Speculative Fiction: the collapse of the North American Economy

As the Canadian dollar continues to hover around parity with the US greenback, it does so not so much on the strength of our economy but on the weakness of the US. The Euro continues to climb and it occurs to me how fragile the global economy and our place in it really is.

Modern finance relies on the speculation of future values, as do governmental budgets. Nothing is based on the value of an item as it stands today but on the expected value tomorrow, next week or next year. Investors guess on the stability of a stock and decided whether to sell or buy, and that value is entirely arbitrary. Value is really only worth the paper the stocks are printed on and as we are seeing, this model is leading to a massive North American recession. Currently the only investments that contain any value are the hard commodities, resource-based investments such as oil even as our planet sinks deeper into an energy crisis due to the unrelenting dependency on petroleum products to fuel our way of life. Housing prices sky-rocket in energy rich areas of the Canada (ie. Alberta) while inflated housing prices remain unchanged in Ontario despite this provinces steady slide into economic collapse.