*** “What beautiful weather…” we said to a colleague yesterday. “It looks like the beginning of summer in London, doesn’t it.”

“The beginning? You better enjoy it. This might be the end of summer too.”

London is not known for its great weather. Sometimes, a few lovely weeks in May or June may be all the summer Londoners get.

*** “You may be able to print your way out of a recession,” said another colleague this morning, “but you can’t mint your way out.”

“What?”

“In the U.S.,” he explained, “because of price increases in the metals markets, it now costs more than 5 cents to make a new nickel. And here in England, if you melt down two pennies, you get 3 pennies worth of copper.”

*** And here’s more, from the Washington Post , on Japan’s self extinction:

“Japan celebrated a national holiday on Monday in honor of its children. But Children’s Day might just as easily have been a national day of mourning.

“For this is the land of disappearing children and a slow-motion demographic catastrophe that is without precedent in the developed world.

“The number of children has declined for 27 consecutive years, a government report said over the weekend. Japan now has fewer children who are 14 or younger than at any time since 1908.

“The proportion of children in the population fell to an all-time low of 13.5 percent. That number has been falling for 34 straight years and is the lowest among 31 major countries, according to the report. In the United States, children account for about 20 percent of the population.

“Japan also has a surfeit of the elderly. About 22 percent of the population is 65 or older, the highest proportion in the world. And that number is on the rise. By 2020, the elderly will outnumber children by nearly 3 to 1, the government report predicted. By 2040, they will outnumber them by nearly 4 to 1.

“The economic and social consequences of these trends are difficult to overstate.

“Japan, now the world’s second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research.

“Population shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone.

“In what is now being called a “super-aging” society, department and grocery stores have recorded declining sales for a decade…”

*** Food riots have broken out in several countries…including several oil producers. The oil exporters find they need to spend more and more of their loot feeding their own growing populations. Several have tried to invest in more local food production, but have been stopped by a lack of water.

*** Here’s something interesting. Our Buenos Aires correspondent, Horacio Pozzo, tells us that U.S. company, Amyris, has gotten together with a Brazilian company, Crystalsev, to produce a sugar-caned based bio-diesel fuel which is “equal or better than diesel from petroleum.” Several large companies from Europe and America are moving to Brazil to take part in the development of bio-diesel fuels. And Fiat Powertrain Technologies says it will launch a motor designed to run on ethanol – also in Brazil, in 2010.

*** Finally, more than a million Americans are being fed and housed, courtesy of state, local and federal governments. They’re the lucky ones…paying no mortgages…losing no jobs; they don’t even have to buy bread. Still, life in U.S. prisons is probably no picnic.

Until tomorrow,

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

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