Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms.
Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts.
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20 economic weapons of mass destruction triggering ticking Global Debt Time Bomb:1. Federal Budget Deficit Bomb
2. U.S. Foreign Trade Bomb
3. Weakening U.S. Dollar as Foreign Reserve Currency Bomb
4. Cheap Money Bomb: Credit Ratings Down, Rates Up
5. Global Real Estate Bomb
Read the article for details on each and the rest of the list.
That article was doom and gloom. They paint it as impossible to turn around; so is there any measures you can take to protect yourself? Or is grab a SKS and go inna woods the only option left?
“30″ years??”
–you all are far too kind..
#18 Dallas…my dear..have you not yet realized how near sighted you are??
-s
Possibly the grimmest thing that I’ve ever read. Small countries with similar experiences with worthless currency, corruption, dept and war have recovered – without America’s wealth of natural resources, population and infrastructure. You start by killing off half your weak and infirm with disease, exporting a large part of your middle aged population to neighboring states, defaulting on foreign debt, selling off your infrastructure and mineral rights to hard cash buyers and making your country a tax haven. Should take, maybe two weeks?
#18 Dallas old man,
Clinton let Greenspan crush any hope of getting OTC Derivatives out in the open, even after the meltdown of Long-Term Capital Management. Obama hasn’t made a single move in this area. I don’t exactly love Republican incompetency but Democrats are hardly blameless.
OTC Derivatives are the hidden time bomb.
The stock market is a zero-sum game. If you expect to be able to out-guess more than 50% of the population, then may the Force be with you.
The only way to reliably make money is through productive labor.
But, money is just green paper!
People, c’mon……we gotta go backbackback…..this is all Bill Clinton’s fault. He STARTED it!….I’m telling ya…ya gotta dig……it’s out there somewhere….
TAX ALL RELIGION – NOW – FOREVER
People, c’mon……we gotta go backbackback…..this is all Bill Clinton’s fault. He STARTED it!….I’m telling ya…ya gotta dig……it’s out there somewhere….
TAX ALL RELIGION – NOW – FOREVER…….
Don’t make this a battle of democrats against republicans, both sides have been digging this shit hole for generations.
And I certainly can’t agree with the argument that, since bush doubled ‘our’ debt it is ok for Obama to do so in 4 years.. an idiotic argument that doesn’t stand. If Bush made the country jump one by one in front of a speeding bus, it is ok for Obama to do the same, but in slow motion!? YAY!
If you permitted an individual to only increase their debt year on year, they would be hunted down and put in jail if they are seen as unable to pay it off. Why should it be any different for a government or a nation as a whole? What the government and the federal reserve has done to their people over the last 80 years is criminal, same goes for most of Europe as well. Every empire falls, it wont last.
This didn’t start with any administration still alive, it started with permitting a private entity to control the money supply, to secretly create money out of thin air and do as they wish – devaluing your wealth by increasing the amount of wealth of ‘others’. To choose not to fix the money in supply and have the money increase in value and its purchasing power rather than what we have now which is money that loses its power…To permit banks to become too big to fail… think about it!
#21 The old Soviets knew that you needed a place where you or friends could grow and store enough food to live on: a few acres will do. Heck a back yard garden can feed a small family. Growing and storing does not have to be done at the same place.
You need a residence that can be kept going at minimal costs with minimal resources.
Stay out of the woods. The nuts with guns are going to be hiding in the woods. There isn’t much food there as for shelter? Bring your own.
I hope I’m wrong but I’m still giving us 5 to ten years until we have a worse crash than the great depression.
The tooth fairy isn’t going to bail us out. China isn’t going to want to buy our bonds once they know we aren’t going to pay them back. Once our bond rating falls the interest will be hopeless. That means we are going to have to crawl out the hole being dug the painful way or die there.
In a few years I will have to retire because I’m getting old. Unfortunately I think that this is going to be a very bad time to be old.
#24 you guys crack me up in selling this hairball story to ignore the last cheney administration decade. Instead, it’s Clinton and Obama where the root cause is. Yeah!
