Catastrophes around the corner

     "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."

             Jeremiah 29:11

I am an optimist. We will muddle through.

I offer a "To Do" list of credible things to worry about.

To make the list manageable, I don't include anything about Trump's second term, domestic politics, possible bad legislation, social disorder, or the health of myself and people I care about.

1. China's economy is a mess. It's failing and it will trigger a worldwide economic crisis. China's real estate market is collapsing under spectacular mis-allocation of money into un-economic projects, creating ghost cities of empty buildings.

Coming on top of the overly-aggressive Covid shutdown, China will go into deep recession, damaging the world economy. Youth unemployment there is over 20%.

2. China is an unstoppable powerhouse. China is the manufacturing center of the world and they can produce everything less expensively than can U.S. manufacturers. Their scientists and R&D labs now file more cutting edge patents than Americans. They are eating our lunch and it is getting worse.

3. Growing China military strength. Their navy already has more ships than does the U.S. They are building islands in the South China Sea, and they have turned belt-and-road investments in Asia and Africa into Chinese owned or controlled ports, which they are garrisoning with military personnel. They are gathering up allies and markets, and locking them into place. We are behind the 8-ball.

4. The U.S. real estate market is un-sustainable. The 15-year period of zero-interest quantitative easing caused a crazy asset bubble in housing, far outpacing earned incomes by young people seeking homes. Housing prices are maintained by people who sold a prior house at an inflated price or who got gifts from parents, rather than a sustainable process of house prices reflecting earnings. 

5. The U.S. stock market is poised to collapse and bring another great recession/depression. Quantitative easing created a stock market bubble as investors grasped for assets that would throw off income.

Hussman Funds market comment

Valuations are farther above the sustainable trend-line than they were at the 2000 market bubble that preceded an 80% drop in the NASDAQ and the 2007 50% drop in the SP500.

6. Cascadia earthquake is due. North America moves west into the Pacific about an inch a year. The Pacific and Juan de Fuca plates slide underneath the continent in 20-foot lurches every 300 years. The last time was in the year 1700. One is inevitable and due.

7. Carbon dioxide levels are high and will get worse for decades. Therefore:

     A. The Arctic and Antarctic are warming. As North American and Asian permafrost melts the methane sequestered in it is released. Methane is a greater greenhouse gas than CO2. We have triggered a bad feedback loop. It is too late to stop this.

    B. Ice sheets are melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. That will raise sea levels by 20 to 30 feet by the end of the century. This will inundate parts of low-lying cities including Miami and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast and older East Coast cities including New York, Boston, Baltimore, and the largest U.S. Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. It will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.

   C. Trigger an Ice Age. Melting ice from Greenland will pour fresh water into the North Atlantic, thus turning off the cycle that causes denser salty water to sink to the sea bottom, which makes the North Atlantic circulation possible. That circulation creates the Gulf Stream. Without it, Europe returns to the Ice Age. The sun reflection (albedo) from European ice brings North America into its own era of mile-thick ice in Canada and the U.S. down to Boston, Pittsburg, Chicago, and Portland.

Melting ice off Greenland turns off the circulation.

    D. Wildfires in the west. In this century higher temperatures will mean drought in parts of the west, weakening and killing the standing forests, making them kindling. They are burning up and it will get worse.

8. Sooner or later, a Mississippi flood overwhelms the levees.  We are experiencing freak weather events of 30 and 40 inches of rain in a day in mid-continent. If a flood overwhelms the 60-year-old Old River Control Structure in northern Louisiana, the Mississippi River will do what gravity is pushing it to do, change course to a shorter, steeper slope to the Gulf. New Orleans and the Lower Mississippi have trillions of dollars worth of urban, port, and petrochemical infrastructure presuming the Mississippi continues where it now is. Those would be stranded by the inevitable Atchafalaya shortcut.

9. Sperm counts are dropping. Medical researchers don't know why. They only know it is happening and that it is worldwide. Sperm count dropped from 104 million per millimeter in 1973 to 49 million in 2019.  In the U.S. one in eight couples struggle with infertility and the male is increasingly the source of the problem. 

10. World population is growing too fast. Or it is dropping too fast. 

     Too many people. The world population is 8 billion humans, more than double from 1975. Humans are stressing the carrying capacity of the earth, driving other animals extinct. Humans are turning natural areas like the Amazon Rain Forest into soybean farms, to our peril. 

     Not enough people. Once women have access to education, meaningful work, and contraception, a great many choose to have fewer or no children. U.S. women now have fewer than 1.7 child per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1. Europe is even lower. China, South Korea, and Japan are lower yet, approaching an average of one child per woman. Only the poorest countries in Africa are still growing in population and as they develop that will presumably join the pattern. 

America's economic system presumes growth. Places in the U.S. that are losing population experience blight as dropping demand means properties sit empty or under-used. If the U.S. is successful in stopping immigration -- a policy desire of many Americans -- we will experience noticeable population decline. Japan is already experiencing it. Our national pension system calculated there would be at least three workers paying into Social Security for every retiree. This is no longer the case, which is why there is a pending crisis. Either we will cut benefits, raise taxes, or grow the deficit.

                                                          --  --

Lots could go wrong. These are just a few of the perils we know about and that come to me in my various new feeds. There are others. I don't consider these warnings a "downer" nor needless alarmism. I like the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. 

It makes me optimistic we will muddle through.

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