An Ordinary Investor Looks at the Coming Decade

It’s a new year, and we must look beyond the mess of sub-prime mortgages and unfunded auto pensions—toward the markets where American citizens have to invest their private capital for the next decade.

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Problem 1: If there hadn’t been buyers for the sub-prime mortgages, they wouldn’t have been written. The buyers were named Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they’re still buying mortgages with our money—after a $200 billion bailout. Problem 2: The auto bailout has been in the making since Japanese companies started hiring American workers at competitive non-union wages 20-odd years ago. The wrongheaded grandeur of the United Auto Workers’ Big Three auto contracts looks stunning, even decades later. But now the auto recovery is complicated by impending constraints on fossil fuels, with the radical Carol Browner as White House “energy czar.” Come to think of it, Obama’s own campaign pledge to make energy costs “skyrocket” in order to fight global warming is pretty radical itself. But the nation is now entering its third straight harsher winter, triggered says NASA by a shift to the Pacific Ocean’s 25–30 year cold phase. Only a fool would escalate energy prices in a recession while global temperatures are trending down. The new President will thus have to dance the same federal minuet as Kevin Rudd, the new Australian Prime Minister—also elected on a Green platform to “save the planet.” Rudd is promising a tiny 5 percent cut in greenhouse emissions—trying to keep his base without scaring investors away from Australia’s manufacturing and its big farming and coal industries. The dance leaves no one happy, most certainly not millions of Australian investors. In Germany, Angela Merkel has transformed herself from “Eco-leader” to “Stability leader,” promising to protect the country’s autos, steel, cement and aluminum from high carbon emissions fees. She realizes the number of highly-touted “green jobs” is tiny compared with the number of “old jobs” that might flee to China or India. She’s building 26 new brown-coal power plants in case Russian gas exports are cut off. This energy question pervades the investment outlook. U.S. judges are banning new coal plants while Europe, China and India burn more coal. The UK has made no decisions on how to replace the upcoming loss of 40 percent of its electricity--except 7,000 new wind turbines that will produce tiny amounts of power erratically. Yet somehow the world in the next decade must increase its food production by another 50 percent, supply homes and transport for another billion people, and educate a new generation of highly-skilled workers for info-tech jobs. It’s a bigger economic dilemma than any since World War II rescued Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” from the Great Depression. Will most of the growth investments now be made in Third World countries? Who will buy stock in GM or Boeing? Will cement for Obama’s public works projects triple with emission fees? Will air travel be penalized for burning fossil fuels? Will Fannie and Freddie be reined in? Must we hazard the Chinese stock market? President-elect Obama offers no guidance yet.