Showing posts with label Stephen Leeb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Leeb. Show all posts

3/11/2010

Review of The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (Hardcover)

I am giving this book a 5 instead of a 3 or 4 because I believe that it does a superb job of laying out some facts that every normal adult needs to understand, and I want to encourage everyone to buy and read this book.

That having been said, I also found it disappointing.The author's main points can be summed up in this review, and take less than an hour to absorb in the actual book:

1)Peak oil and the need for alternative energies are being over-shadowed by myopic media and lack-luster academics that focus on poverty, climate change, terrorism, everything but the core Achilles heel of the Western world, its addiction to cheap oil which is no more.

2)Cheap oil is made possible by blatant political and financial maneuvers that enrich a few and set the rest of us up for life long poverty.Government subsidies and tax breaks purchases by expensive lobbyists giving expensive gifts and cash bribes to our politicians are directly responsible for pre-determined failure of our energy policy and the lack of an energy strategy.

3)The catastrophic nature of the collapse of cheap oil is dramatically enhanced by the combination of the *huge* U.S. deficit and by the increased prospects of war over oil.

The author concludes with some bottom line advice for investors: get out quickly from stocks associated with high oil usage (airlines, autos, chemicals; followed by cosmetics, food requiring processing and transport, and retail dependent on far away factories and raw materials).

I disagree with one key point he makes.He assumes that Wall Street and the media have been ignoring this problem because of "group think."I certainly do agree that the larger mass of the public and the average bureaucrat that do not know any better have fallen prey to unethical propaganda, but I am quite persuaded by Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy; Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil; The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and other books that this catastrophe in the making was clearly understood by the White House and the US Senate in 1974-1979, and a very deliberate selfish even treasonous decision was made to profit in silence and let the people fry.

This is a much simpler book than most of the others I have read and recommend, but I give it a solid five stars because if you can only afford to buy and read one book, this is the one that will be easiest and most to the point.

And just to drive the point home, when WIRED had the cover story on alternative energy, Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon, and went on to amass 25 documented high crimes, 23 of itemized in my review of this book (Cheney makes Agnew and Johnson look like wall-flowers--this is the guy that put HIGH into "High Crimes."
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency



Click Here to see more reviews about: The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (Hardcover)

11/11/2009

Review of Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy (Hardcover)

The Game Leeb writes about is whether or not alternative energy systems can be developed before there is painful economic collapse."Game Over" refers to a world where the easily extractable energy and mineral resources are gone (peak commodities) and we haven't developed the alternative technologies to maintain our society in the absence of low cost oil.Leeb outlines how energy and other resource limitations have come to dominate global economics.He explains the familiar concept of peak oil, and introduces the concept of absolute peak oil, the point where the energy cost of oil production just matches the energy extracted. Further Leeb goes on to describe how the extraction of minerals, water and even food are coupled to energy production.Leeb is concerned with the problems of building out of the most common alternative energy systems to a large scale.

Much of this book is recycled material found in Leeb's earlier work
The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself and Profit from the Coming Energy Crisiswhich made a more technical presentation of most of the economic ideas in the first few chapters.As in the The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel this book is written for a more general audience, but unlike his other books which are mainly directed at individual investors, the first three sections of Game Over are directed to the broader questions of how our complex and technological society can deal with resource limitations, which have been magnified by rapid economic development of Asia.Only the last section of the book is directed to investment choices for individuals.

One weak spot in the book is a chapter on the costs of complexity, which comes off as a bit of a political rant against the costs of having bad regulations and archaic ownership systems that make it difficult to move to solutions to the Energy supply problems. He might have added some material about how the demand for safety, adds to energy costs over time, as in pollution controls and automotive safety features making cars less efficient.

For a book emphasising alternatives to oil, Leeb says surprisingly little about global warming. He seems to underestimate the size of US coal reserves and so doesn't discuss the CO2 production problem. My suspicion is that when things get tough, concerns about our ecological commons will be swamped by immediate and local economic concerns.Another item almost entirely left out of the discussion is population control.In a world where change is driven by the billions in the third world expanding their consumption patterns, it seems Leeb is implying its already too late to do anything about overpopulation.

Leeb's investment advice has been fantastic.My interpretation of his oil price indicator was a market sell signal in late 2007. A big question right now is how long will the deflationary fears and trends last. This book's advice is based on the premise that the pain of deflation is so threatening to government revenues that inflation will be manufactured to keep the housing market from collapsing.His advice is premised on the view that the stimulation needed to solve the short term problems(thanks George) will flip us into a world of inflation that will make the 70's look like a cakewalk. Leeb paints a very nasty and depressing picture of our economic future. The rapid consumer growth in Asia has pushed up the Malthusian day of reckoning that much closer.Leeb's depressing picture may well prove prophetic unless we see some tremendously clever improvements in our industrial, land use, trade and energy policies combined with some timely technical advances in energy development.

Ignore Leeb's warnings at your own peril.



Click Here to see more reviews about: Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy (Hardcover)