Enough fluff
The “big picture” of the future of the state’s largest industry, tourism, as presented by State tourism liaison Marsha Wienert in her interview with Honolulu Weekly [“Tourism: The big picture,” 2/10] could be greatly improved by being brought into much sharper focus. What we do learn from the graph and the statistics provided in the interview is that the industry was already on the ropes before the real estate bubble burst in the fall of 2008.
This, of course, should come as no surprise to anyone as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008–the event that precipitated the real estate meltdown was preceded during the summer of 2008 by an extreme spiking of oil prices.
The 2008 oil price spike played a greater role in pushing the global economy into recession then did the wide-scale criminal impropriety in the U.S. financial markets. Since the 1970s, all recessions have been proceeded by some degree of price volatility in the oil market. So if “oil price shock” was a significant factor in causing the recession we are still in, one needs to know what was the cause of the extreme 2008 oil price spike. The conventional answer to that question is that speculators in the oil futures market acted to drive up the price of oil to their extreme heights during the summer of 2008. Yes oil futures speculation did play a role in the spike of oil prices, but only partially. This trend should be considered evidence that the oil demands of a growing global economy were outstripping the ability of oil producers to meet that demand.
And what of today’s prospects of diversifying our economy away from its excessive dependence on tourism? Well, I certainly can agree with Marsha Wienert’s answer to Adrienne LaFrance’s question on diversification: “For as long as I can remember, we’ve been trying to diversify our economy. But, as all of our economists say, at the end of the day, tourism still is the economy.”
And so, we find ourselves in a situation quite possibly not that dissimilar to the one we were in during the 1850s–economically dependent on an industry (then, whaling) that is about to peak and enter into a terminal decline. Not even taking into account how totally petroleum-enabled our lives have become, we were back then, in a much better position, facing the complete collapse of whaling than we are now faced, with what at this point, is nothing more than a significant drop in the yearly visitor arrivals count. A complete end of tourism is something that is simply unthinkable. But, then the response of mainstream economists to the expression of such worries is, to declare, that they give voice not so much to the “unthinkable” as to the impossible.
Lucas Wheeler Honolulu
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