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Gostaria de partilhar com o Fórum o Crash Course de Chris Martenson, decerto alguns de vós já o conhecem, mas acho que devia ser mais divulgado ainda.
O trabalho é composto por 20 capitulos que explicam as bases da economia para se entender os verdadeiros riscos que todos enfrentamos neste momento, e é de facto assustador o que pode estar para vir se não se tomarem medidas.

Os videos estão disponiveis no youtube, mas vou tentar publicar aqui para melhor organizar, é tudo em Inglês e penso que não existe ainda tradução para português.

saudações.

Crash Course Chapter 1: Three Beliefs

It's very important to distinguish between facts, opinions, and beliefs. So let me be right upfront about this. I hold three beliefs, which I'm going to share with you and then spend the rest of our time showing you how I got to these beliefs.

The first is that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. Second, I believe that its possible that the pace and/or scope of change could overwhelm the ability of our key social and support institutions to adapt. Third, I believe we do not lack any technology or understanding necessary to build ourselves a better future.

Crash Course Chapter 2: The Three "E"s

Massive change is upon us. To understand the nature of this change, we need to understand the three "E"s – the Economy, Energy, and the Environment - which is where we'll spend the rest of our time in the Crash Course.

The first "E" is the economy, which is the lens through which the Crash Course looks at everything, specifically exponential money, the first-ever collapse of a global credit binge, an aging population, and a national failure to save.

The second "E" is energy. We will explore what Peak Oil implies for an economic system that is based on continual expansion.

The third "E", the environment, will be exerting its own unknowable but certainly significant economic burdens due to shrinking resources and other systemic pressures while the other two "E"s are clamoring for your money and attention.

Crash Course Chapter 3: Exponential Growth

In the Crash Course we will learn a few foundational Key Concepts. None is more important than exponential growth. Understanding this will greatly enhance our chances to form a better future.

Once an exponential function "turns the corner," even though the percentage rate of growth might remain constant and possibly quite low, the amounts do not. They pile up faster and faster.

Oil consumption, the US money supply, world population, worldwide water use, species extinction, and other critical areas all follow an exponential curve in their growth, and all have turned or will soon turn that critical corner.

Taken one at a time, any one of these areas could command the full attention of every earnest person on the face of the planet, but we need to understand that they are, in fact, all related and connected.

Crash Course Chapter 4: Compounding Is The Problem

In order to understand the urgency I feel about the issues covered in the Crash Course, you need to understand the power of compounding. If something, such as a population, oil demand, a money supply, or anything else steadily increases in size in some proportion to its current size, and you graph it over time, the graph will look like a hockey stick.

Said more simply, if something is increasing over time on a percentage basis, it is growing exponentially. With exponential functions, the action really only heats up in the last few moments. There is simply not a lot of maneuvering room once you hop on the vertical portion of a compound graph.

Crash Course Chapter 5: Growth vs. Prosperity

Growth is good, right? A growing economy means that we are becoming more prosperous...growth offers opportunities. So many people would say that growth equals prosperity. But is this actually true? And what if it's not?

For the past few hundred years we have been lulled into linking the two concepts, because there was always sufficient surplus energy that we could have both growth AND prosperity. But what's going to happen when 100% of our surplus money or energy is being used to simply grow? And what happens if there's not enough surplus to even fund growth alone?

This, then, is the greatest challenge of our times – properly recognizing where we want our remaining surplus to go and getting that story out. We place a great deal at risk if we allow ourselves to do what is easy – that is, take the path of least resistance and simply grow – instead of doing what is right, which is directing our surplus towards a more prosperous future.

Crash Course Chapter 6: What Is Money?

Before we begin our tour through the three Es (the Economy, the Environment, and Energy), we need to share a common understanding of this thing called money.

Money is something that we live with so intimately on a daily basis that it probably has escaped our close attention.

Money should possess three characteristics. The first is that it should be a store of value. Historically, gold and silver filled this role perfectly because they were rare, took a lot of human energy to mine, and did not corrode or rust. By contrast, the US dollar pretty much constantly loses value over time – a feature which punishes savers and enforces the need to speculate and/or invest. A second feature is that money needs to be accepted as a medium of exchange, meaning that it is widely accepted within a population as an intermediary within and across all economic transactions. And the third feature is that money needs to be a unit of account, meaning that the money must be divisible and each unit must be equivalent.

It is crucially important that a nation's money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation.

Crash Course Chapter 7: Money Creation

Here we will explore the process by which money is created. In order to appreciate the implications of our massive levels of debt, you have to understand how the debt came into being.

John Kenneth Galbraith once famously said, "The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled." We're about to discuss that very thing. Money creation is a bizarre thing to ponder. It is actually a very simple process, but it's really difficult to accept.

Money is loaned into existence. Conversely, when loans are paid back, money 'disappears.'

There is a federal rule that allows banks to loan out a proportion, a fraction, of the money they have on deposit to others. In theory, banks are allowed to loan out up to 90% of what people have on deposit with them. Because banks retain only a fraction of their deposits in reserve, the term for this process is "fractional reserve banking."

