Jim,
Ironically, just a day after I wrote an e-mail chiding you [for giving too much attention to economic gloom and doom in SurvivalBlog], I had a meeting with one of our clients that has been a very successful Wall Street trader. He gave me a laundry list of banks that he expects to fail before the end of the year and predicted a complete collapse of the financial sector. Worse [for us], since we are in Michigan, he said that some of the Big Three auto makers are in serious trouble.
When I asked him where he saw the financial sector ending up, his response was that he had "never lived through a depression" so he had no real idea. Not exactly the response I was hoping for. – JMM