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Thursday, May 08, 2008

Gas Prices. It Could Be Worse. A LOT Worse.





About 2.5X worse to be exact, in the Netherlands. See retail gas prices above in selected European countries from late April 2008, data available here from the EIA.

From Carpe Diem.

And a few more facts about gas prices:



And



And what happended to the Great Depression we were promised?
Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year.

I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was going to force the United States into a new era of dust bowls and breadlines, a slump that would call into question the very functioning of the capitalist system in the world’s largest economy. Carried away on the surging wave of their own economically dubious verbosity, the pundits even speculated that this unavoidable calamity might presage some 1930s-style global political cataclysm to match.

Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience. Last week the Commerce Department reported that the US economy – battered by the credit crunch, pummelled by a housing market collapse and generally devastated by the wild stampede of animal spirits – actually grew in the first three months of the year.


Maybe we should sell t-shirts?

"The media promised a depression and all we got was yet another lousy quarter of economic expansion."

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