Well...Still time.....

Casey: It'll Be Unstoppable, the Speed of It Will Leave Most People Waking Up to the Danger After It Has Already Happened

Doug: You know I’ve been saying for years that the coming crash is going to be even worse than I think it’s going to be. The correction in 2008 was very scary, but minor by comparison. A warmup. Minor trembling in the ground, just before Krakatoa blows.

That the world financial system will have to face a reckoning day has been pretty much a given since the U.S. took the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, off the gold standard. Since then, decades of profligacy, not just in the U.S., but all around the world, have distorted the global economy to the breaking point. It’s only lasted as long as it has because of the great increases to productivity the computer and other wealth-creating technologies have created, and the fact that many individuals still produce more than they consume and save the difference – even as governments have stepped up their efforts at wealth confiscation.

I thought things might go over the edge in 1980, but I was early. I underestimated how much wealth there was left in the world for the politicians to plunder. But now, while there is more physical wealth in the world, in the form of factories, homes, powerful technologies, etc., there is also massively more debt. Governments – first-world governments, not just banana republics – are sliding towards default, and in the West most individuals have little or no savings. In the East, many have savings tied up in a deflating gargantuan real estate bubble.

For all the reasons we’ve discussed in many different ways, the Greater Depression we’re sliding into is going to be catastrophic for the old world order.

Uneconomic patterns of production and consumption are going to be liquidated – they have to be – and that’s going to smash a lot of people’s rice bowls. In today’s richest societies, people won’t be able to move back to the family farm the way they did in the 1930s; there’s no farm left in most families. There’s not even that much family left in many families – instead of extended families that care for their elders, who educate the young while the able-bodied adults work, we send our elderly to fade away in institutions and our young to be indoctrinated in other institutions, and we barely know what our brothers and sisters are doing, let alone our other relatives. What happens to the huge masses of such people when unemployment benefits can no longer be extended?