The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
Yes, any shortage of energy we have today is more or less entirely voluntary on a species level.
You can blame Moloch or wall Street or whatever for making it functionally impossible for whatever multipolar market-actor reasons, but with the right choices we could have plenty of energy today, just as we could (but don't) feed everyone on Earth.
Eventually the will bea point where it does actually become physically impossible to generate that much power without melting the Earth's crust or boiling the seas, but that's a long, long way away.
Seems more correct to say with different choices rather than the right choices.
For example plenty of energy likely means far more nuclear reactors, and the unfortunately truth is that most can be used to breed plutonium, so while we could be living with energy abundance, we also at least slightly increase the chance of global nuclear war. (IMO probably still worth it but it's no longer a super clear right/wrong).
With food, the problem is not producing it, it's the distribution. You aren't going to get it distributed in many countries that need it without overthrowing governments which will include lots of killing and bombing. Now it being the right choice to feed everyone is much murkier.
It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.
Everybody assumes that correction will happen via crash. And perhaps that's the case for stock market prices. But while we have had housing price crashes in the past, that's very much the exception. House prices are very sticky, people are irrationally unwilling to sell their houses for a loss. I've seen several markets where real estate nominal prices stayed roughly flat for a couple decades, moving the market from "overpriced" to "underpriced" without anybody really noticing.
"Just build more houses" is the fix for many (but not all) of the US economy problems. Not sure about the UK, but I wouldn't be surprised if it applies there too.
Home building is indeed the solution, but it can never outrun the printing presses. Ultimately there is a bare minimum cost of a house too. If people are too poor to pay for that, the home building pipeline will have to stall. People need to be productive and competitive enough in the economy to be able to pay for all the new houses being built.
People want absolute values to be ever increasing too, but they'd settle for nominal values to be ever increasing. This violates the law of supply and demand, and common sense about depreciation and changing demographics. We should experience falling prices as material wealth increases in the world. Governments and money lenders hate this because they want to print off as much money as they possibly can get away with (as if they know how much that amount even is). They can't stand the idea of someone being rewarded for conserving their own resources, when those resources could be siphoned off for some other bullshit.
Despite talking about physical goods and services, there seems to be little in the article that goes into any detail about concrete reality, so I didn’t get much out of it other than a vague sense of foreboding.
Some nits:
The “energy cost of energy” metric seems a bit suspect and I wonder how it’s calculated. One reason I would expect it to go up because solar power is getting cheaper, and therefore it makes more sense to “waste” it on overprovisioning. Another is that the costs of fossil fuel are getting higher in some places. More detail is needed to see if it means anything.
Stock market valuations are in large part based on expectations about future growth. Perhaps these expectations are wrong? But I’m not sure that tells us anything one way or another about the wealth we already have. Perhaps some better way is needed to understand the present and past.
While Dr. Morgan makes a few reasonable points about "real wealth" (aka points I agree with), he also hand waves many assumptions which are, at best, questionable.
Finally, be aware that he's been predicting imminent economic collapse for almost 20 years now. He'll probably be correct someday (assuming he lives a very long life), but that doesn't mean much IMO.
>> Rather, what we need to do is to calibrate the physical economy such that we can benchmark the monetary against the material. This enables us to avoid the futility of measuring the monetary only against itself.
That may be 100% true, but the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and in this case, gold has been doing awkwardly well under current conditions.
By the article's _own_ parable: if you were starving on a desert island, you wouldn't be relieved to be airdropped a briefcase full of gold. You're benchmarking money to money.
IMO, combining gold money arguments with observations about the price of gold is contradictory. If gold is money, then you should never wonder about the "price of gold" as gold should be used to price things.
The goal of post-modern society is to create wealth without additional energy costs.
If I write software that schedules health care more efficiently, I've created value and therefore wealth. If I make a video game that's more fun than the previous generation of games, likewise.
Kids glued to "fun" (addictive) video games on their phones is not wealth, it is the feeder channel for these "efficient" health "care" schedulers, in your other example.
That is, IMO, arguable. Entertainment has always been valued by humans. It is just the non-physical equivalent of fancy clothing or jewelry. And clothing/jewelry is most certainly a form of wealth. So, it can be argued that things that you can buy that make you feel better emotionally or increase your social status are forms of wealth.
That some forms of entertainment may be detrimental if abused in the long-term is an orthogonal topic.
> * Energy physics puts an upper bound on material wealth
Sure, but that's such a high upper bound that it may as well be false from our perspective in 2025. We use a miniscule fraction of the energy we receive from the sun.
We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.
Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.
I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.
well written article but he doesn't use data to prove his point that energy is what drives the economy.
you look at the UK example[0] - energy production / consumption has been going down. likewise quality of life has been going down. but yet if you listen to the economists / politicians they will tell economy is doing okay.
energy and how its used is what determines how successful an economy is. & like the prof says - money alone doesn't produce goods. energy does. money is just a transfer mechanism - which on its own is useless.
> On this basis, global material prosperity has grown by 25% since 2004, which is nowhere near claimed “growth” of 96% in real GDP over that period. Moreover, the 25% rise in aggregate prosperity has been matched by the rise in population numbers over those twenty years.
This assumes that the GDP growth and the material prosperity are in a simple linear relation. I don't think this makes sense.
A small solar panel that can charge battery-powered night lights and a couple of cell phones produces negligible energy. Just a few minutes of air-conditioning consumption for a house in the US. Yet it can completely transform the life of households in an African town.
