It's too late to save the USA. Why waste money trying?

The real currency of the world is energy - that is what keeps things moving. Within a decade there may be NO oil on the world export market. We, and the USA, will only have what we produce ourselves. See:

http://www.energybulletin.net/38948.html

Where will we be then?

yep, we're going to hell in a handcart. so what?

as usual, cassandra doesn't have any ideas about what to do about it. that's because anyone not in parliament has no power to participate in national policy. there is literally nothing cassandra can do, nor i, nor you.

i have gradually come to realize that there can be a 'kingdom of the blind', and oz is one of them. indeed, it is the common human condition. but the one-eyed man is not king. he's "crazy".

Well of course. We've got the ironic situation of having house prices that are too high for people to afford in a country where there is virtually endless space and simultaneously a shortage of rental accommodation for people who can't afford to buy a house even though we've had a so-called housing boom. Well up go rents and would you believe, we have the real irony of interest rate rises.

When the Reserve Bank sees increasing interest rates as a way of controlling inflation it would know for a fact that the biggest contributor to inflation recently has been the increase in rental costs. So how does it make any sense to be putting up interest rates to control something that's going to become more expensive?

The tipping point? Well try an explosion of credit and its seemingly camouflaged derivatives giving us this transient, floating world.

The decline of the US Empire economically has been an on-going process and will continue. The ruling US elite uses military power to bolster their economic power. It won't in the long run work but makes the world a very dangerous place indeed.

On the nature of economic crisis, Marx identified both the boom and bust cycle - overproduction followed by decline - and the flaw at the heart of capitalism - the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

Passy is right, as was Marx so long ago. The problem James Cumes discusses is inherent in Capitalism. It's the way capitalism works and cannot be cured (although somewhat ameliorated) by any adjustments while retaining that form of economics.

The only solution will be when enough people understand the basic nature of the problem to form a political party with the aim of fundamentally changing capitalism. It's a big ask, since capitalism has been running for 400 years or so, but there are some encouraging signs in various parts of the world, unfortunately not Australia.

As is usual with economic articles the posts fail to recognise the real reason for inflation (and the so-called business cycle), the pumping of money into the economy by the FED, Reserve Bank and the like. Governments could stop inflation tomorrow by stopping the printing of money (including credit). This would also stop the money manipulators in their tracks.