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Post: Our Dust Bowl Economy  Tyler Durden's picture   Submitted
by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,    The PBS series The
Dust Bowl inspired an apt metaphor: ours is a dust bowl
economy. What is the basis of the metaphor? Simply this: those
living in the dust bowl responded by doing more of what had
failed rather than doing something different. Several key
responses actively worsened the crisis: 1. In response to
declining prices for wheat, farmers plowed up more marginal
prairie land to plant even more wheat: the idea was to
compensate for lower prices per bushel by growing more. We can
anticipate the unintended consequence: bumper harvests further
depressed prices, which fell from 95 cents a bushel to 25 cents
a bushel (and stayed there). 2. Plowing up fragile prairie held
together by native grasses exposed the soil to the winds,
further feeding the dust storms. In our economy, debt is the
marginal field that has been plowed up for brief e