Yeah. Feels like a "labour theory of value" but for energy, with the same drawbacks. Stock markets are imperfect measures of value but "it's the worst system of value allocation apart from all others that have been tried" applies here (and if you did want to come up with a "better" measure of value than stock prices, it would probably be a "hypothetical value created if the people making investment decisions made fewer mistakes and more broadly represented aggregate human wants" rather than assuming the impossibility of efficiency improvements and indexing value to commoditised energy and labour indices).
Another bold, unsupported claim in the OP is that renewables and nuclear cannot materially slow the effects of resource depletion. I mean, yes, there's not an infinite amount of land, rare earth metals and the sun won't last forever, but the resource depletion absolutely looks different from an internal combustion engine (and an efficient ICE or gas power station is the same outcome for lower material cost than an inefficient one, for that matter)
It doesn't make sense. But that is exactly how policy makers justify how "the economy is doing good!" The GDP was never intended to be used as an indicator of national economic well being; only a simple statistic to measure how much money is exchanged between people.
But it only takes a few examples counter to what a public service should do to show that GDP reliance creates anti-patterns. e.g. rising healthcare costs is good for the GDP while universal healthcare is bad.
First, you are correct. However, the reason GDP is used as a proxy metric for economic growth because it's convenient. Doing so does make a few assumptions though, foremost of which is that the structure of the economy will change very little from year to year. If that is so, than a rise in GDP should correspond to a rise in economic prosperity (and by extension wealth). Thus, using GDP change to measure changes in prosperity works (more or less) year by year. but the longer the periods you compare (5 years, 10 years, 20 years), the less meaningful the number becomes.
Yup. A substantial proportion of the difference in GDP between the EU and the US relates to how health care values are assigned. In the EU (for public healthcare), it's at cost while in the US it's the final transaction price. It would be interesting to deflate US GDP against the same metric used in the EU to get more accurate figures, but I've never seen such an analysis.
The GDP number is an example of "all models are wrong, some are useful". You'll inevitably oversimplify at least _something_ if you try to boil down the economy to a single number.
GDP is still useful. I don't think there are examples of countries that had drops in GDP without being in deep trouble. It exploits the fact that economies [almost] never change quickly, so when you're looking at just one country, the GDP is a reasonable indicator of the overall state.
Where the GDP sucks is when people try to compare the _rates_ of GDP growth between countries.
I agree. It's a tool and it has its uses. I simply think this current decade has had a lot if "everything is a nail" approach to it. With gdp being used to hide a massive slowdown and contraction on the labor market and the rest of the "real" economy.
I think the modern indicator is how GDP growth last year would have been almost entirely flat had it not been for the massive amounts of AI spending. Something that as of now (regardless of thoughts of long term job aspects) is only constrainting the material market.
I don't fault the author for that usage because I know they are basically using the same language such policy makers use, and using it to disprove a really odd (but common) usage of GDP as this way to measure long term prosperity.
> This assumes that the GDP growth and the material prosperity are in a simple linear relation. I don't think this makes sense.
Yeah, I felt that this was the weakest point of the argument presented.
I do like calling out the absurdity of "wealth" in various assets though, as well as the notion that we need to map this "wealth" back ultimately to energy (which makes sense, as we need energy for basically everything).
"Yet you don’t need SEEDS analysis to know that the British economy itself is at an advanced stage of disintegration."
"Put another way, very little of the world’s supposedly enormous wealth actually exists in any meaningful sense."
Citation overwhelmingly needed. His claim that the economy is disintegrating is supported by the argument that: "you know, just look around." But what we're looking around and seeing is wealth accumulating at the very top.
The mistake he's making is thinking that if most people aren't doing well, then nobody is doing well, that the 1% aren't even really rich because their wealth is all a fiction.
In fact, wealthy people are really, actually wealthy. They are unimaginably wealthy. It is literally beyond the author's imagination how wealthy they are, leading him to the truly absurd conclusion that they're not really even wealthy at all.
"Nobody could be that wealthy, could they?!" Yes, my dude. Yes, they actually can be that wealthy. Indeed, they actually are.
Ok, this seems like a good post. At the end of the day, what do I, as a single investor, do? I'm 50 years old, 2 kids in college, I have a $300,000 mortgage on a house presently worth $1M. I have $300,000 cash and an open eTrade account.
What do I do with the cash?
A) keep it as cash
B) Pay off the mortgage
C) Buy some QQQ
D) Buy some T-notes
E) there is no E. I am a simple man. Let's start with a simple solution.
A - Never. Cash with no return is just decaying with inflation.
B - Depends on interest. If your mortgage interest is lower than no-risk interest (e.g. SGOV) then no, you'd be throwing money away by paying off the mortgage. If OTOH your mortgage interest is substantially higher than no-risk interest, then yes, paying it off (or at least overpaying monthly) is a good idea. There is a gray area if your mortgage interest is slightly higher than no-risk return right now. Numerically it makes sense to pay the mortgage, but there is also a safety aspect in keeping the liquid cash on hand.
So that leaves some combination of C & D. The best ratio there is a harder question to answer.
C. it's the only one that has you in the arena. There's no guaranteed outcome, but money itself is a team-sport.
I'm a simple man myself, so I'm answering in order to verify my own reasoning.
A. will have negative returns from inflation. D. defends against inflation but is too conservative. B. There's arguably negative value in holding more equity in terms of opportunity cost since you already have > 200% position in equity. source: I believe this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4H9LL7A-nQ
Keep 12 months living expenses in cash/t-bills. Depending on your age, increase to 24 mos if kids etc
If cash remaining -> if mortgage rate >4% pay down mortgage (locking in 4%+ yield). If you want to average 50% towards mortgage 50% VOO (S&P Index fund)
I enjoyed the linked post overall, but want to highlight one thing:
>The real insight: paying down your mortgage reduces your monthly burn, which reduces the chance you’ll need to sell stocks in a downturn. It’s not about math, it’s about resilience.
