Copper toxicity

 

Kayser-Fleischer Rings

Markshere2 called me out in the comments of the last post.

Max out credit cards? Really?

Nothing short of bigass comet heading to wipe us out would make me max out credit cards.

Collapse in Egypt will crash the dollar / economy / international supply lines?

I'm missing something here. 

The thing is, I mostly agree with him and perhaps I did get carried away and resorted to hyperbole. However...

Background

One thing you will hear from old farmers who handled a lot of different kinds of livestock is that many types of farm animals can seem perfectly fine and then, out of nowhere, fall to the ground and die in a matter of minutes or hours.

One example of this is copper toxicity in sheep. Using trace-mineralized salt that is formulated for cattle can be a death sentence for sheep and you will never see it coming.

Sheep tend to accumulate copper. They are not very efficient at excreting excess-to-need. Perhaps they evolved in landscapes where copper is either rare or other mineral out-compete the copper absorbtion pathways.

Regardless of cause, the sheep's liver starts storing that excess copper and there is no safety relief-valve. Little-by-little the amount of copper in each liver cell increases until one cell dies due to copper toxicity. The cell autolyses (digests itself and releases its contents) and the surround cells absorb most of those nutrients...including the copper.

Those cells were already red-lining their capacity to absorb copper. The incoming jolt kills most of them. They, in turn, release their contents and neighboring cells absorb the copper they just dumped.

The number of cells dying increases as the sphere-of-death expands outward. In time, the copper overload is killing cells that are distant neighbors and tissue that is not in the liver.

The first cell that died had no impact on the sheep's brain but it triggered an avalanche of dying cells that eventually results in the brain dying...often in a stunningly short time.

Back to Egypt

If Egypt (population 120 million) tumbles into hyper-inflation (for food prices), there will be mass, outbound migration. They will not go south into Africa. They will not go west. Some might go to Syria (population 26M and getting bombed by Israel), Iraq (48M) and Turkey (87M) since they are culturally similar...but those countries are akin to the liver cells that are already red-lined with copper. They have the same issues. They cannot take any more. 

That leaves Europe and the US. Sentiment in Europe is starting to swing to the right, but at the current time the EU will welcome them with open arms even if the first wave is a million.

Perhaps the fabric of Europe will hold. But it is likely that the wave of Egyptians will trigger waves of Syrians, Iraqi and Turks + chain migration of additional waves of Egyptians.

It easy to scoff at Europe's economy as too dependent  on "culture, tourism and status apparel", but Europe produces many things that are vital to the US economy, chemicals, drugs, pigments and dyes, catalysts, machine tools, hybrid seeds, niche farm equipment (like aquaculture) and so on.

For example, in 2012 there was a fire in a German chemical plant that was the only supplier in the world of an exotic polyamide*  (plastic) that was used by every US auto manufacturer for fuel system components. Switching to another polymer would force EPA emissions recertification of every vehicle line. Buyers were scavenging the world, calling warehouses looking for stray pallet loads of that polyamide so they could keep the auto plants running.

So one product of one chemical plant going off-line had the potential for shutting down the entire US auto industry.

The previous essay fingers Egypt as a good candidate for the place where the cascading failure will start. 

Economics

Mathematically, it is defensible if you can borrow money at an interest rate that is lower than the rate at which prices are going up. Scarcity drives up prices.

*My memory isn't what it used to be but I think it was marketed as "Nylon 18".