The Wrinkle

...The issue here really is about the world wide gap between the haves, those with a reasonable level of living, and the battlers. There needs to be better balance if we are to avoid future unrest similar to that seen in Greece. A very small “few” profited very handsomely from the Global Financial Crisis, however the debt overhang from this will need to be carried by the “many”, for years if not decades to come.

People are finally waking up to this fact, unfortunately it will be up to governments to try and restore the balance so that profits are made from producing real things of benefit. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Capitalism is a good model, but it also needs a human face. Speculators have a place to balance risk, but not to drive and increase risk to make “super” profits.

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The Wrinkle has mentioned previously how “peak oil” is largely a myth, and that ultimately price will drive technological innovation well before oil, shale oil, oil sand deposits, or coal and gas as oil substitutes become exhausted. Water has also been promoted as the next scarce resource; however most of those arguments are predicated on continued population growth at similar rates to the last 100 years.

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Today I’d like to talk about something The Wrinkle came across several decades ago (an oldie but a goodie), and is covered off in a book first published in 1984. This is the “Theory of Constraints” and applies to all business activities including service industries. The Theory is quite simple in that business processes and production all have bottlenecks, and while you can increase the pressure going into a bottleneck; ultimately what flows through is determined by the size of the bottleneck. Ergo your total output or productivity will be determined the size of the neck of your bottle.

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Well it looks like the tide might be coming back in across the financial markets, as the volatility subsides along with the fear and panic. A broker recently commented that investors were behaving like “a cat with a long tail in a room full of rocking chairs”. Assuming stability does return it will be up to investors to “lick their wounds” and count the damage.

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