According to the January 29th Financial Times:
“Air freight accounts for 35 per cent of the value of goods traded internationally and the International Air Transport Association said traffic volumes had fallen by 22.6 per cent year-on-year in December. The airline industry reported an “unprecedented and shocking” plunge in global air cargo traffic.”
Failure to anticipate this plunge only illustrates that the “masters of the universe” don’t really control the economy any more than a surfer controls an ocean wave. At times, both the “masters” and the surfers may ride their corresponding waves with such great apparent skill that they might claim to actually “control” the waves. But every so often a wave comes along of such “unprecedented and shocking” dimensions that it becomes suddenly clear that the “masters” and surfers may ride the waves, but they’ve never really controlled them.
That’s where we are today. People are beginning to see that the economy is not under control, perhaps can never be truly controlled, and is subject to random and unpredictable movements that are more akin to chaos than order. In fact, it’s increasingly apparent that most of the “masters” don’t really even understand the economy.
What shall we do? Same thing as we’d do on a ship at sea caught in a hurricane. We can’t stop the hurricane. All we can do is batten down the hatches, pray to God, and hang on as best we can until the hurricane blows itself out.
Today’s economic “hurricane” will blow until it simply blows itself out. Our fearless leaders won’t stop or control it. They might influence it a little by slowing it down or even postponing it for another six months or a year; but in the end, the “hurricane” is gonna do whatever the “hurricane” wants to do. By doing so, this “hurricane” will expose Obama, Bush, Clinton, the House and the Senate and most economists as emperors without clothes who claim to control the economy, but who are mostly adept at merely claiming credit for events they neither control nor fully understand.
