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Jeff Rubin
Born
in Canada
August 24, 1954
Genre
Jeff Rubin isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
Re: The Electric Car: Turn Out the Lights
The idea that we're going to somehow replace 300 million gas vehicles in US alone is outright insane. Supply-side lithium/ zinc and power generation is going to see immense strain, and none of these processes are entirely green.
Truth is, our cities are going to have to become far more compact whether we like it or not. While it is true that affluent people throughout the first world are living far
Read more of this blog post »
More books by Jeff Rubin…
“At the end of the day, we supported globalization because we wanted to be able to buy cheaper computers, cheaper vehicles, cheaper clothes and cheaper furniture. Wal-Mart parking lots were jammed with North American workers buying bargain-basement-priced goods made in China even if in the process they were shopping themselves right out of their own jobs.”
― Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
― Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
“A WORLD OF SLOWER GROWTH
AND HIGHER INFLATION If triple-digit oil prices are the true culprit behind the recent recession, what happens if oil prices recover to triple-digit levels or even close to them when the economy recovers? Does the economy slip right back into recession again? Everything else being equal—or ceteris paribus, as they say in the economics textbooks—that’s probably as good a forecast as any. Every oil shock has produced a global recession, and the record price increase of the past few years may produce the biggest one of all. But recessions, no matter how severe, are finite events. Ultimately, we face a far more challenging economic verdict from oil. Any way you cut it, a return to triple-digit oil prices means a much slower-growing world economy than before. And not just for a couple of quarters of recession. That’s because virtually every dollar of world GDP requires energy to produce. Not all of that energy, of course, comes from oil, but far too much does for world GDP not to be affected by oil’s growing scarcity. And there is nothing at the end of the day that we can do about depletion. Big tax cuts and big spending increases can mitigate triple-digit oil’s bite, but the deficits they inevitably produce ultimately lead to tax hikes and spending cuts that just make the suffering all the more painful down the road. Taking out a loan to pay your mortgage might defer your problems for a month or so, but in the end, it often makes your difficulties more acute. Borrowing from the future just turns today’s problems into tomorrow’s, and by the time tomorrow comes, they’ve become a lot bigger than if we had dealt with them today. Trillion-dollar-plus deficits, just like a near-zero percent federal funds rate, can mask the impact of high energy prices for a while, but ultimately they can’t protect economies that still run on oil from the impact of higher energy prices and the toll that they take.”
― Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
AND HIGHER INFLATION If triple-digit oil prices are the true culprit behind the recent recession, what happens if oil prices recover to triple-digit levels or even close to them when the economy recovers? Does the economy slip right back into recession again? Everything else being equal—or ceteris paribus, as they say in the economics textbooks—that’s probably as good a forecast as any. Every oil shock has produced a global recession, and the record price increase of the past few years may produce the biggest one of all. But recessions, no matter how severe, are finite events. Ultimately, we face a far more challenging economic verdict from oil. Any way you cut it, a return to triple-digit oil prices means a much slower-growing world economy than before. And not just for a couple of quarters of recession. That’s because virtually every dollar of world GDP requires energy to produce. Not all of that energy, of course, comes from oil, but far too much does for world GDP not to be affected by oil’s growing scarcity. And there is nothing at the end of the day that we can do about depletion. Big tax cuts and big spending increases can mitigate triple-digit oil’s bite, but the deficits they inevitably produce ultimately lead to tax hikes and spending cuts that just make the suffering all the more painful down the road. Taking out a loan to pay your mortgage might defer your problems for a month or so, but in the end, it often makes your difficulties more acute. Borrowing from the future just turns today’s problems into tomorrow’s, and by the time tomorrow comes, they’ve become a lot bigger than if we had dealt with them today. Trillion-dollar-plus deficits, just like a near-zero percent federal funds rate, can mask the impact of high energy prices for a while, but ultimately they can’t protect economies that still run on oil from the impact of higher energy prices and the toll that they take.”
― Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
Topics Mentioning This Author
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|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cover to Cover Ch...: Ryan's 2010 Reading List | 14 | 106 | Dec 10, 2010 05:12PM | |
| Science and Inquiry: July 2014 - Guns Germs & Steel | 34 | 133 | Jul 31, 2014 03:17PM |
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