This seems more emotional than anything. The feeling of paying off a mortgage and being relieved of some monthly burden. But there will always be monthly burdens, that's life. Everyone needs monthly cashflow. So the insight of putting extra cashflow into a mortgage to offset the burden is just reversing the purpose of why you got the mortgage in the first place? What I mean is money has time value, a mortgage is paying for the time. So being in a hurry doesn't automatically insightfully make sense.
The post is all about resilience, I suppose my point is that there will always be a need for monthly costs, so trying to be free of the stress of a monthly cost -a time cost- is overly emotional in my view.
If I have $300K on my mortgage and a monthly payment of $2000, and I pay an extra $100K, that 100K reduces the principal of the mortgage by $100K, and so the mortgage will run for several years less than it would have. But my monthly payment is still $2000 for the years I have left on it.
There are other ways to structure it - you can pay ahead, paying next month's payment this month so that you don't have to pay anything next month if you don't want to. Can you pay $100K so that you don't have to pay the next 50 months' payments? I don't know, but probably. You have to be clear with them what you are trying to do, though.
I don't have any answers but you definitely need some cash. How much? I have no idea.
With the rest, I would put some in a vanguard account. And then invest where? I want to say index funds but the market is very strange. The biggest companies have too much wealth soaked up. Is this sustainable? Is this a bubble? Who knows...
In your spreadsheet , you have to include what is expected appreciation on the house, what is the mortgage interest rate, how much longer you have on that mortgage, your personal opinion on how well QQQ is going to do, how much you’re gonna want cash - your emergency fund for a rainy day, should be some N months of living expenses. Mix that all up in the spreadsheet, and come up with whatever feels good to you. There is no right answer, and my time machine isn't any better than yours, or anyone else's.
I would buy some physical gold as the ultimate hedge (don't invest ALL of you money!), and invest everything else in some highly rated fund. Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.
Trading yourself is just not worth it. You'll lose money long-term. An exception here is if you want to hold shares of a company long-term as a form of investment.
If your mortgage is a fixed rate at a reasonable interest, then keep it. If there's a high inflation episode, you'll be able to benefit from it.
maybe learn about options. do some practice trading. Theory is one thing, patience and common sense are other things. Above all be very, very careful, but have fun.
The practice part is important but when you are comfortable, nibble a little with small amounts.
Yeah, my rule when I got started was "If I ever lose a lifetime aggregated $3000 in the markets, then the markets are not for me". Then once you're ahead in the markets, it's fine to continue trading.
(Note: I ended up breaking my rule by continuing to trade after losing $5000, but then did great in the markets anyway in the long run LOL)
also if the losses are in a non-IRA, they are (or were? talk to your cpa) tax deductible against other gains. But is it all worth even one lost night of sleep. Nah.... of course, there are ways of covering bets with options but that is professional level stuff.
I made the mistake of gambling on 3x gas and oil futures once. Problem was, I got lucky a couple of times. They got all my money back and then some eventually. Gains based on luck can be toxic! Unless it's a well thought out statistical approach, maybe- but that would be a full time job.
Why is this hard? Calculate the expected value of each option, do a risk analysis, apply risk factor (based on your own tolerance), biggest number wins.
Risk analysis depends highly on your views of the world? "Are we in/heading towards a recession?""will the stock market continue its explosive growth"? "Do I as a person favor stability or prefer to take a bit of risk?"
Well yes, precisely. Which is why nobody can give this guy an objective answer to his question -- it's entirely dependent on him and his views. That being said, there is absolutely an analytical way to approach the problem, which is what I outlined.
I imagine that someone asking for advice isn't trying to take any comment wholesale. It's to help answer one of the above questions that they currently cannot right now.
For an internet forum, I've found it easier to ask direct, actionable questions like "should I buy this couch" than "is [couch brand] good?". Even if what I really wanted to get at was the former. Maybe the brand isnt good but the price is a steal. Maybe the brand is so utterly trash that you couldn't give it away. But putting the brand into the question instead of a direct 'thing' changes the discourse.
This is a great article. It clearly explains what people like Nate Hagens have been saying for some time now. The real economy is about EROI & materials, money & financial activity can not change the amount of fossil fuels available for industrial processes regardless of any clever financial engineering.
> Renewables, and for that matter nuclear power as well, cannot materially slow, let alone reverse, the relentless rise in ECoEs caused by the depletion of oil, natural gas and coal. Neither can technology halt this trend, since the potential of technology, far from being infinite, is bounded by the limits imposed by the laws of physics.
Why would this be the case? Are fossil fuels uniquely low cost in terms of energy in? I can't imagine them beating the ECoE of "put this magic panel on your roof and get free energy whenever the sun is out, for decades". If the problem is that you don't get solar during the night, then that's a question of battery technology. And that's not even a problem with nuclear reactors!
And saying that technology is "bounded by the limits [of physics]" is not useful. That doesn't say where the limits are, only that there are limits. Yes, at some point, we'll have almost 100% efficient solar panels being fed into batteries with the highest practical energy density. But we're nowhere near that.
Insamuch as the western world is being hit with increasing ECoEs, it's from people who either can't or won't switch from chemical fuels to something with a lower ECoE. It would be more useful to identify those industries and show any evidence of cost disease in those industries brought about by the dependence on diminishing reserves of fossil fuels.
I've been watching my investment accounts, particularly the TSLA fraction, and see-sawing between "This has got to collapse soon, I should..." and "You cannot time the market, idiot".
I'm dissatisfied with the inaction, but I can't come up with a coherent theory about how I should act... Bleah.
