It Could Happen Here

As in Weimar Germany, prices change daily. One character, traveling from Washington to New York, pays $8,010 for a ticket on the Eastern Shuttle. His cab ride from LaGuardia to Wall Street costs $6,000. A family’s monthly gas bill rises to $150,000, and the attractive young wife, desperate to keep food on the table, gives her body to the butcher in exchange for meat.

This may sound exaggerated, and of course it is, for that’s what disaster novels are all about. But it happened before, it can happen again, and this time the slide toward the brink would be infinitely more difficult to arrest. During the Weimar years, the economies of the other industrialized nations were sufficiently stable to pull Germany back from the edge. Today, however, most of those economies are solid as yogurt, they are intricately interrelated, and a large-scale economic disaster in any one of them could send the rest tumbling like dominoes. And then there is the unique threat posed by the OPEC members, who hold us gently by the throat and can apply as much pressure as they like any time they feel like squeezing. True, as the Steins point out, too tight a squeeze would be suicidal, since it could destroy the market for OPEC oil. But not all members of OPEC are famous for their logic.

JR

About the Author

John R. Coyne Jr.

As in Weimar Germany, prices change daily. One character, traveling from Washington to New York, pays $8,010 for a ticket on the Eastern Shuttle. His cab ride from LaGuardia to Wall Street costs $6,000. A family’s monthly gas bill rises to $150,000, and the attractive young wife, desperate to keep food on the table, gives her body to the butcher in exchange for meat.

This may sound exaggerated, and of course it is, for that’s what disaster novels are all about. But it happened before, it can happen again, and this time the slide toward the brink would be infinitely more difficult to arrest. During the Weimar years, the economies of the other industrialized nations were sufficiently stable to pull Germany back from the edge. Today, however, most of those economies are solid as yogurt, they are intricately interrelated, and a large-scale economic disaster in any one of them could send the rest tumbling like dominoes. And then there is the unique threat posed by the OPEC members, who hold us gently by the throat and can apply as much pressure as they like any time they feel like squeezing. True, as the Steins point out, too tight a squeeze would be suicidal, since it could destroy the market for OPEC oil. But not all members of OPEC are famous for their logic.