Economic meltdown a perfect storm

http://www.montereyherald.com/
search/ci_11579888?IADID

Quote from above online newspaper article, "The pride is gone," said, Putin, whose country has fallen hard over the past year, seeing its currency plunge and once massively rich magnates lose billions.

Putin said economists and politicians should always be ready for such a crisis, saying it was as inevitable as the Russian winter.

The crisis differs from the Great Depression of the late 1920s and the early 1930s because it has affected everyone at this time of globalization," he said. "Regardless of their political or economic system, all nations have found themselves in the same boat."
end quote.

I think in its own way this is more evidence that the primary cause of this particular global meltdown is Global Climate change. When the world surplus of food ended with the droughts in Austalia and elsewhere it set off a panic among the world's poor last summer. Richer people and organizations panicked when the dollar and stocks dropped and there was no safe refuge to avoid the deflating values of both monetary systems and stocks and other investments. When food commodities and oil commodities shot up not entirely from a lack of oil and food products but from investors desperately searching for a safe investment, people could not afford to buy either food or oil products in much of the world as a result. And even those who could at least temporarily afford food and oil were having to change their ways of life to survive these times. Then banks started collapsing from all the undercurrents worldwide and a lack of good and stable investments. Then loans became impossible for most including the big three automakers in the U.S.

Yesterday, I found out that the average value of a house in my county had dropped 50% but not as bad in the affluent area where I live. It is down 14% in my area. But the fact that most homeowners in my county are enduring a 50% real value drop in value in 12 months is a real horror that they are all reckoning with in one way or another. No wonder California has basically run out of money because a 50% drop in the value of any house is also a 50% drop in taxes for that house or houses.

This also means that it is also every nation, every county, every city, every area, and every family and individual for themselves more than ever in my lifetime. If countries and areas are in this hard of a position how can they be expected to help others outside of their own areas if they can't even feed and clothe and house their own people?

More and more I unfortunately believe we will see whole 3rd world nations without enough food starving in these awful times. Never since I was born in 1948 have things gotten this bad. Only during the 1970s during the end of the Viet Nam War and then the Carter administration was there anything even beginning to approach this economic insanity.