Recognize that holding is an action and a choice, too.
If you don’t have a coherent theory to {act}ively hold an asset, you probably shouldn’t be acting to hold it, and be acting to sell it.
This is equally true for TSLA and NVDA as it is for VOO and BRK.
Why? Because when prices are too low you need to be able to hold (and ideally buy) with conviction and when prices are too high you need to be able to sell with conviction, although the latter is less important if you have steady income.
If you don’t have a theory of value, you’ll be able to do neither effectively, and risk loss of principal and opportunity in a downturn.
I understand your point; but against it I lay the truism that every time a retail investor trades, value is destroyed. ;)
My own personal financial history has been more damaged by actions taken, than by forbearance and waiting. "Time in the market beats timing the market", style. So I wait for the moment when I've got Something Better To Do with the money, and then I act. And try not to second-guess later.
One possible solution to my framework is (1) to only buy things for which you have a coherent theory (2) that coherent theory holds water over the duration of your investing life.
It's possible that you had a coherent theory for purchasing TSLA at a certain price. If that price has out-run your theory, there is no contradiction in selling that TSLA and parking it in some place you have a coherent theory for, like VOO. This is maturity and humility, not hubris.
If I were in your position, I'd try to ask myself: does this decision to rollover TSLA into something I better-understand (e.g. VOO) fall inside or outside the pattern of "my own personal financial history has been more damaged by actions taken".
FWIW, "Time in beats timing" is a truism that applies to market-spanning indices, not a choice between individual securities. It would be a mistake to apply that logic to individual positions, unless you've given yourself the arbitrary restriction of only buying or selling TSLA and nothing else!
Yep, I’m sitting on the same fence. We can all see the circular deals in the high tech sector which has been the recent engine of the stock market. It’s all uncertainty, everywhere you look.
Hurry, then, while your money is still worth something and there's farms to be had. I did and never looked back, no mortgage, no loans, no nothing. Use your money to become less dependent on future money. In the end it is independence which gives you security, not money in the market or on the bank.
I support this view, though in my own deep thinking about it all, I've come to see that all things are leased. Life itself is leased. We are all on borrowed time with borrowed resources and social contracts.
This affects me because the urgency toward ownership and being less dependent on future money is prudent in some ways, but also naive in others?
When I think about owning property and being free of monthly rent, there's a truth to that. And it feels nice to say we've achieved generational wealth. But maintaining the property costs money and property taxes are recurring, forever. So I've relaxed on this idea that it'll be markedly different from rent.
Maintaining property takes time and costs some money, true. Farm property is (meant to be) productive though so if done right its maintenance has a negative cost, i.e. it makes you money. This goes for the traditional products you might think of - for us, silage from the fields, timber and firewood from the forest - as well as more recent things like electricity from solar panels - we've had negative electricity bills since I installed panels on the barn I built some 5 years ago. We're close to energy independent, once I've arranged some storage solution we will be independent. We have our own water, our own waste disposal facilities, a forest full of deer and elk and swine and the rest for when we might feel the need to tap that resource, enough land to feed the family and the means to store and prepare it without the need for external power - I've been cooking on a wood-fired stove for the last 21 years and prefer it over the alternatives we also have at hand (resistive electric and induction electric hobs). I've baked my own bread for much longer than that so I gradually moved into this 'lifestyle' - and that is what it comes down to, living the way we do is a conscious choice. Sometimes it is a lot of work, sometimes a storm brings down a hectare of forest, other times the water facilities freeze solid, sometimes a moose or deer pulls down the fencing in the middle of the night, sometimes there's weird critters trying to make a home under our roof, etc. All in all it is more than worth it for me.
Owning and living on a farm is not for everyone as it does tie you down more than a random apartment somewhere. If you're the type who wants to fly off to some trendy destination on a whim a farm might not be for you.
The true cost of energy and other resources (besides labor) is going up but that is a red herring. Above all the money supply is going up. THAT is why wealth appears to be dying so rapidly. The West is heavily invested in assets that seem immaterial, because business is only possible in the West when profit margins are high. There are multiple reasons for this but they tend to fall under the umbrella of international competition. If we didn't print so much money, it would be more obvious that there are simply not so many good opportunities in the West as a whole, as all the old money makers get replaced by outsourcing and automation.
The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
Yes, any shortage of energy we have today is more or less entirely voluntary on a species level.
You can blame Moloch or wall Street or whatever for making it functionally impossible for whatever multipolar market-actor reasons, but with the right choices we could have plenty of energy today, just as we could (but don't) feed everyone on Earth.
Eventually the will bea point where it does actually become physically impossible to generate that much power without melting the Earth's crust or boiling the seas, but that's a long, long way away.
Seems more correct to say with different choices rather than the right choices.
For example plenty of energy likely means far more nuclear reactors, and the unfortunately truth is that most can be used to breed plutonium, so while we could be living with energy abundance, we also at least slightly increase the chance of global nuclear war. (IMO probably still worth it but it's no longer a super clear right/wrong).
With food, the problem is not producing it, it's the distribution. You aren't going to get it distributed in many countries that need it without overthrowing governments which will include lots of killing and bombing. Now it being the right choice to feed everyone is much murkier.
It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.
Everybody assumes that correction will happen via crash. And perhaps that's the case for stock market prices. But while we have had housing price crashes in the past, that's very much the exception. House prices are very sticky, people are irrationally unwilling to sell their houses for a loss. I've seen several markets where real estate nominal prices stayed roughly flat for a couple decades, moving the market from "overpriced" to "underpriced" without anybody really noticing.
