A little G&D

One Michael Klare, writing on tomdispatch.com, has some cogent reflections on the tangled web of cheap energy and funky mortgages that is even now falling apart to the great distress of the American economy. We may never be the same again.

The economic bubble that lifted the stock market to dizzying heights was sustained as much by cheap oil as by cheap (often fraudulent) mortgages. Likewise, the collapse of the bubble was caused as much by costly (often imported) oil as by record defaults on those improvident mortgages. Oil, in fact, has played a critical, if little commented upon, role in America's current economic enfeeblement -- and it will continue to drain the economy of wealth and vigor for years to come.

Read it all here. This guy makes more or less the same points as Jim Kunstler about how things cannot continue as they are but without the glee that sometimes mars Kunstler's posts on the doom of the suburban pattern of living in this country.