ARTICLE: Kazakhstan's Construction Collapse, By Abdujalil Abdurasulov, BusinessWeek, November 21, 2008

A good example of how this profound System Perturbation works its way down to the bottom of the pyramid. Quite frankly, we thought we knew how bad it was to have high oil prices, but now we'll see how bad it is to have low oil prices. So yeah, the price drop undercuts the "axis of diesel," but it ends up harming a lot of poor people (I mean, really poor people) around the world while not helping us environmentally whatsoever. Cheap oil, in my mind, is bad all around. I will suffer the few fools in exchange for the upgrading of our energy profile combined with the transfer of wealth to countries that need to move themselves out of poverty, because we end up paying either way. So why not pay in a way that benefits emerging markets while forcing us toward much-needed change? The big question with this global slowdown (true recession in West, diminished growth in emerging) will be, Does everything wait on America's de-leveraging or can other sources of demand sustain/re-energize globalization's advance? All in all, it's been an amazing quarter-century run that no one except the extreme optimists dreamed would continue uninterrupted forever. Eventually, America's implicit Marshall Plan transfer of funds through extreme consumption had to burn itself out, as much as the rest of the world wanted it to continue to their benefit. The problem is, with the rest of the Old Core into recession faster than we are moving, and the New Core not yet big enough in its demand potential to sustain things on its own, we're into chicken-v-egg territory over who restarts demand fastest. And the answer, quite frankly, is that we don't know for sure. This is simply new territory in terms of the global economy's breadth (never been bigger or more pervasive) and the synchronicity of this shock (we've also never been more interconnected). What this means is that Obama really is the FDR-like figure of his era--hit or miss. What he chooses to do will have impact far beyond our shores. (Thanks: Terry Collier)