Frequent content contributor Kevin A recommended this piece by Doug Casey: Street Fighting Man. It has some observations that sound a lot like what you’ve read in SurvivalBlog, such as: “I’ve long believed that this depression would not only be much different but much worse than the unpleasantness of the ’30s and ’40s. In those days, only a few people were involved in the financial markets; now almost anyone with any assets at all is a player. In those days, there were no credit cards, consumer debts, or student loans; now those things are ubiquitous. It’s true that nobody will lose any money because of bank failures this time around; instead, everybody is going to suffer a loss from a collapse of the U.S. dollar, which is much worse. In the ’30s and ’40s, the U.S. population was still largely rural in character, including people living in the cities. The average American was just off the farm and had a lot of practical skills as well as traditional values. Now he has skills mainly at paper shuffling or in highly specialized technologies, and it doesn’t seem to me that the values of hard work, self-reliance, honesty, prudence, and the rest of the Boy Scout virtues are as common as they once were.”
From The Daily Bell: Bernanke dragged into stimulus debate
Marty Weiss on the enormous derivatives threat: The Great Lie of 2009
Items from The Economatrix:
Seven Franchises that Went Bankrupt
Banking’s Two-Class System of Winners and Losers
World Prepares to Dump the Dollar
Abandoned US Dollar and Paradigm Shift “The foreign creditors continue to protect their core US$-denominated reserves, while clearly undermining the US$ on the margin, as alternatives are chosen.”
Americans Now Pariahs of Foreign Banks
Out of House and Home
The Doctrine of Preemptive Bailouts and the Biggest Bailout you Haven’t Heard About: The U.S. Treasury Plan C and the $3.5 Trillion You Will be Paying