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.