"We Have Until July to prepare"

This morning there was an interesting radio interview on Nine-to-Noon which featured a working woman in Rotorua. She and her husband are a month behind with their mortgage and other payments.  They are both working but despite budgeting advice are unable to keep their head above water and have to make considerable sacrifices to keep paying the bills. (the husband has to sleep in his daughter’s garage to get to his job).

They reached this situation comparatively quickly after her husband was without a job for two months and got into debt.  

Neither of them smoke or drink and haven’t been to a movie in 2 years.  It seemed that their children are grown up but they have a mortgage - but are afraid of losing their house.

This is symptomatic of an economic situation that for ordinary working people is deteriorating rapidly with increasing prices across the board (they, like me question why a bottle of coca cola is cheaper than a bottle of milk)

The international context

In the last 24 hours or so Michael Ruppert has put out an alert to members of CollapseNet in which he basically says that the downstream effects of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami will hit the world economy in July or August when the first quarterly earning reports for major corporations comes out..

The reality is that due to the earthquake and the  Fukushima accident 30 major corporations have been forced to cut back production, essentially due to the rolling electricity shutdowns.

This has not only meant that Japan is only producing 50 percent of its normal automobile production but that there have been  electronic component shortages across the globe. Large companies such as Siemens in Germany have been affected and Toyota has closed down its North American plants with thousands out of work.

Mostly it is the automobile industry and consumer electronics that are most affected. Markets, as Mike Ruppert points out are already over leveraged and are predicated on growth of GDP.

Ruppert says that essentially Japan has destroyed growth and one quarter of negative growth will cause the market to implode. 

Other things that are happening at the same time are

• Record increases in the prices of food while harvests are predicted to be down this year due to climate change  
• Large increases in the cost of oil when economies are already under huge stress.. Just when we need the extra food less food will be produced because farmers, fishermen etc . cannot afford the fuel. We have the oil that could be operating tractors etc; it is the way that money works that is preventing this from happening.
• Failures in European countries' economies such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain (which is “too big to bail”). The bail-outs  so far are predicated on continued growth of GDP, so bailouts will fail

His advice

Mike Ruppert says, “...the Japanese events have given us a wall against which we can look and against which we can back ourselves  up to; and we have between now and July to get ourselves ready as possible, to feed ourselves, to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves warm, to keep ourselves out of the way until things settle down”

He has always warned about social upheaval when things breakdown and advised to stock up on 3 months of food and water, to have  cash on hand, to grow as much food as you can - generally to disengage as much as possible. Above all, to look to others.

Whilst the conclusions he comes to may SEEM to our sensibilities to be alarmist to me there is no escaping the logic of what he is saying.

If you take his advice and things turn out to not to be so bad what would you have lost? You might end up with a garden of veges instead of roses, a bit more food on your shelves that you would have normally and made some friends in the meantime.

There is no doubt that you can never be totally prepared for any sort of event - especially seeing the only predictable thing is unpredictability.

However if you choose to ignore it and treat it as just so much fear mongering and keep to business -as-usual you may just be subject to a sudden and rude awakening.

Back to New Zealand

There is no doubt that especially since the February 22 earthquake in Christchurch that things have got a whole lot worse, not only for those directly affected without sewerage or job, but gradually for the rest of New Zealand.

The radio broadcast I listened to today show that things are quickly getting harder for ordinary folks.  When we add in the downstream effects of the Christchurch earthquake (large increases in insurance premiums as a result of government bailout of AMI), not to mention the global effects of events in Japan as well as North Africa and the Middle East, well it’s anyone’s guess where where we’re headed.