Jeff Rubin

Soaring oil prices caused four out of the last five recessions. They caused the current recession. And they will cause the next one. Expensive oil costs us more than just money. It costs jobs, homes and in the long run it is going to radically alter the way we live. For if cheap oil is the fuel that keeps the machinery of globalisation in motion, then expensive oil has the same effect as pouring diesel into an unleaded tank. Everything stalls; the engine fails. Oil prices will rise again in the coming years, as this utterly convincing insight into our collective future argues. And as oil prices fluctuate wildly, our society will change dramatically, and for good. From the homes we live in and the cars we drive to the food we eat and the places we work, our daily lives and global economy are going to be transformed. But while this new, smaller world will take some getting used to, it will also open our eyes to a more localised and ultimately more liveable way of life.

During the pandemic, the borrowing patterns of the Canadian government inflated a national deficit by a factor of ten in just two years - and the time has come to pay for it. The ramifications of international COVID-19 spending could potentially last for decades, and inevitably one of the first manifestations of these consequences will be that central banks will lose control of interest rates, and therefore of growth and inflation targets. The genie will be out of the bottle. That is just the first symptom of a series of cascading upheavals. Supply-chain disruptions have already shown the vulnerability of the globalist model that has fuelled growth for the past decades. War has not only shown the fragility of the status quo, but has revealed diplomatic and economic rifts that promise to shift trading patterns, which means access to markets and to resources. At the same time, the precarity of the US dollar underlines the life-or-death importance of those resources, energy in particular

From the #1 bestselling author of Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller, a provocative, far-reaching account of how the middle class got stuck with the bill for globalization, and how the blowback--from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe--will change the developed world. Real wages in North America have not risen since the 1970s. Union membership has collapsed. Full-time employment is beginning to look like a quaint idea from the distant past. If it seems that the middle class is in retreat around the developed world, it is. Former CIBC World Markets Chief Economist Jeff Rubin argues that all this was foreseeable back when Canada, the United States and Mexico first started talking free trade. Labour argued then that manufacturing jobs would move to Mexico. Free-trade advocates disagreed. Today, Canadian and American factories sit idle. More steel is used to make bottlecaps than cars. Meanwhile, Mexico has become one of the world's biggest automotive exporters. And it's not just NAFTA. Cheap oil, low interest rates, global deregulation and tax policies that benefit the rich all have the same effect: the erosion of the middle class. Growing global inequality is a problem of our own making, Rubin argues. And solving it won't be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous, and most importantly, timely. GDP is growing, the stock market is up and unemployment is down, but the surprise of the book is that even the good news is good for only one percent of us.

We are constantly being told that globalisation is good for the economy and good for us, but it’s actually the opposite, argues bestselling author Jeff Rubin in this provocative, timely book. In the pre-coronavirus world, governments and economists bragged that GDP was growing and unemployment was down. But even then, real wages had been stagnant for decades, union membership had collapsed, and full-time employment no longer guaranteed you could pay the bills. When we emerge from the virus, it would be nice to think that living in a country that’s getting richer means that you’re getting richer too, but that’s not the way it works anymore. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit only the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the ‘expendable’ middle class. The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous.

Pinole is a small city with a very big history. Pinole holds the unique distinction of having the oldest name in Contra Costa County. The area's first fast food, "pinolli," originated here with the 1772 Spanish discovery. Since then, the landscape has changed from nineteenth century cattle round-ups at Rancho El Pinole to twenty-first century round-ups of laptops, iPads, and smartphones at local eateries. The last grizzly bear disappeared from here in 1848. But the last dinosaur still exists from the extinct Pinole Midget Golf course. Pinole's appealing geography of bay, fertile valleys, and favorable climate has attracted a multi-cultural stream of newcomers through time. From gala Fourth of July parades of the early 1900s to the Fiesta del Pinole pageants of the 1960s, Pinole has always known how to celebrate its heritage and the contributions of its citizens. This book captures the images of many of those moments of celebration as Pinole emerged from a sleepy village into a dynamic city.