01.01.08 Some Things To Keep An Eye On

WHY THE ERA OF CHEAP FOOD IS OVER, CS Monitor. Food shortages worldwide, maybe just rising prices here in the U.S., but food supply is something to keep an eye on as we move forward. With the super efficiency of our transportation and distribution systems in this country, most people depend on supermarkets for their food supplies. Those supermarkets typically have less than a week's worth of groceries on hand. That's fine as long as nothing happens to disrupt the system.
...According to the article, food prices are rising faster than anytime in the past 30 years for two main reasons: 1. People in rising power economies of China and India are eating more meat. Grain is required to fatten food animals for slaughter. 2. More crops are being grown for biofuel at the expense of food production. Some estimates think that as much as 30% of U.S. grain production will go into biofuels this year.
...Higher food prices are a growing problem for everyone, but especially the world's poor since higher prices take an increasingly large bite out of their already meager resources.
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2007 SAW RECORD SECURITY BREACHES, Boston (AP). This is subject is something to keep an eye on later, hopefully much later. A major contention of this blog is that we are in the last generation before the return of Jesus Christ so this world is in for some increasingly stressful times. One of them is the mark of the beast. People are conditioned to regarding that mark as an attempt by a future evil dictator to microchip everybody on the planet so that he and his minions can have complete control over them. However, I believe that the 'mark' is likely just biometric identification that will be required to participate in the world's future cashless financial system. Security breaches, computer hacking, identity thefts will all be solved by a new system that requires that anyone who wants to be able to buy and sell must log onto a central computer system using biometric identification.
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TOP ECONOMIST SAYS AMERICAN COULD PLUNGE INTO RECESSION. Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University, said that there is a good chance that the housing recession will go on for years.
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THE CREDIT CRISIS GROWS, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, U.S. News and World Report. "What is now seriously in question is the capacity of our financial system to provide enough credit to support the scale of investment that has maintained our long economic expansion. Coming at a time of soaring oil prices, we may have a simultaneous decline in consumer spending, residential investment, and business investment."
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THIS YEAR'S HOUSING BUST IS SHAPING UP TO BE ONE OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS. FORECLOSURES AND PRICE DROPS ARE THE LARGEST SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION - AND EXPECTED TO GET WORSE NEXT YEAR. (Washington Times).
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