"Just build more houses" is the fix for many (but not all) of the US economy problems. Not sure about the UK, but I wouldn't be surprised if it applies there too.
Home building is indeed the solution, but it can never outrun the printing presses. Ultimately there is a bare minimum cost of a house too. If people are too poor to pay for that, the home building pipeline will have to stall. People need to be productive and competitive enough in the economy to be able to pay for all the new houses being built.
People want absolute values to be ever increasing too, but they'd settle for nominal values to be ever increasing. This violates the law of supply and demand, and common sense about depreciation and changing demographics. We should experience falling prices as material wealth increases in the world. Governments and money lenders hate this because they want to print off as much money as they possibly can get away with (as if they know how much that amount even is). They can't stand the idea of someone being rewarded for conserving their own resources, when those resources could be siphoned off for some other bullshit.
Despite talking about physical goods and services, there seems to be little in the article that goes into any detail about concrete reality, so I didn’t get much out of it other than a vague sense of foreboding.
Some nits:
The “energy cost of energy” metric seems a bit suspect and I wonder how it’s calculated. One reason I would expect it to go up because solar power is getting cheaper, and therefore it makes more sense to “waste” it on overprovisioning. Another is that the costs of fossil fuel are getting higher in some places. More detail is needed to see if it means anything.
Stock market valuations are in large part based on expectations about future growth. Perhaps these expectations are wrong? But I’m not sure that tells us anything one way or another about the wealth we already have. Perhaps some better way is needed to understand the present and past.
While Dr. Morgan makes a few reasonable points about "real wealth" (aka points I agree with), he also hand waves many assumptions which are, at best, questionable.
Finally, be aware that he's been predicting imminent economic collapse for almost 20 years now. He'll probably be correct someday (assuming he lives a very long life), but that doesn't mean much IMO.
>> Rather, what we need to do is to calibrate the physical economy such that we can benchmark the monetary against the material. This enables us to avoid the futility of measuring the monetary only against itself.
Garden-variety Gold Standard quackery.
Wait, it's not obvious to me why this is quackery?
It makes people uncomfortable. That's the long and the short of it.
I kept having my bad vibes meter triggered by the italics so thanks for making the connection for me.
My spider sense was going off because they spend the first several pages constructing the most obtuse definition of Inflation without just saying it.
That may be 100% true, but the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and in this case, gold has been doing awkwardly well under current conditions.
By the article's _own_ parable: if you were starving on a desert island, you wouldn't be relieved to be airdropped a briefcase full of gold. You're benchmarking money to money.
IMO, combining gold money arguments with observations about the price of gold is contradictory. If gold is money, then you should never wonder about the "price of gold" as gold should be used to price things.
Roughly half the gold produced each year vanishes into gold hoards. Half.
This has been going on for forty years. There's literally decades of gold production sitting in hoards all around the world.
Gold prices could get very strange very fast.
The goal of post-modern society is to create wealth without additional energy costs.
If I write software that schedules health care more efficiently, I've created value and therefore wealth. If I make a video game that's more fun than the previous generation of games, likewise.
Kids glued to "fun" (addictive) video games on their phones is not wealth, it is the feeder channel for these "efficient" health "care" schedulers, in your other example.
That is, IMO, arguable. Entertainment has always been valued by humans. It is just the non-physical equivalent of fancy clothing or jewelry. And clothing/jewelry is most certainly a form of wealth. So, it can be argued that things that you can buy that make you feel better emotionally or increase your social status are forms of wealth.
That some forms of entertainment may be detrimental if abused in the long-term is an orthogonal topic.
Claims that ring true:
* Energy physics puts an upper bound on material wealth
* The disparity between notional and material wealth is large and growing
* Notional wealth figures are largely speculative / fictitious
Claims that could be true (if empirically verified):
* Material wealth is decreasing
* Energy is decreasing
* The monetary system will collapse
Claims that have been implied but not demonstrated or argued:
* There is a causal link between decreasing energy supplies and monetary system collapse
Overall it smells like 2004-era peak oil doomerism. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it could just be early. Intrigued but not convinced.
> * Energy physics puts an upper bound on material wealth
Sure, but that's such a high upper bound that it may as well be false from our perspective in 2025. We use a miniscule fraction of the energy we receive from the sun.
We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.
Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.
I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.
It's still a tiny fraction. Plants are surprisingly inefficient users of sunshine. And our use of plants is less surprisingly inefficient.
Of course more efficient usage isn't necessarily a good thing.
well written article but he doesn't use data to prove his point that energy is what drives the economy.
you look at the UK example[0] - energy production / consumption has been going down. likewise quality of life has been going down. but yet if you listen to the economists / politicians they will tell economy is doing okay.
energy and how its used is what determines how successful an economy is. & like the prof says - money alone doesn't produce goods. energy does. money is just a transfer mechanism - which on its own is useless.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
> On this basis, global material prosperity has grown by 25% since 2004, which is nowhere near claimed “growth” of 96% in real GDP over that period. Moreover, the 25% rise in aggregate prosperity has been matched by the rise in population numbers over those twenty years.
This assumes that the GDP growth and the material prosperity are in a simple linear relation. I don't think this makes sense.
A small solar panel that can charge battery-powered night lights and a couple of cell phones produces negligible energy. Just a few minutes of air-conditioning consumption for a house in the US. Yet it can completely transform the life of households in an African town.
Yeah. Feels like a "labour theory of value" but for energy, with the same drawbacks. Stock markets are imperfect measures of value but "it's the worst system of value allocation apart from all others that have been tried" applies here (and if you did want to come up with a "better" measure of value than stock prices, it would probably be a "hypothetical value created if the people making investment decisions made fewer mistakes and more broadly represented aggregate human wants" rather than assuming the impossibility of efficiency improvements and indexing value to commoditised energy and labour indices).
