Dr. Doom - Two years ago, Nouriel Roubini predicted the current economic crisis. Now he sees things becoming far worse.

Published: August 15, 2008, New York Times Sunday Magazine

On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund
and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and
years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a
once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining
consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a
bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions
of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the
global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he
went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and
other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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How to Travel by Cargo Ship

Travel by Cargo Ship ...click here...

Where is Matt?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Tailor-made biofuels

Amyris was going into partnership with Crystalsev, a Brazilian firm, to
make car fuel out of cane sugar. Not ethanol (though Brazil already has
a thriving market for ethanol-powered cars), but a hydrocarbon that has
the characteristics of diesel fuel. Technically, it is not ordinary
diesel, either: in chemist-speak, it is an isoprenoid rather than a
mixture of alkanes and aromatics. But the driver will not notice the
difference.

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Two dead in Europe fuel protests

A sign of things to come?

Spaniards are stockpiling fuel and food as hauliers blockade major cities in protest at rising diesel prices. Protesting drivers complain that the price of diesel has soared by more
than 20% this year, and are calling for the government to enforce a
minimum price for haulage, to prevent firms being undercut.

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Related Spanish hauliers on fuel strike

Food prices are rocketing all over Europe

Anyone outraged by the cost of a trip to Tesco or Sainsbury's – or the
price of filling their car – should know that they are not alone: the
same bewilderment and anxiety is sweeping the Continent.

Bulgarian bus drivers are going on strike. Italian fishermen will soon
down tools. Lorry drivers have sealed off oil refineries across France.
Even the fishermen of Belgium, hitherto a relatively obscure force in
European politics, are due to mass in Brussels.

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An open letter to the leader of Opec's biggest oil producer

There are several reasons for the high price of oil. Low prices at
the beginning of this decade discouraged oil companies from investing
in future capacity. There is a global shortage of skilled labour, steel
and equipment. The weak dollar means that the price of oil is higher
than it would have been if denominated in another currency. While your
government says that financial speculation is an important factor, the
Bank of England says it is not, so I don't know what to believe. The
major oil producers have also become major consumers; in some cases
their exports are falling even as their production has risen, because
they are consuming more of their own output.

But what you know
and I do not is the extent to which the price of oil might reflect an
absolute shortage of global reserves. You and your advisers are perhaps
the only people who know the answer to this question. Your published
reserves are, of course, a political artefact unconnected to geological
reality. The production quotas assigned to its members by Opec, the oil
exporters' cartel, reflect the size of their stated reserves, which
means that you have an incentive to exaggerate them. How else could we
explain the fact that, despite two decades of furious pumping, your
kingdom posts the same reserves as it did in 1988?

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