If you have not yet read Part 1: The End Of Stimulus? (And The Start Of The Crash?), available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Suddenly everywhere we look in the emerging markets, we're seeing things quickly get out of hand. EM currencies are plunging and their bonds are being sold hard. It’s a broad-based sell-off. 

Expect similar disruptions in the EM equity markets soon. The collapse progression is always the same: currency first, bonds second, then equites.

Our view of what’s happening in the EM universe is that the carry trades are unwinding. What this means is that the big piles of money unleashed on the world by the OECD central banks are turning tail and running away from the periphery (EMs)  and back towards the core (US, EU).

The virtuous part of this cycle for the EM countries was that big funds would borrow in a major currency, like the dollar or euro, and then buy a particular EM currency (causing that currency to strengthen) as well as its debt (causing those bond prices to rise).

The opposite and unhappy part of that story is when that whole things gets reversed. A vicious cycle is initiated which causes the bonds of the EM country to be sold, jacking up EM interest rates, and then the currency is sold (weakening it), and then dollars/euros are bought again causing those major currencies to strengthen.

That’s the pattern we're seeing right now and it’s consistent with the falling global liquidity markets are experiencing, which indicates that a big problem is brewing.

For several EM countries, as well as weaker players in Europe and the American lower and middle classses, that problem has already arrived.

We see clear evidence of it in…

If you have not yet read Part 1: The Economy Is Cooked, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

One of my bigger 'learnings' from writing The Crash Course in book form was the deepening of my appreciation for the utter importance of energy to our way of life and to the process of creating (and maintaining) wealth. 

I spent time reacquainting myself with the laws of thermodynamics and came away with a far more focused view of the predicament in which we find ourselves.

I know that 'using the term thermodynamics' may sound awfully bookish or geeky, but it's by far the most important concept if one wants to understand the role of energy in our economy and why our economy will almost certainly fail to operate well in a world of declining net energy.

The laws of thermodynamics have never been violated by humans, not even for a millisecond.  Just like the law of gravity, they just exist as something we can either pay attention to, or not.  Our choice.  But they cannot be violated. At least, they haven't yet; so betting on a future where such laws have been repealed by human ingenuity would not be, shall we say, a sound wager.

A problem with the laws of thermodynamics is that they require a little bit of study to understand and they are loaded with wacky jargon which masks some very simple ideas.  Gravity is easy – all one has to do to appreciate it is get a few feet off the ground – the farther the better – in order for the reptilian portions of the brain to kick in and take over and make you very, very aware of gravity's potential consequences. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics are less obvious, and we don't have a hard-wired evolutionary pathway that will force awareness upon us.  We have to come by an appreciation of the laws intellectually.

The first law simply states that..