Loved this analogy of our near future in the comments on Billmon today….
Seriously, like I’ve been telling folks for the last few years, get out of debt as fast as you possibly can and stock something away. This won’t be pretty, people.
The good times are not going to come again. The financial rug is about to be pulled out from under the U.S. — India, China, Brazil, Russia and, well, just about everyone else are busy getting a good grip on the edges, so they can pull more effectively. It’s nothing personal, mostly, although that may be a bit hard to believe. It’s a trick the U.S. has used, itself, many and many a time. But while the rug is about to be pulled out from another room, the ceiling is also starting to cave in; over the last several decades, conservatives (with the compliance of a media willing to portray them as centrists) have metaphorically replaced steel with wood, then wood with plastic, then plastic with cardboard. Now the rafters are buckling, there are creaks and groans from behind panels, and the ceiling gets suspiciously damp when it rains. And we’re stuck with an educational system that mostly still can’t bring itself to talk about sex and denounces evolution as fraud, a popular culture that would make Nero blush and make a Nazi yearn for something more wholesome, a dismantled healthcare system in the name of corporate profits, and a manufacturing base so shrunken that for all practical purposes it might as well not exist at all.
When the finances go, in other words, everything will go, and the finances are about to go. The little voice trying to keep us from protesting doesn’t mention that, but then, the little voice spent the last few decades helping talk the world into making those decisions in the first place, so perhaps we shouldn’t trust it.
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