This is the last day of the 2010 Hurricane season and the US managed to make it through with only one minimal Tropical Storm, Bonnie, making landfall. Other areas were not so fortunate.

Igor, which devastated Newfoundland, and Tomas, which ravaged St. Lucia are almost certain to be retired from the name list. Alex and Karl, which both made landfall in Mexico, are also candidates for retirement.

There were two Tropical Depressions and 19 named storms this year. A dozen of the named storms became hurricanes, and five of the dozen reached major hurricane status [Category 3 and above]. The Sea Surface Temperatures were well above normal, but the steering currents and fairly consistent high pressure in the Northern Gulf kept the storms away.

Dr. Masters has more information in his post, Hurricane season draws to a close.

He compares this season to 1995, when only two hurricanes made landfall in the US. The 1995 map is the background to my hurricane header, and the two hurricanes were Erin and Opal. If you look at the map, I live where both storms made landfall.

In addition to the Tropical Weather links, I’ve also pulled the Wildfire links from the sidebar, as the rains and snow have started and are reducing the danger.

So I came across a link to, an Irish blogger, David Malone, with a nice post on the problems, The Enemy Within, showing the regulators in Ireland are no more interested in regulating than those in the US.

In the comments, there was a link to an academic paper by Dirk J Bezemer, Groningen University, Netherlands, dated 16 June 2009, titled “No One Saw This Coming”.

The paper is in PDF format, so use appropriate caution, but Mr. Bezemer wondered, after all the claims that “No one could have imagined …” that the global economy would go into a meltdown, if that was true.

This is an academic paper, so there are footnotes and references throughout, and the criteria used in the selection of the dozen people he cites as having predicted what happened were very limiting. It wasn’t enough that someone said it, they had to have the background to make that prediction, and they had to explain their reasoning.

I was interested that all of the major macro schools were represented, the Austrians, the freshwater, and the saltwater followers all had adherents who predicted the global meltdown, because they are all focusing on that ubiquitous report required in all accounting programs – the balance sheet.

They are definitely not in agreement as to what should be done, but they all saw the problem.

Simply put – people were generating “paper” assets, rather than “real” assets. If you read the blogs you know that it is a common statement that Wall Street doesn’t actually create anything. You need manufacturing to create real assets, and since the coronation of Reagan manufacturing has been moving out of the US. You can’t base your economy on “paper” assets and expect to survive.

People took on too much debt because “on paper” they were well off. As much of their wealth was tied up in their house, when the housing bubble burst, their asset value disappeared. When the assets took a major hit, the debt load leaped up.

Denied access to the pressure washer, they used a leaf blower – I kid you not.