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.
OTC Derivatives. No doubt.
If it doesn’t work as a business, get rid of it. I assume everybody is in place. If they aren’t they are dead. This digital world keeps getting faster. Time for me to get my boots out on the street.
And the most obvious…
#21: If Americans are dumb enough to vote Obama in for a 2nd term.
Eight years of the Cheney presidency disaster will not be fixed in 1 year.
* two wars
* tax cuts that added a trillion to the deficit
* unregulated banking industry that created a house of cards that finally fell.
It will take at least 2-3 non-Republican administrations to dig out of this shit hole.
Between 2000 and 2008, President Bush managed to double the entire U.S. national debt.
President Obama plans to double it – in just 4 years.
The U.S. has spent more money that it doesn’t have in the last 10 years than in all it’s previous history.
Whoever is president in 2012 will preside over the biggest bankruptcy of all time.
Everything would work out fine if our wages were equal to the wages in India, China, ‘nam, Haiti, etc.
Equal pay for equal work!
I will be horribly disappointed when the future doesn’t turn into a Mad Max movie. For me there is no downside to financial Armageddon except the loss of my 401(k). I have no wife, kids or other obligations and I have only a small amount of consumer debt which will be paid off soon. All I have to do is stock up on seeds and ammo.
#8 “.. 3 years ago, companies were wisely cutting back on their employment hiring practices when they got wind that Obama might be elected. ..”
Calling you a buffoon is an understatement. Wow. Is that load of shit being baked in the GOP kitchen or did you come up with that?
“The Republicans did it! We are pure!” “NO! The Democrats did it! We are pure!” …and other tragic professional wrestling tales.
That all the “top economic advisers” in the WH happen to be the co-creators and supporters of the derivatives bomb and the destruction of glass-steagall means nothing i suppose? (let alone G&S shills)
-Like #1 inferred: OTC Derivatives (ie toxic assets) is the only bomb. -what, like a $quadrillion are still out there??
-expect a false flag event soon to be used as a scapegoat to “ruin” this “wonderful [papered over] recovery”
bush/clinton/cheneybush/obama have NOTHING to do with this. This was all scripted and designed by the wonderful bankster cabal a century+ ago..
move along..
-s
Sorry all you partisans, this has been building for 30 years. Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible.
The author figures the worst that can happen is you lose your retirement? (Aren’t you glad I didn’t spell it “loose” like some of the “loosers” on here would?)
It’ll be much worse than loss of retirement. How ’bout when the power goes out for good in the winter & there’s no more natural gas being pumped. There won’t be anything left to hang around for then except misery & I’ll be outta here. They’ll find me kneeling, leaning forward with a noose around my neck. Take anything you want. I won’t be needing it any more.
How did Cheney’s bonehead war work out for us? For anybody? Blame where blame is due & all that.
#15 Oddly, that’s how the bible describes Armageddon (amazement that what they built crashes and wanting the rocks to fall on them); just saying…
#14 I keep hearing from Repugs that this shit hole of a mess was brewing for 30 years,
Wrong. The Cheney administration of nearly a decade royally screwed this country with …let me tell you again slowly…
(1) Two, god damn wars costing trillions
(2) Tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts
(3) Let chaos reign in the financial sector leading to a house of cards that collapsed.
You need to stop sweeping this Republican shit under the rug. The rug has no more room.
#18 So… You’re against people… who are against… what you’re against… er…
#14 Actually, progressives in both parties are to blame…
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.
@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.