1. Faber: The ‘American Empire’ has peaked, is on a decline
Hong Kong economist Marc Faber says “the average life span of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years … Once a society becomes successful it becomes arrogant, righteous, overconfident, corrupt, and decadent … overspends … costly wars … wealth inequity and social tensions increase; and society enters a secular decline.”
2. Grantham: Learned nothing, doomed to repeat past, only bigger
Money manager Jeremy Grantham warns that our irrational nightmare will repeat. A year ago we came dangerously close to the “Great Depression 2.” Unfortunately, we’ve “learned nothing … condemning ourselves to another serious financial crisis in the not too-distant future.”
We had our bear-market rally. Next, historical cycles plus our irrational behavior guarantees another, bigger global meltdown. We “learned nothing.”
3. Stiglitz: Wall Street creating short respite before next crash
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently warned: Unless Wall Street’s incentive system is drastically reformed, “the financial sector will only try to circumvent whatever new regulations we put in place. We will simply have a short respite before the next crisis.” Warning, nothing’s changed, it’s worse: Lobbyists run Obama, Congress and the Fed.
4. Johnson: Running out of time before Great Depression 2
Yes, “we’re running out of time … to prevent a true depression,” warns former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson. The “financial industry has effectively captured our government” and is “blocking essential reform,” and unless we break Wall Street’s “stranglehold” we will be unable prevent the Great Depression 2.
5. Ferguson: Fed’s easy money fuels new bubbles, meltdowns
In the 400-year history of the stock market “there has been a long succession of financial bubbles,” says financial historian Niall Ferguson. Who’s the culprit? The Fed: “Without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission and commission of central banks.”
Another bubble (and crash) is virtually certain, thanks to Washington’s $23.7 trillion explosion in debt, the Fed’s support for the $670 trillion shadow banking system and Wall Street lobbyists getting superrich thanks to Wall Street’s insatiable greed.
6. Taleb: Fed haunted by ghost of Greenspan’s failed Reaganomics
When Obama reappointed Bernanke, Nassim Taleb, risk-management professor and author of “The Black Swan,” warned of a new disaster: “The world has never, never been as fragile,” yet Obama reappoints an economist who “doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work.” New proof? At last week’s American Economic Association, Bernanke was still shifting the blame: “The best response to the housing bubble would have been regulatory, not monetary.”
Wrong: He conveniently forgets he was advising Bush earlier, did nothing. Now Obama’s stuck with a Greenspan clone and an insane ideology focused solely on saving a failed banking system by flooding the world with inflated dollars guaranteed to trigger another meltdown.
7. Soros: Dollar dead as a reserve currency, nest eggs dying
Billionaire investor George Soros’ “New Paradigm:” America’s 25-year “superboom … led to massive deregulation … blindly chasing free markets … unleashed excessive greed … created the dot-com and credit meltdowns” and a “shadow banking system” of derivatives.
“The system is broken. The current crisis marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency,” warns Soros. “We’re now in a period of wealth destruction. It is going to be very hard to preserve your wealth in these circumstances.”
8. Hedgers: make billions shorting stupid politicians, bankers
Soros isn’t alone. Lots of hedge fund buddies made hundreds of millions and billions betting on the stupidity of Washington with the Fed’s cheap-money policies. Alpha magazine reports that four hedgers made more than $1 billion each in 2008. The top-25 “managers made $464 million each on average last year … a kingly sum, especially during a year of global recession, stock market wipeouts and vanishing wealth.”
9. Shiller: Dot-com, subprime meltdowns, ‘third episode’ next
Economist Robert Shiller a “Dr. Doom?” Remember a decade ago with “Irrational Exuberance?” Now he’s warning: “Bubbles are primarily social phenomena. Until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming. We recently lived through two epidemics of excessive financial optimism, we are close to a third episode, only this one will spread irrational pessimism and distrust — not exuberance.”
Henry Kaufman was Salomon’s chief economist and “Dr. Doom” for 24 years: “Why are we so poor at managing our key economic institutions while at the same time so accomplished in medicine, engineering and telecommunications? Why can we land men on the moon with pinpoint accuracy, yet fail to steer our economy away from the rocks? Why do our computers work so well, except when we use them to manage derivatives and hedge funds?”
Kaufman warns: “The computations were correct, but far too often the conclusions drawn from them were not.” Why? Selfish, myopic politicians and bankers.
11. Biggs: Sell everything, buy guns, food, head for the hills
In his 2008 bestseller “Wealth, War and Wisdom” former Morgan Stanley research guru Barton Biggs warns us to prepare for a “breakdown of civilization … Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food … It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc … A few rounds over the approaching brigands’ heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage.” Biggs sounds like an anarchist militiaman.
12.Jared Diamond: Nations ignore obvious till it’s too late, then collapse
The end will be swift. In our age of short-term consumerism and instant gratification, few hear the warnings of our favorite evolutionary biologist, Jared Diamond. Societies fail because they’re unprepared and will be in denial till it’s too late: “Civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”
13 Ilargi from TAE
And they only need to do it for as long as it takes to move all gambling debt magically off the books of the players and onto the national public balance sheet. Then when the loot has been loaded into the get-away planes, trains and automobiles, they will get the hell out of Dodge and slip away like so many thieves in the night as literally as they can. Après ça, le deluge.
14 James Knustler
Welcome to the Futility Economy. This is the economy where Nature and its material companion, Reality, punish us for our stupidity and fecklessness. This is the economy that will tear the United States apart, after it bankrupts us at every level, and mercilessly drives the population down by one-third through starvation, homelessness, violence, disease, and sheer political cruelty.
Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years — whatever model of it you have in your head — that is definitely not what we are going back to. Like one of Dickens’s Yuletide ghosts, Reality is leading us by the hand into new circumstances. We resist like crazy. We throw our hands over our eyes. We don’t want to look. We want to return to the comfort of our dreary routines — living in places that aren’t worth caring about, weaving endlessly in freeway traffic, drawing a paycheck at the air-conditioned cubicle, inhaling Buffalo wings by the platterful, with periodic side-trips to the state-chartered casino where there’s always a chance of scoring a lifetime’s income on one lucky bet. And at the end of the day, you can retire with a simulated prostitute on your laptop screen! And not even have to fork over a dime — except perhaps for the Internet connection fee.
