Reflections on the Great
Depression of 2010

15 Mar 2050

We've come a long way...

A little over 40 years ago, western financiers and their advisors were torn. On the one hand they were quietly thrilled by the audacity of recent imperial outreach work in the middle east. On the other hand, they now felt a little nervous about the scale of the transfer of wealth closer to home.

The superpower of the day had stopped reporting on the creation of money (M3). Foreign investors rightly took this to mean that too much money was being pumped into the world's financial system. Their response was to stop building dollar reserves and to stock up on euros.

Institutional investors moved money into tangible assets. Speculation raged. Land, commodity and energy prices spiked. The value of the dollar fell.

Then as the unprecedented housing boom predictably turned into an unprecedented housing bust, something shook the banks. As house prices collapsed, borrowers started to turn round and hand back the keys.

Investment vehicles froze like a startled fox in the headlights. With the banking system over-lent and barely solvent, cheap loans evaporated. Buyers vanished. Shares were hammered. And, despite the injection of hundreds of billions of dollars by central banks, trust and confidence continued to wane.

It was then that some of us started to comprehend the scale of the speculative bets being made. Oil soared to $110 barrel. Gold screamed up to $1000 an ounce.

But the fat controller was spooked, not by the end of the boom with a bust – but by the possibility of violence on the streets.

Stoking anarchy in the middle east was one thing, but Anarchy in the UK was beyond the pale. Large numbers of people were going to lose jobs, homes and businesses. Protest would grow. Administrations both sides of the atlantic sought to extend detention without charge.

From a world of wasteful abandon...

The convergence of oil depletion, resource wars, climate change and financial meltdown, saw elites turn to private security firms for succor.

The financiers were certainly not preparing to queue at the fuel pump. Ideas were floated. Depopulation? WWIII? Penury? They had already decided which they preferred.

Meanwhile we had swapped social, spiritual and sexual communion for TV dinners and pornography. Climatologists warned that the planet was about to shake us off like a bad cold, but restraint on consumption was nowhere obvious. The UK government had plans for more roads, more runways, more houses, more power plants, more... prisons.

Our hunger for domestic energy remained insatiable. Whereas the Roman might keep a horse, citizens of the West thought nothing of tethering 100 horses to their chariot.

At the turn of the century we celebrated the wizardry of city finance, the low cost of goods made in Asia, and the excessive choice provided by the [super] market.

All this cheap abundance came at a high cost. Manufacturing, mining, drilling and agriculture were fast exhausting natural resources. Only it was now happening out of sight. Unpleasantness had effectively been banished. The London smog was now Beijing's problem. This was what we meant by globalisation.

Television was a daily diet of little of any real consequence. Our daily travails kept most of us excessively busy turning cogs in government or corporate wheels. In the commercial world, profit imperative remained centre stage. Politicians repeated the mantra of never ending growth. But, all the signs were that ours was not an exemplary way to live.

Worse still, we felt disconnected. Catastrophic human losses had disoriented us. It felt like reality was being fabricated. We were hypnotised. For a while, TV became a disaster movie of terror and anthrax and viruses.

To the dawning of the real world...

During the austerity of the Great Depression of 2010, something finally dawned on a great many westerners. Our fast living fast spending overstocked supermarket of a culture was only possible thanks to the continued exploitation of foreign workers.

The one way traffic of resources had always, in fact, been based on presumptions of superiority. Now, with growing demand for resources from cash rich China, we were about to experience the reverse flow of resources. Asia would now price the meat and fish off our plates.

We looked at our reflections in the mirror and we realised how precarious our position had become. We had been carried all these years, as if on a chaise longue, by an army of foreign labourers. Carbon trading and offsetting was just another convenient deceit born of a misplaced belief in our own superior worth.

We started to recognise that our profit driven work ethos had caused errors of judgement. It had accelerated the depletion of the very resources needed for man and planet to enjoy happy continued co-existence. Convenience, we now discovered, had a counterproductive side. We had built little to last.

In fact, we had done little to resolve the fundamental issues. The most fundamental of all was the entrenched injustice stemming from the private ownership of land. The UN's 2020 Vision Development Goals raised our hopes – a debate began to unfold.

Some of us looked for examples of sustainable development. Often we found it in places reviled or even embargoed by the west – Castro's Cuba for example.

We resolved to cycle to work, eat less meat, generate our own hot water and electricity where practicable. In small ways we relearned how to do things for ourselves – how to be more self-sufficient. We grew food. We travelled less. We shared more.

We were not luddites. We eagerly anticipated the convergence of technologies - the reduction of all communications into one chip set. We loved being able to download software to take control of another aspect of our lives. We loved the wireless freedom to roam. We revelled in the ability of new fabrics, garments and prints to harness energy and insulate against heat and cold.

We began to value clean air, clean unfluoridated water, seasonality in all things. We backed up or dug new homes into hillsides and covered them in soil and grass. We aspired to clutter free lives and relearned the art of designing products which had long lives of rich utility.

We were hopeful. We took time to meditate and developed faith in humanity, because without this faith there could only be more carrots and sticks.

And carrots and sticks, we knew, were meant for donkeys.

Oil had been a remarkable gift to mankind over an entire century. Oil was gone, but there were, of course, other gifts.

Ends | 15 Mar 2008 | The Leg

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Essential Reading:
Money Matters by Elaine Meinel Supkis
Austerity Britain (1945 - 1952) by David Kynastaon

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