Gotta give u goofs credit for being persistent. It’s both comical and sad the great lengths you take to overlook nearly a decade of a republican executuve branch of government.
Both parties have contributed, but the idea that markets should always be unregulated and unpoliced is the central problem. If we had regulators that felt like regulating and enforcement agencies that locked up fraudsters this chasm would be a blip.
Democrats went along, but the philosophical problem lies well to the right. Organized crime became crime by quasi-legitimate organizations about 20 years ago. We have scant resources focused on this because the crooks tend to be campaign contributors.
My take on the next “uh-oh” is that it will come, and be ultimately bigger than the AIG-Lehman-BS period.
Big debt collapses tend to come in two waves. The first one freaks out the public at large. A lot of people yank their money from riskier assets, but things stabilize. Debt is not written off because the problem is thought to be solvable by calming the masses. The real problem is all the debt that isn’t going to be paid back.
Asset markets go back up eventually, but eventually the debt crushes individual borrowers who can’t be profitable at lower revenue levels.
Until huge amounts of debt is written off this will continue. Do to the marvels of modern accounting it is better for banks to hold non-performing loans than to write down the debt. Only once the debt is gone can things change.
The second wave tends to suck much worse than the first one.
Oh, and my predicted vector of collapse is interest rate swaps.
You americans are so full of crap…
You never can get along with each other for a common good right? You people are always categorizing each other and others for no reason. Old-europe/new-europe, republicans/democrats, socialists/communists and so on…
Everyone is blame but your own ignorance right?
It is just pathetic. Get together and start doing something bunch of whiners.
@qb
“Sorry all you partisans, this has been building for 30 years. ”
You are ruining their game where they are both at fault and like children point the finger at the other one that is REALLY the one at fault.
If Obama’s actions in the last year are the cure, I’d rather have the disease. There has been no parallel between his talk and his actions.
In fact, I think the last 5 years of Bush’s presidency were especially stupid and fail to see any meaningful distinction between those and Obama’s.
* Obama hasn’t returned any troops home and did the opposite.
* Obama hasn’t bailed with the Bush “World Police” policy (that is expensive and burdens the US with problems that should belong to other countries)
* Obama hasn’t stopped corporate welfare giveaways and has even outdone Bush.
* Obama hasn’t made peace with Cuba.
Obama is Bush-Lite; Bush was Obama-Lite.
Partisan hacks are idiots that more like to argue and call names and are incapable of independent thought.
#34 You remind me of a tribe chief with an ill child. You shot the previous two witch doctors for making things worse. Good.
Now, you have the best surgeon in the world and you’re ready to shoot him too because the child is still sick after one week.
Your grading methodology is flawed.
#34 Labels are often misused in politics and sometimes intentionally so. Some labeling is necessary unless we stick to the “they do bad things” level of expression. We might quibble over which words, but the words are important and so are the ideas that they represent.
Both parties are similar, but by no means identical. The central structural idea of the right is that markets always do the right thing because of the intrinsic morality of people combined with competition. This is simply wrong and is what is being looked at now.
I’ve driven on the Autobahn and loved it. You’re free to do what you want, but in dangerous areas you must slow down or they WILL give you a big ticket. That’s sort of the approach I’d hope regulators are applying.
That NO RULES idea is central GOP economics going back decades. The Democrats did partake of the poisoned food, but you’ve got to look first at who brought it to the party.
Obama is way too careful. A lot of what he should be doing is pretty simple and requires more arm-twisting than analysis.
A public works program similar to the WPA would be a good idea(say half infrastrucure and half alt-energy). Forcing financial institutions to stay out of related businesses which encourage conflicts of interest if joined(Investing, Insurance, Banking). creating national healthcare based on the best bits of the British/Canadian/French/German/Japanese/Taiwanese systems.
Obama is smart, but thus far seems weak in the knees. Congress can’t be finessed, they must be forced. More LBJ toughness would be good.
@Dallas
When Obama decided to add troops to Afghanistan, that was “the end” for me. I wanted change; it didn’t happen.
#37 well, I also would have liked to think it was a matter of telling the troops to pack up and leave. I’m no expert on the situation there but convinced it’s not quite that simple.