“It could unfold very, very quickly. Because deflation is a swing of poverty feedback, it can take awhile to build up. If you try to explain to people what’s coming, because it doesn’t happen instantly, they tend to go back to sleep. The thing they need to understand, however, is that when it does hit a tipping point, a kind of critical mass, then it can unfold exceptionally quickly. Then it’s very much like having the rug pulled out from under your feet. So I tell people all the time, prepare now because it’s better to be two years too early than five minutes too late. You can’t play with this sort of thing. In September, 2008, we came within a few hours of the banking system seizing up, and that could easily happen again. People wouldn’t get a lot of notice. For anyone who’s not in the meeting room-it will be too late by the time they find out. My worry is that if there are an enormous number of people who just had the rug pulled out from under their feet, they’re going to run around like headless chickens, and the human over-reaction to events will be really responsible for a large percentage of the impact.” – Nicole Foss, Senior Editor of The Automatic Earth blog site
Jim’s Quote of the Day:
