Tuesday, May 12, 2015 Progam

 

Ous speaker on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 was Mike Shea.  He gave us his insights as an economist on the world's econonmy and how demographics, geography and economic model all work together to determine the success of countries. Although quite a few of us would think that the United States in in decline, Mike gave us a different view. 

 

In the area of geography, the United States has a tremendous advantage because of our climate, our location between two oceans and the vast amount of navigable rivers that allow us to get bulk products such as grain from the breadbasket states, such as Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri, to foreign markets very cheaply via barges.  No other country in the world has this advantage.  We also enjoy a wealth of natural resources.  He pointed out that despite a lack of energy policy, we are approaching energy self sufficiency with oil production because of shale oil.  He pointed out that on the world stage, our energy independence will have a major impact on the world's economies.  The middle east oil producers and Russia have based their economic model on an oil price per barrel of $100.  Because we are able to produce our own oil supply, we are making them have to continue to pump crude oil at prices that cannot sustain their internal economies.  Over the long term, this will make these states less able to affect the stability of our economy and they know it.  In the long term, they will no longer be able to have any control over oil pricing. 

 

In the area of demographics, our population isn't growing, but it isn't in the steep decline seen in such countries as Japan and Italy.  The Baby Boomer

bubble will cause some problems in the short term, but then the Generation X is a smaller percentage of the population that is followed by a much larger Generation Y group that will be getting to their peak earning years..  China's population growth has been affected by the one-bsby policy, but China doesn't yet have the infrastructure of naval capability to challenge the United States in our role of keeping the sea lanes for commerce open.  He also noted that Chinese billionaires are having to invest in real estate here in order to get dollars out of China that would be stuck in China because of the trade deficit. 

 

These are just some of the insights he shared with us about our U.S. economy as compared with the other economies around the world.  His comments were briefer than quite a few of us would have liked because of time constraints.  However, this was, nontheless, a very fascinating presentation.