THE ECONOMIES–‘DEPRESSION’: “Evans-Pritchard: In Europe, Depression Now” is a Moneynews article by Julie Crawshaw (moneynews.newsmax.com) on 2/20/09.
“Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor for the Daily Telegraph in London, says debating the risk of a full-blown depression is pointless.
“There’s no risk,” Evans-Pritchard told Moneynews.com in a wide ranging interview, “We’re in it. It’s begun.”
“Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for 25 years. His reporting in the Telegraph about the global liquidity crisis and now banking crisis was way ahead of the curve.”
As regards a where-we-are-now, Mr. Evans-Pritchard points out “ … that, during the past six months , the world’s major economies contracted at rates more severe than those of the 1930’s.”
Continuing, Mr. Evans-Pritchard notes that “An economy can cope with deflation, with falling pieces, that’s not a problem in itself. It can cope with high levels of debt …What it cannot cope with is the two together. It’s the combination of these two things that’s the absolute killer, and that is what we face in the United States, Europe and Japan … basically globally at this point.”
Finally, Mr. Evans-Pritchard concludes with, “I think there are two outcomes to this crisis… Either the central banks of the world succeed in reflating, in which case inflation’s going to take off and then gold will do very well — or they fail, in which case the institutional structure that we’ve know(n) for the post-war era will start to unravel, in which case gold will also rocket.”
“I think it’s going to be one or the other, and both seem to me to be favorable to gold.”
A sobering analysis by any measure and one that leads us to some thoughts on coping at the family level. We’ll hold those thoughts though and present them next week along with some “sources and methods” of sustainable family food production.
Until next week then. Keep your eyes on the horizon as the weather’s changing fast.
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