europe is descending into poverty. did you know that? someone told you that? so the most advanced continent on the planet, the birthplacerta of western civilization,ce our civilization is getting much poorer very quickly. it s moving backward at high speed just a year ago,st ay europe was a modern place.ea for example, the overwhelminge r majority of europeans heatedwhle their homes with natural gas as modern people do in germany,l the continent s richest country, only about six percent of households, most of them6% o rural, heated with cord wood and you would expect that givena that again, germany is a moderna industrialny country with centrl heating and indoor plumbing and all the other trappings of a society that has moved beyonda the medieval period. year, only about six percent of germans used% of wood to heat their homes. but that has changed dramatically. demand for firewood in germany has risen so fast that there is none left to buy. you can t get it so desperate. ger
and what will be the cascading effect? well, when the cost of keepings whr apartment warm jumps by hundreds of percent in a single year, you become a completely different person. you change your behavior radically. you re no longer tempted to buy a new fourteen hundred diff or iphone or shop at whole foods or even pick up an extra cappuccino. the entire consumer economy grinds to a halt becauseo a ha there s no discretionary income. so it is impossibllte to overstate the downstream effects on the worldit s of an energy crisis. everything changes. how are the centras l banksding responding to this? not well . they seem to be making things worse on purpose in the unitedhe states . we re told not to notice what the fed doe us because t the fed is now diversewhat and therefore great. amazing piece in the just the other day announcing that, quote, leadership of the federal reserve has become its most diverse ever there. more female, black and official as contributing to the central bank s