Crash Course Chapter 8: The Fed - Money Creation

Here's a quote from a Federal Reserve publication entitled "Putting it Simply": When you or I write a check, there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.

Wow. That is an extraordinary power. Whereas you or I need to work to obtain money, and place it at risk to have it grow, the Federal Reserve simply prints up as much as it wishes, whenever it wants, and then loans it to us via the US government, with interest.

All dollars are backed by debt. There are two kinds of money out there. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. And perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking.

Crash Course Chapter 9: A Brief History of US Money

The purpose of this section is to show you that the US government has radically shifted the rules during times of emergency and that our monetary system is really a lot younger than you might think.

In 1933, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to counter the falling money supply in a most drastic manner. To accomplish this he confiscated all privately-held gold and immediately devalued the US dollar. This goes to show how governments, in a period of emergency, can change rules and break their own laws.

Fast forward to 1971, when President Nixon "slammed the gold window," ending its dollar convertibility. Without a gold backing, there was no hard, physical limit to how many paper dollars could be issued.

What will it be like to live here when our nation is creating a trillion dollars every four weeks? How about every four days?

Crash Course Chapter 10: Inflation

Most of us think of inflation as rising prices, but that's not quite right. Inflation is not caused by rising prices. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation. Inflation is caused by the presence of too much money in relation to goods and services. What we experience is things going up in price, but in fact, inflation is really the value of your money going down, simply because there's too much of it around. Inflation is, everywhere and always, a monetary phenomenon.

From 1665 to 1776 there was absolutely no inflation. For 111 years, a dollar saved was, well, a dollar saved. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a world where you could earn a thousand dollars, put it in a coffee can in the backyard, and your great- great grandchildren could dig it up and enjoy the same benefits from that thousand dollars as you would have 111 years previously? This was reality in the US at one time.

What does it mean to live in a world where your money loses value exponentially?

Crash Course Chapter 11: How Much Is A Trillion?

During the Crash Course, you will often encounter numbers that are expressed in trillions. How much is a trillion?

A trillion is a very, very big number, and I think it would be worth spending a couple of minutes trying to get our arms around the concept.

Make no mistake, we should not be lulled into complacency simply because it is too big to really get our minds around.

Keep this lesson in mind as we discuss the total accumulated debts and liabilities of the US, which are many tens of trillions of dollars.

Crash Course Chapter 12: Debt

Now we enter Part Two of the Crash Course. With the background you've received thus far, you are now positioned to understand how the Three "E"s - the Economy, Energy, and the Environment - intersect and seemingly converge on a very narrow window of the future - the Twenty-Teens. The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

For you and me, there are only two ways to settle a debt: 1) Pay it off or 2) default on it. If you have a printing press like the government does, a third option exists: 3) Printing money to pay for the debt. So what is debt, really? Debt represents future consumption taken today.

Our entire economic system, and by extension our way of life, is founded on debt, and debt is founded on the assumption that the future will always be bigger than the past. Therefore it is utterly vital that we examine this assumption closely, because if this assumption is false, so are a lot of other critical things that we may be taking for granted.

Crash Course Chapter 13: A National Failure To Save

If you've just seen the previous chapter on debt, then you might be wondering if either our savings or our assets are of sufficient quantity to make those levels of debt perfectly manageable. In this chapter I will present evidence that the United States has failed to save money at virtually every level of society and make the claim that the United States government is insolvent.

A personal failure to save has been reflected by a state and local failure to save, which are mirrored by a corporate failure to save, all dwarfed by a failure to save at the federal government level. And capping it all off is a profound failure to invest. All of these deficits lie before us and lead me to conclude that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

Crash Course Chapter 14: Assets & Demographics

Our nation has a historic, never-before-seen level of debt and a historic failure to save. Along with debt and savings, one also has to consider assets. After all, does it really matter if you have no savings and a million dollars of debt, if you have assets worth 10 million?

An asset is an item of ownership that is convertible into cash. Assets comprise the total resources of a person or business, including such things as cash, notes, accounts receivable, securities, inventories, goodwill, fixtures, machinery, and/or real estate.

Debts are fixed, while assets are variable. When you take on a debt, there it placidly sits, growing larger until you make payments on it. Assets, on the other hand, are variable, sometimes gaining and sometimes losing value.

Crash Course Chapter 15: Bubbles

Along the continuum of irrational financial behavior, it can be tricky to tell the difference between a bubble, a mania, and mere touch of exuberance. A bubble is reserved for the height of folly, and history is rich with folly.

So how would we know that we're in an 'asset bubble'? What do they look like and what can we expect when one bursts? The Fed famously likes to claim that you can't spot one until it bursts. But actually you can, and the definition is pretty simple.

Bubbles used to happen once every generation or so, because it took time to forget the pain from the damage. Today we are facing the bursting of a second major asset bubble, housing, spaced less than ten years from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. This is simply astounding and thoroughly unprecedented. It is the largest bubble in all of history and will probably be the most destructive. And it is happening right now.

