My education in Peak Oil, economics, and global political shenanigans over the past few years has led me to believe that an economic crash or collapse or disruption is approaching. I’m of the general opinion that if nothing drastic happens, then this will be a relatively slow decline, measured in years. But on the other hand, there are myriad things that could happen that would trigger some fast effects. So I think it’s all up in the air, I don’t think anyone can know for sure how things will unfold.
When R and I would discuss this, he tended to think that once he became aware of some piece of information, that the effects or consequences of that information would happen immediately. So, when we learned about the falling dollar, he was *sure* that the dollar would crash the next day, and within the month we’d be in the midst of bank failures, bread lines, mutant zombie bikers roaming the landscape, whatever. I felt that nearly anything was *possible*, but that such fast changes weren’t necessarily *likely*.
So, being the data geek that I am, I decided to start charting some select criteria, so we could see how things wobbled, meandered, dipped and recovered, etc. And if anything DID crash fast, that would look really cool too.
My criteria are:
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the US Dollar Index value from that same site,
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both the local and the wholesale prices of gasoline — local taken from the sign on our valley’s main gas station, and wholesale taken from the oil site above
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the Dow Jones Industrial Average
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I started charting this information in early August. Data collected Friday evenings.
I’m trying to learn how to use Microsoft Excel (or its freeware counterpart, Open Office Spreadsheet) to draw charts from spreadsheet data, but until I figure that out I’m keeping a physical chart hung on the wall and updated in purple Sharpie marker.
Here are the photos showing data from August 7, 2007 through March 7, 2008:
