Chris Caldwell

The economy is doing great. One day I go to the bank to borrow $300,000.00 for a home. The bank appraiser say's it is worth $300,000.00. The bank lends me the money to pay back over 30 years. A year later the bank examiner shows up at the bank. Looks at my loan and says my house is worth $200,000.00. The bank examiner says the banks collateral is insufficient. I go to the bank and say my house is not worth the money I borrowed for it. I want my payment and loan reduced. Short Sell The Housing Market. Where did the money go? Who lost? Out the exhaust pipe with the burned inflated oil. Who knew a year before? Who knows now? Maybe oil knows? Not only are you paying for oil at the pump, but everywhere else as well. Can you hear that sucking sound?

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Home Price Index showed a record decline in home prices in July. The 20-city index fell 16.3% in July from July 2007, and the 10-city index fell 17.5%. Suspect is the value of real property falling when everything else is rising. Make it up as you go. How is gold and oil worth more than real property? Squeeze! You wringing it out until it stops producing. What does that cost in balanced systems? Dry wells!

The data add to worries about when, and if, the housing market will recover. The housing slump has been the crux of the mortgage-market meltdown and credit crunch over the past year. This is what the focus is on but not the real source of the world economic woes.

Everytime oil goes up in price the oil backed dollar goes down in value. Every asset class, your home, your land, your retirement accounts, savings is connected to the value of your currency. Each rise and fall milks that value out of the US financial markets. Oil is a commodity that is finite in supply.


According to the bean counters arithmetic and speculators the supply is on the the downhill side of the bell shaped curve. Demand is out stripping this finite supply. Finite meaning when it is goes it is gone there is no new oil. Doubling demand every ten years will exhaust the supply of something that will be no more. You can't sell, buy or use what is not there. We are in the last minute or less of this supply of oil.

Oil backed currencies work well if your a net exporter. The US has not been a net exporter for sometime. It will not get better because as demand doubles and the supply quickly shrinks to zero the US will find it becomes a net importer very fast. The FOMC knows the value of US asset classes have decreased in value. Because financial institutions are over leveraged on the collateral value of these assets the FOMC had to require the banks to hold the losses as a higher percentage of reserve on deposit. This has shrunk the money supply. You do not have to raise interest rates to shrink the money supply. The problem with this shrinkage is no yield. This causes investment or liquidity to dry up. This sets up a cascade effect where the value becomes indeterminate. Liquidity dries up to zero.

What I would like to impress on you the most is that as long as this bleeding of US assets continues US assets will continue to lose value. Eventually the victim could hemorrhage and die. I thing if you look at your assets values through the years you'll see what I am talking about. Cutting fossil fuels out entirely would stop the bleeding and restore value to assets. This is a critical situation that needs bold swift action. You are in the ER and the patient is critical. Removing the cause of the bleeding is the only treatment that will help. Fossil fuels will continue to deteriorate the patient.

$700 billion spent on removing fossil fuel dependence will restore value to US assets and capital to markets. Transfusions of any other kind will only be bled out through fossil fuels. Freeing up the capital that goes into oil will provide an infusion of capital to every household and business in the US. The Real Cost of Oil

Everything moves on fossil fuels. There is two days worth of goods in your favorite grocery store. We have seen this manifest in natural disasters. Freight trains move most of the goods in this country. Imagine no fossil fuels right now. No heat for your home. No electricity for your phone, lights, computers, and anything that reguires electricity to operate. No fuel for tractors, cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, cranes, buses, generators, anything and everything that requires fossil fuels to operate. There is no fossil fuel. The day the earth stood still. Biomass will not make a difference. The last minute is here!