Crash Course Chapter 16: Fuzzy Numbers

In this Crash Course video chapter called Fuzzy Numbers, you will learn how our official economic statistics are based on deeply misleading, if not provably false, data. Our economic recession, and possibly depression, can be partially explained by the extent to which we have chosen to provide ourselves with misleading economic data. Certainly if you share my concerns over stocks, bonds, and 401K holdings, or are a serious investor of any sort, you owe it to yourself to listen to this explanation of how wrong our measures of inflation and GDP really are.

In Fuzzy Numbers, we will examine the ways that our measures of inflation and Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, are flawed, using charts of inflation and GDP as well as other easy-to-understand graphics. This chapter will help you understand inflation and GDP and how our national obsession with misrepresenting them to ourselves has led us to the edge of a recession and possibly depression.

Crash Course Chapter 17a: Peak Oil

Energy is the lifeblood of any economy. But when an economy is based on an exponential debt-based money system that is itself based on exponentially increasing energy supplies, the supply of that energy deserves our very highest attention.

Oil is a miracle, working tirelessly in the background to make our lives easy beyond historical measure. Oil represents over 50% of US total yearly energy use, while oil and natural gas together represent over 75%. How easily could we replace the role of oil in our style of consumer-led, growth based economy? Not very.

Peak Oil is simply a fact. Peak Oil is NOT synonymous with "running out of oil." But the most urgent issue before us does not lie with identifying the precise moment of Peak Oil. What we need to be most concerned with is the day that world petroleum demand outstrips available supply. It is at that moment that the oil markets will change forever - and probably quite suddenly.

Crash Course Chapter 17b: Energy Budgeting

In the next section, we will discuss the intersection between Energy and the Economy, and I will make the point that it was no accident that our exponential, debt-based money system grew up at precisely the same moment that a new source of high quality energy was discovered that proved capable of increasing exponentially right alongside it.

Now we embark on the precise line of thinking that completely dominates my investing and purchasing habits. I call it energy economics.

With sufficient surplus energy, humans can construct remarkably complex creations in short order. Social complexity relies on surplus energy. Societies that unwillingly lose complexity are notoriously unpleasant places to live. Given this, shouldn't we pay close attention to how much surplus energy we've got and where it comes from?

Crash Course Chapter 17c: Energy and the Economy

In theory, there's nothing problematic with living in a world full of exponential growth and depletion curves – as long as the world does not have any boundaries. However, exponential functions take on enormous importance when they approach a physical boundary, as seems to be the case for oil in the very near future. Both discoveries and production indicate that we could be at oil's exponential boundary already.

We can make a very strong case that both population and our money system are utterly dependent on the continued expansion of oil energy. But what if our exponentially-based economic and monetary systems, rather than being the sophisticated culmination of human evolution, are really just an artifact of oil? What if all of our rich societal complexity and all of our trillions of dollars of wealth and debt simply are the human expression of surplus energy pumped from the ground?

What will happen to our exponential, debt-based money system? Is it even possible for it to function in a world without constant growth? These are important questions, and they deserve answers.

Crash Course Chapter 18: Environmental Data

In Crash Course Chapter 18: The Environment, Chris Martenson explains how multiple essential resources are being depleted at ever faster rates. Our money system requires continual economic growth, but energy depletion will run headlong into dwindling resource returns to limit future growth options. Overpopulation will increase competition and demand for fossil fuel energy sources such as crude oil and coal, as well as for natural gas and sources of alternative energy.

In this chapter, Peak Coal, Peak Uranium, and copper extraction are explored as illustrations challenging long-held assumptions about the inevitable certainty of continued global economic expansion. This chapter makes it easy to understand why careful management of our natural resources will be necessary for our economic and environmental future.

Crash Course Chapter 19: Future Shock

You are at the part of the Crash Course where everything you learned comes together into a single chapter. Chapter 19 contains a comprehensive view of how all of our problems are actually interrelated and need to be viewed as such or solutions will continue to elude us.

We will review the key trends, which appear to be converging on a very narrow window of the future. Here is a two-second recap of the key issues. If you have watched all of the videos until this point, you will undoubtedly see how they are connected:

Money, credit, growth. Exponential growth. Debt, future, history. Failure to save. Assets, housing, bubble, financial panic. Demographics, wealth, boomers, falling values. Fuzzy numbers. Energy, oil, growth. Peak Oil. Environment, resources, exploitation, change.

This chapter will connect the dots and beckon us toward the future.

Crash Course Chapter 20: What Should I Do?

This chapter is the final integration of all the prior chapters and attempts to provide clarity around the question of, "What should I do?" Let me rephrase that. What should WE do? The changes that are potentially coming are not solvable alone.

Chapter 20 is not going to be a simple list of things to do. Instead, it will reflect my goal of each person assuming responsibility for their own actions.

Chapter 20 is going to provide a framework for action. This is a way of structuring all the myriad things you COULD do, into the prioritized list of things you WILL do. Consider it your personal risk-mitigation plan.

Our individual challenge is to accept the possibility that the future may be quite a departure from the present.

Video: http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-20-what-should-i-do

Espetacular, obrigado por partilhar!