HAVE you heard of jingle mail? It's the practice in the US of sending your bank manager the keys to your house when you can no longer pay your subprime mortgage.
Instead of hanging on despite crippling mortgage payments, you find an envelope (any old one will do), put your house keys in it and mail them to the bank.
Then you pack up the missus, the kids and the pets and begin your new life in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.
Before the move, as you are packing, the banker arrives, lifts your flaxen-haired daughters' chins and says: "No need to take the little ladies."
Your bad home loan — and of course, your daughters — are now the bank's problem.
In housing-poor Australia, flogging the house wouldn't be a problem for the bank, not with new immigrants driving up our housing prices.
But in the US, with its huge population and huger housing stock, selling the millions of houses that have suddenly come on the market is a problem. And so is the reason for all those defaulters: peak oil.
That's the idea that world oil production peaked in either 2005, or this week or next week, and we will soon be reduced to savagery. Which brings me to T. Boone Pickens.
Pickens, a Republican oilman, says the US has finally found a problem it can't drill its way out of. Last year, Pickens predicted oil would surge to $US100 a barrel.
Naturally, no one believed him at the time, instead calling for him to be captured by men in white coats armed with butterfly nets and placed in a rubber room (Pickens, not the men in the white coats).
Now $US100 oil is a fragrant memory redolent of happier times, but still, sadly, no one is paying attention to Pickens. "He was right, but for the wrong reasons," grumble the experts.
The US imports about 70 per cent of its oil at a cost of $700 billion a year, four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.
"If we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil," he says.
Pickens says over the next 10 years $US10trillion will be handed over to foreigners. This will be the biggest transfer of wealth in the history if the planet, he says.
Pickens's solution is to build wind farms in all the prairie states from Texas to North Dakota. These are among the windiest places on earth, Pickens says, and will free up the natural gas the US now uses to generate power. The gas will then be used to power the nation's car and truck fleet, reducing the nation's dependency on foreign oil.
It's a stop gap that will give America the breathing space it needs to stop the Saudis repossessing (possessing?) the US.
And it's not just Saudi Arabia. My good friend Frank Fukuyama seems to agree with Pickens. Talking about foreigners' cash reserves of US currency, Frank says China has about $1.5 trillion of US cash reserves, Russia half a trillion, South Korea about one-quarter. Now while this doesn't necessarily translate into military or other kinds of power, "a few hundred billion dollars here, a few trillion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money".
So what will happen if the US doesn't adopt the Pickens plan?
I can see a time when it won't have any more money to give to Saudi Arabia and it simply opts to send the Saudis the keys to the country, all because Americans are addicted to burning leftovers from carboniferous times.
The former population of the US will then form an orderly line to head for a large cardboard box underneath an overpass among the sucked-dry sand dunes of the Middle East.
As the Americans line up to leave the US, the Saudis will say: "There's no need to take the little ladies with you." Then they will pause and say: "Better leave the little boys and the pets as well."
What does all this mean for Australia? We who are still paying our mortgages and whose houses are still worth something. I would say it's time to buy some canned goods.
But maybe it's time we saved America's bacon, like they saved the French in World War II, and we saved them in World War I, World War II, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.
We must all get behind Pickens's plan, get off the oil teat, send the US instead of China our natural gas and for God's sake look after their women for them.
