that, they made clear what the whole world now knows: The
American bubble has burst -- and it was oil that popped it. Thus are
those with an "oil addiction" (as President Bush once termed it)
forced to grovel before the select few who can supply the needed fix.
Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, is a
professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College.
His newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics
of Energy, will be published by Metropolitan Books in April 2008.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174888/michael_klare_barreling_into_recession