Atlantic Monthly Press

interrupted again to ask Dottor Moretti

but it hadn’t upset him. He’d walked

We’ve done a terrible job of managing contraction so far. We can’t face it. We pretend it’s not happening. We’re doing everything possible to defy it as a practical matter. But contraction is the essence of our reality right now. Faced with the likelihood that peak oil has already occurred, along with upheavals in finance, all we’ve done is mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to attempt to reflate the deflating money supply, to try and ramp back up an orgy of borrowing that was insane in the first place and has already ended in tears once,