MAJOR ?

Budman's Avatar
The one sure sign that the world is coming to an end is that the Saints won the Super Bowl. Originally Posted by GneissGuy

and the Rangers made it to the series.
Barbie,

Put the bible away, it's mostly fiction. As BigTex noted, the world is full of turmoil and always has been. Each generation thinks that things will fall apart on their watch. However, as Sterno pointed out, the US financial system, and dollar hegemony, are on the brink. We've kicked the debt can about as far as it will go. We're now printing money we don't have (QE1,QE2 and now talk of QE3), and as a result, exporting inflation to the rest of the world. Things will get very nasty as more and more people can't afford to eat. (read: look for more foreign governments to fall)

Save your money Barbie, and strongly consider investing in commodities.

Gump

P.S. Anyone think it's McCarthyism the way Meredith Whitney has been called to testify before a congressional subcommittee? Be careful what you say on 60 minutes...
rekcaSxT's Avatar
The media is all about sensationalism. Everytime there are forest fires they act like it's the end of the world. They happen in cycles. Same thing with active hurricane seasons, earthquakes, blizzards, etc....

Remember WE as humans have only been keeping weather data for a little more than 100 years. And the world was around a LONG time before we got here.

Did you know that there was once only 1 landmass? HUGE earthquakes over time and the shifting of the earth's crust formed what we know today.

With continents always shifting, and the earth going through weather cycles that last THOUSANDS of years. There are bound to be some surprises.

There's a sucker born every minute.
Funny video on global warming debate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdxaxJNs15s
harkontume's Avatar
yeah things are screwed. But things are always screwed.

The 24/7 multi channel news coverage requires that they be screwed or there is nothing to report. Over reporting is a factor in all this.

And dont give up your Bible Barbie.. But there is Good News there also. Look for that not gloom and doom.
More of America heading down the drain.

Obama Launches Total Takeover of Media: Emergency Alert System


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4ZdbiSLnv4&feature=pl ayer_embedded
Excerpt from an investment newsletter I ran across.


Here are the top seven factors we believe MUST lead to the end of the global U.S. dollar standard – what we call The End of America.

1)The price of gold has gone up for 10 years in a row. We can't think of another market that's ever risen for 10 consecutive years. This is a historical anomaly, and it means something has gone badly wrong with the world's reserve currency (the U.S. dollar). Markets, if left to find their own equilibrium, will naturally fluctuate. Gold isn't fluctuating. Its steady move up proves something strange is happening to our money.

2) Our government's deficits are out of control. The government's annual deficits now routinely surpass $1 trillion. The first $1 trillion deficit came in 2008 – and the government explained it away as the consequence of the financial crisis. But we racked up another $1 trillion deficit in 2009 and yet another in 2010. We'll have another in 2011 and so on. Our national debt has doubled since 2005. We've borrowed more money in the last five years than we had in the entire history of our government until then. This isn't sustainable.

3) The government cannot increase tax revenues enough to cover our spending or repay our debts – ever. Our annual deficits have become completely unlinked to taxes. Total federal income taxes and corporate taxes generate $1.1 trillion a year in revenue, and we still ran a $1.3 trillion federal deficit last year. So even if we increased tax revenues by 100%, we would still have fallen $200 million short. This is totally unsustainable.

4) Special-interest groups particularly government unions are looting our Treasury. Self-serving special interest groups have completely hijacked government spending. We now spend $200 billion a year on federal pensions. We're spending another $450 billion on welfare. This spending, combined with our defense spending ($700 billion), exceeds total federal tax revenue and leaves nothing to pay the $200 billion in interest on our debt, nothing to pay for actual government services (like roads), and nothing to pay towards the inevitable Social Security/Medicare shortfall. Remember… most voters do not pay taxes. It's politically impossible to reform this interest group-based spending. These people are robbing the Treasury. They will cause our currency and eventually our government itself to collapse.

5) We're printing money just like the banana republics we used to mock. To support the government's runaway spending, the Federal Reserve is now continuously buying government debt. This process was commonly called "monetizing the debt" or, more simply, "printing money." The Fed creates new money to buy government bonds. This kind of Ponzi financing destroyed every previous experiment with paper money. If printing money were truly good for an economy, Zimbabwe would be the world's wealthiest country. Perhaps even more worrisome than the practice itself is the leadership of the Fed, which has alternately defended this practice and then denied using it. If the Fed continues this practice, it will eventually cause a global run on the dollar that will destroy the value of our currency overnight.

6) We can't repay our debts. Total debt outstanding in the U.S. currently exceeds $55 trillion. That's $681,165 in debt per U.S. family. There is simply no way to repay (or even maintain) debt of this magnitude using the income of the average American family, which is slightly less than $50,000 per family. Interest alone on these debts (based on a 5% rate) would total $34,000 per family every year. Total debt in the U.S. economy is unsustainable and can't be financed without printing vast new sums of money.

7) Shockingly, new debt issuance in the U.S. is soaring, with the lowest-quality debtors borrowing record amounts. Despite all the evidence that the U.S. economy carries far too much debt, both public and private debt issuance soared to new record levels in 2010. Overall, more than $3 trillion in new corporate debt was issued last year – the second record year in a row. And junk-bond issuance set a new, vastly higher record. In 2010, 509 speculative-grade corporate borrowers sold $287 billion worth of new debt. That compares to the previous record (2009) of $167 billion. Our economy has become so warped by its debt load, it cannot function without ever-larger amounts of debt. Anyone looking at these numbers must realize this is not safe and will not last long. Originally Posted by Sternomancer

Add to all this the fact that a US resident(baby boomers) will turn 65 every 8 seconds for the next 15 years. How are these 60,000,000 people going to collect Social Security and Medicare? The whole system is doomed. The Chinese are carrying us as they are behind the scenes buying up all the resources all over the world. We are running out of people to bomb into submission and we're not going to manage to bomb the Chinese into submission. They are going to kick our asses and there is nothing we can do about it. All the "Greatest Country in the World" patriotic BS is not going to save us from reality. If it wasn't for illegal immigration, the US population would be dropping like a stone. How can 300 million people compete against the 2 BILLION plus in China and India. We have shipped all manufacturing and hi tech to these 2 countries over the past 20 years and we think we can sustain our standard of living? We think that Hollywood and the NFL place us above the planet...but it doesn't. Reality will set in...it may take 20 years or even the rest of the century...but...the US is doomed as the world superpower.


I am so much more interested in having BritneyBangs ride me in ACG while I finger her ass.....

The thought of that moves me more then the undeniable, impending demise of the west...