Juggling Dynamite

A Toronto realtor, spooked by prices gone bat poop crazy, yesterday dared to articulate the question haunting Canadian real estate and the households, lenders, services, economy and tax revenues now precariously exposed to the unsustainable.  See:  Why am I not celebrating?

“what is going to happen to this market because surely it cannot continue like this….tell me what happens when all these expensive homes have mortgage renewals in a few years and the interest rates are higher, can they afford the payments? While the values have decreased and now the homes aren’t worth what they have invested in them?”

Today crude prices are back testing $50/barrel range, as the latest US inventories show supply at multi-decade highs.  So much for OPEC’s output cuts since December.  Technological advance continues to unleash new product worldwide, just as efficiencies and alternatives are leapfrogging over old restraints daily.  The new preference to consume local, includes everything from food and goods to energy.

In 2016 Tesla unveiled their new solar shingles (available 2017) that convert individual roofs into architecturally stunning, clean, energy factories like this one.

But that’s just the beginning.  Others are already building with photovoltaic glass that makes entire structures massive solar receptors.  Others are developing woven solar fabrics that have photoactive dyes coating individual threads, making each fiber a miniature solar panel.

For personal electronic devices, others are designing solar capturing jackets and bags that use flexible panels laminated on top of fabrics, like this one on right from Tommy Hilfiger.  Free and efficient is the new cool, and for good reason.

Others are making building facades out of heavy-duty solar fabrics like those on the planned expansion of the Artists for Humanity Epicenter in Boston (below). See:  One company’s mission to make every surface soak up the sun.

Is it any wonder that the Saudis have been frantically talking up oil prices daily, while they race to issue an IPO to offload a chunk of their reserves onto outside investors?

The Saudis seem to recognize what is happening here.  Hopefully all the self-styled business geniuses running the US government today, will stop trying to block progress and get behind the smart energy boom too.

Most people greatly underestimate how deleterious financial scams, fraud and cheating have been on our economy and democracy over the past 20 years.  Not to mention, all the energy and resources that have been funneled into financial trickery and away from other productive activities. This is a cancer eating at the fabric of civil society, and we, the people, need to demand substantive changes and reforms if we are to get out from under.

The pioneers of the hedge-fund industry changed Wall Street. By placing at times brilliant bets in the market they gained considerable personal wealth, but according to New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar, an outsize influence on society too. She joins The Agenda to discuss the seven-year investigation into Steven A. Cohen, one of the industry’s biggest success stories, and her book, “The Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.” Here is a direct video link.