10 explosive bubbles that will kill capitalism
Commentary: Slow-motion train wreck in store for U.S.
By Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch.com
July 3, 2012
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — In mid-2005, three years before Wall Street’s credit meltdown, the Economist warned of the “Biggest Bubble in History.” In five short years after the 2000 dot-com crash property prices across the world had risen an unprecedented 75%. Real estate had become the new dot-com.
In his April 2007 quarterly newsletter, Jeremy Grantham, founder of the $95 billion GMO firm, reinforced the warning: “First Truly Global Bubble, impacting all countries, all assets worldwide.”
By midyear 2007, a deeply concerned Grantham was “watching a very slow motion train wreck.” By October, the “train hits end of track at full speed.” A year later, on schedule, Wall Street’s credit train did crash.
Flash forward: in Grantham’s early 2012 newsletter he saw a bigger train accelerating: When he focused on the “common good, it became quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. And probably its greatest weakness is its absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output.”
This we call the Myth of Perpetual Growth, the pseudo-scientific justification for modern capitalism.
Grantham concludes that capitalism’s flaws are so deadly that while it does “a thousand things better than other systems,” it fails in those three crucial areas. And “unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.”
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