Another bold, unsupported claim in the OP is that renewables and nuclear cannot materially slow the effects of resource depletion. I mean, yes, there's not an infinite amount of land, rare earth metals and the sun won't last forever, but the resource depletion absolutely looks different from an internal combustion engine (and an efficient ICE or gas power station is the same outcome for lower material cost than an inefficient one, for that matter)
It doesn't make sense. But that is exactly how policy makers justify how "the economy is doing good!" The GDP was never intended to be used as an indicator of national economic well being; only a simple statistic to measure how much money is exchanged between people.
But it only takes a few examples counter to what a public service should do to show that GDP reliance creates anti-patterns. e.g. rising healthcare costs is good for the GDP while universal healthcare is bad.
First, you are correct. However, the reason GDP is used as a proxy metric for economic growth because it's convenient. Doing so does make a few assumptions though, foremost of which is that the structure of the economy will change very little from year to year. If that is so, than a rise in GDP should correspond to a rise in economic prosperity (and by extension wealth). Thus, using GDP change to measure changes in prosperity works (more or less) year by year. but the longer the periods you compare (5 years, 10 years, 20 years), the less meaningful the number becomes.
Yup. A substantial proportion of the difference in GDP between the EU and the US relates to how health care values are assigned. In the EU (for public healthcare), it's at cost while in the US it's the final transaction price. It would be interesting to deflate US GDP against the same metric used in the EU to get more accurate figures, but I've never seen such an analysis.
The GDP number is an example of "all models are wrong, some are useful". You'll inevitably oversimplify at least _something_ if you try to boil down the economy to a single number.
GDP is still useful. I don't think there are examples of countries that had drops in GDP without being in deep trouble. It exploits the fact that economies [almost] never change quickly, so when you're looking at just one country, the GDP is a reasonable indicator of the overall state.
Where the GDP sucks is when people try to compare the _rates_ of GDP growth between countries.
I agree. It's a tool and it has its uses. I simply think this current decade has had a lot if "everything is a nail" approach to it. With gdp being used to hide a massive slowdown and contraction on the labor market and the rest of the "real" economy.
I think the modern indicator is how GDP growth last year would have been almost entirely flat had it not been for the massive amounts of AI spending. Something that as of now (regardless of thoughts of long term job aspects) is only constrainting the material market.
I don't fault the author for that usage because I know they are basically using the same language such policy makers use, and using it to disprove a really odd (but common) usage of GDP as this way to measure long term prosperity.
> This assumes that the GDP growth and the material prosperity are in a simple linear relation. I don't think this makes sense.
Yeah, I felt that this was the weakest point of the argument presented.
I do like calling out the absurdity of "wealth" in various assets though, as well as the notion that we need to map this "wealth" back ultimately to energy (which makes sense, as we need energy for basically everything).
"Yet you don’t need SEEDS analysis to know that the British economy itself is at an advanced stage of disintegration."
"Put another way, very little of the world’s supposedly enormous wealth actually exists in any meaningful sense."
Citation overwhelmingly needed. His claim that the economy is disintegrating is supported by the argument that: "you know, just look around." But what we're looking around and seeing is wealth accumulating at the very top.
The mistake he's making is thinking that if most people aren't doing well, then nobody is doing well, that the 1% aren't even really rich because their wealth is all a fiction.
In fact, wealthy people are really, actually wealthy. They are unimaginably wealthy. It is literally beyond the author's imagination how wealthy they are, leading him to the truly absurd conclusion that they're not really even wealthy at all.
"Nobody could be that wealthy, could they?!" Yes, my dude. Yes, they actually can be that wealthy. Indeed, they actually are.
Ok, this seems like a good post. At the end of the day, what do I, as a single investor, do? I'm 50 years old, 2 kids in college, I have a $300,000 mortgage on a house presently worth $1M. I have $300,000 cash and an open eTrade account.
What do I do with the cash?
A) keep it as cash
B) Pay off the mortgage
C) Buy some QQQ
D) Buy some T-notes
E) there is no E. I am a simple man. Let's start with a simple solution.
Whatever you decide, be aware of the following:
- You will sleep 5% better every night from here on out if your mortgage is paid off
- You'll sleep 5% worse every night from here on out if you have 300k riding in the markets
A couple of these are easy to answer.
A - Never. Cash with no return is just decaying with inflation.
B - Depends on interest. If your mortgage interest is lower than no-risk interest (e.g. SGOV) then no, you'd be throwing money away by paying off the mortgage. If OTOH your mortgage interest is substantially higher than no-risk interest, then yes, paying it off (or at least overpaying monthly) is a good idea. There is a gray area if your mortgage interest is slightly higher than no-risk return right now. Numerically it makes sense to pay the mortgage, but there is also a safety aspect in keeping the liquid cash on hand.
So that leaves some combination of C & D. The best ratio there is a harder question to answer.
C. it's the only one that has you in the arena. There's no guaranteed outcome, but money itself is a team-sport.
I'm a simple man myself, so I'm answering in order to verify my own reasoning.
A. will have negative returns from inflation. D. defends against inflation but is too conservative. B. There's arguably negative value in holding more equity in terms of opportunity cost since you already have > 200% position in equity. source: I believe this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4H9LL7A-nQ
Keep 12 months living expenses in cash/t-bills. Depending on your age, increase to 24 mos if kids etc
If cash remaining -> if mortgage rate >4% pay down mortgage (locking in 4%+ yield). If you want to average 50% towards mortgage 50% VOO (S&P Index fund)
Deeper post ->https://monetarymusings.substack.com/p/how-to-not-blow-up-wh...
I enjoyed the linked post overall, but want to highlight one thing:
>The real insight: paying down your mortgage reduces your monthly burn, which reduces the chance you’ll need to sell stocks in a downturn. It’s not about math, it’s about resilience.
This seems more emotional than anything. The feeling of paying off a mortgage and being relieved of some monthly burden. But there will always be monthly burdens, that's life. Everyone needs monthly cashflow. So the insight of putting extra cashflow into a mortgage to offset the burden is just reversing the purpose of why you got the mortgage in the first place? What I mean is money has time value, a mortgage is paying for the time. So being in a hurry doesn't automatically insightfully make sense.
The post is all about resilience, I suppose my point is that there will always be a need for monthly costs, so trying to be free of the stress of a monthly cost -a time cost- is overly emotional in my view.
But it doesn't, does it?
If I have $300K on my mortgage and a monthly payment of $2000, and I pay an extra $100K, that 100K reduces the principal of the mortgage by $100K, and so the mortgage will run for several years less than it would have. But my monthly payment is still $2000 for the years I have left on it.
There are other ways to structure it - you can pay ahead, paying next month's payment this month so that you don't have to pay anything next month if you don't want to. Can you pay $100K so that you don't have to pay the next 50 months' payments? I don't know, but probably. You have to be clear with them what you are trying to do, though.
> locking in 4%+ yield
Locking in 4% AFTER TAX yield ... if you invest the $300K and it earns 4% you still can't pay the mortgage interest with those funds
No one can give you an answer to this but you because it depends on what you value.
I don't have any answers but you definitely need some cash. How much? I have no idea.
With the rest, I would put some in a vanguard account. And then invest where? I want to say index funds but the market is very strange. The biggest companies have too much wealth soaked up. Is this sustainable? Is this a bubble? Who knows...
You'll always have property taxes, maintenance, insurance etc even after your house is paid off.
So that 300,000 is the money you need to passively support your house after you've paid it off.
In your spreadsheet , you have to include what is expected appreciation on the house, what is the mortgage interest rate, how much longer you have on that mortgage, your personal opinion on how well QQQ is going to do, how much you’re gonna want cash - your emergency fund for a rainy day, should be some N months of living expenses. Mix that all up in the spreadsheet, and come up with whatever feels good to you. There is no right answer, and my time machine isn't any better than yours, or anyone else's.
I would buy some physical gold as the ultimate hedge (don't invest ALL of you money!), and invest everything else in some highly rated fund. Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.
Trading yourself is just not worth it. You'll lose money long-term. An exception here is if you want to hold shares of a company long-term as a form of investment.
If your mortgage is a fixed rate at a reasonable interest, then keep it. If there's a high inflation episode, you'll be able to benefit from it.
maybe learn about options. do some practice trading. Theory is one thing, patience and common sense are other things. Above all be very, very careful, but have fun.
The practice part is important but when you are comfortable, nibble a little with small amounts.
Yeah, my rule when I got started was "If I ever lose a lifetime aggregated $3000 in the markets, then the markets are not for me". Then once you're ahead in the markets, it's fine to continue trading.
(Note: I ended up breaking my rule by continuing to trade after losing $5000, but then did great in the markets anyway in the long run LOL)
Most of us lose more than that to inflation
also if the losses are in a non-IRA, they are (or were? talk to your cpa) tax deductible against other gains. But is it all worth even one lost night of sleep. Nah.... of course, there are ways of covering bets with options but that is professional level stuff.
I made the mistake of gambling on 3x gas and oil futures once. Problem was, I got lucky a couple of times. They got all my money back and then some eventually. Gains based on luck can be toxic! Unless it's a well thought out statistical approach, maybe- but that would be a full time job.
E) bitcoin
Why is this hard? Calculate the expected value of each option, do a risk analysis, apply risk factor (based on your own tolerance), biggest number wins.
This comment has strong draw the rest of the owl vibes. (and the risk analysis & factor can cover a multitude of sins).
Risk analysis depends highly on your views of the world? "Are we in/heading towards a recession?""will the stock market continue its explosive growth"? "Do I as a person favor stability or prefer to take a bit of risk?"
All these will influence your EV.
Well yes, precisely. Which is why nobody can give this guy an objective answer to his question -- it's entirely dependent on him and his views. That being said, there is absolutely an analytical way to approach the problem, which is what I outlined.
I imagine that someone asking for advice isn't trying to take any comment wholesale. It's to help answer one of the above questions that they currently cannot right now.
For an internet forum, I've found it easier to ask direct, actionable questions like "should I buy this couch" than "is [couch brand] good?". Even if what I really wanted to get at was the former. Maybe the brand isnt good but the price is a steal. Maybe the brand is so utterly trash that you couldn't give it away. But putting the brand into the question instead of a direct 'thing' changes the discourse.
This is a great article. It clearly explains what people like Nate Hagens have been saying for some time now. The real economy is about EROI & materials, money & financial activity can not change the amount of fossil fuels available for industrial processes regardless of any clever financial engineering.
Less an article than an op-ed.
Which part do you disagree with?
> Renewables, and for that matter nuclear power as well, cannot materially slow, let alone reverse, the relentless rise in ECoEs caused by the depletion of oil, natural gas and coal. Neither can technology halt this trend, since the potential of technology, far from being infinite, is bounded by the limits imposed by the laws of physics.
Why would this be the case? Are fossil fuels uniquely low cost in terms of energy in? I can't imagine them beating the ECoE of "put this magic panel on your roof and get free energy whenever the sun is out, for decades". If the problem is that you don't get solar during the night, then that's a question of battery technology. And that's not even a problem with nuclear reactors!
And saying that technology is "bounded by the limits [of physics]" is not useful. That doesn't say where the limits are, only that there are limits. Yes, at some point, we'll have almost 100% efficient solar panels being fed into batteries with the highest practical energy density. But we're nowhere near that.
Insamuch as the western world is being hit with increasing ECoEs, it's from people who either can't or won't switch from chemical fuels to something with a lower ECoE. It would be more useful to identify those industries and show any evidence of cost disease in those industries brought about by the dependence on diminishing reserves of fossil fuels.
Posts like this make me want to hurry up and buy a farm
Ahh, we can all buy the farm together. ;)
I've been watching my investment accounts, particularly the TSLA fraction, and see-sawing between "This has got to collapse soon, I should..." and "You cannot time the market, idiot".
I'm dissatisfied with the inaction, but I can't come up with a coherent theory about how I should act... Bleah.
Recognize that holding is an action and a choice, too.
If you don’t have a coherent theory to {act}ively hold an asset, you probably shouldn’t be acting to hold it, and be acting to sell it.
This is equally true for TSLA and NVDA as it is for VOO and BRK.
Why? Because when prices are too low you need to be able to hold (and ideally buy) with conviction and when prices are too high you need to be able to sell with conviction, although the latter is less important if you have steady income.
If you don’t have a theory of value, you’ll be able to do neither effectively, and risk loss of principal and opportunity in a downturn.
I understand your point; but against it I lay the truism that every time a retail investor trades, value is destroyed. ;)
My own personal financial history has been more damaged by actions taken, than by forbearance and waiting. "Time in the market beats timing the market", style. So I wait for the moment when I've got Something Better To Do with the money, and then I act. And try not to second-guess later.
I don't think we're at odds here!
One possible solution to my framework is (1) to only buy things for which you have a coherent theory (2) that coherent theory holds water over the duration of your investing life.
It's possible that you had a coherent theory for purchasing TSLA at a certain price. If that price has out-run your theory, there is no contradiction in selling that TSLA and parking it in some place you have a coherent theory for, like VOO. This is maturity and humility, not hubris.
If I were in your position, I'd try to ask myself: does this decision to rollover TSLA into something I better-understand (e.g. VOO) fall inside or outside the pattern of "my own personal financial history has been more damaged by actions taken".
FWIW, "Time in beats timing" is a truism that applies to market-spanning indices, not a choice between individual securities. It would be a mistake to apply that logic to individual positions, unless you've given yourself the arbitrary restriction of only buying or selling TSLA and nothing else!
Yep, I’m sitting on the same fence. We can all see the circular deals in the high tech sector which has been the recent engine of the stock market. It’s all uncertainty, everywhere you look.
Hurry, then, while your money is still worth something and there's farms to be had. I did and never looked back, no mortgage, no loans, no nothing. Use your money to become less dependent on future money. In the end it is independence which gives you security, not money in the market or on the bank.
I support this view, though in my own deep thinking about it all, I've come to see that all things are leased. Life itself is leased. We are all on borrowed time with borrowed resources and social contracts.
This affects me because the urgency toward ownership and being less dependent on future money is prudent in some ways, but also naive in others?
When I think about owning property and being free of monthly rent, there's a truth to that. And it feels nice to say we've achieved generational wealth. But maintaining the property costs money and property taxes are recurring, forever. So I've relaxed on this idea that it'll be markedly different from rent.
Curious how you think about it?
Maintaining property takes time and costs some money, true. Farm property is (meant to be) productive though so if done right its maintenance has a negative cost, i.e. it makes you money. This goes for the traditional products you might think of - for us, silage from the fields, timber and firewood from the forest - as well as more recent things like electricity from solar panels - we've had negative electricity bills since I installed panels on the barn I built some 5 years ago. We're close to energy independent, once I've arranged some storage solution we will be independent. We have our own water, our own waste disposal facilities, a forest full of deer and elk and swine and the rest for when we might feel the need to tap that resource, enough land to feed the family and the means to store and prepare it without the need for external power - I've been cooking on a wood-fired stove for the last 21 years and prefer it over the alternatives we also have at hand (resistive electric and induction electric hobs). I've baked my own bread for much longer than that so I gradually moved into this 'lifestyle' - and that is what it comes down to, living the way we do is a conscious choice. Sometimes it is a lot of work, sometimes a storm brings down a hectare of forest, other times the water facilities freeze solid, sometimes a moose or deer pulls down the fencing in the middle of the night, sometimes there's weird critters trying to make a home under our roof, etc. All in all it is more than worth it for me.
Owning and living on a farm is not for everyone as it does tie you down more than a random apartment somewhere. If you're the type who wants to fly off to some trendy destination on a whim a farm might not be for you.
...yeah, there is always a post giving you that feeling..
Maybe, we should start with putting solar on the roof :)
Just because there is a risk of apocalypse, doesn't mean it's a good idea to try and time it.
The true cost of energy and other resources (besides labor) is going up but that is a red herring. Above all the money supply is going up. THAT is why wealth appears to be dying so rapidly. The West is heavily invested in assets that seem immaterial, because business is only possible in the West when profit margins are high. There are multiple reasons for this but they tend to fall under the umbrella of international competition. If we didn't print so much money, it would be more obvious that there are simply not so many good opportunities in the West as a whole, as all the old money makers get replaced by outsourcing and automation.
Tl;DR computer nerd reads marx, rejects marginal revolution, writes about classical economics in turgid prose
Complete and utter horseshit
Glad I wasn’t alone. What absolutely terrible writing.
Stonks always go up!
And always have gone up for decades!
It's really great!