It will take more time to fully play out but the writing was on the wall when we abandoned the gold standard in 1971. The US economic flywheel is now slowing down at an exponential rate even if the slow down has been papered over to keep Americans from learning the truth. Papering over, however, is superficial and it does not affect the true rate of decay. All it does is suppress the news so that it can pop up suddenly and dramatically down the road in the form of some type of "economic shock".
Our control over the world for the past 50 years was completely driven by our economic power and you can indirectly measure the reduction in that economic power by watching as our control over the satellite members of our global empire break free. The marginal players are, of course, getting hit the first and the worst. Tunisia's ousted dictator Ben Ali and Egypt's soon to be ousted president Hosni Mubarak are both commonly recognized to be US-backed puppets. Their replacements will not be. You can see evidence of this as Mubarak tries to shuffle deck chairs within his own version of the Titanic. He swept away the cabinet and put in new talking heads in an attempt to appease the people but they are having none of it. Those people will not rest until Mubarak is out and someone who represents them (instead of western interests) is in.
As our economy loses power, our ability to set up and maintain puppet governments, etc. will continue to diminish in locked step. Without
When that happens we will no longer be able to borrow cheaply to fund the national debt that we have no intention (or means) of ever repaying. Neither will be able to print trillions from thin air and then export the inflation and the associated revolution. When that time comes, printing of trillions of new dollars will manifest itself as skyrocketing prices on everything. The inflation curse will have come home to roost. That's when we will have to deal with our real problems and until that day most Americans will have no clue (and will continue to not want to know) what is going on. Ignorance may seem like bliss but it will also lead to most people being caught by surprise and unprepared. People will not get paid their Wimpy Promises (food stamps, medicare, social security, government salaries, health care, etc.) by a government that has no money of its own, diminished ability to borrow cheaply, diminished ability to print money without causing internal inflation and no ability to increase taxation upon impoverished citizens. Pensions will suffer right along with the stock market, 401ks, annuities, etc. We will see civil unrest in our cities and it will not be pretty.
Nobody can put a time line on these events but smart people like Ron Paul have been trying to educate us on the inevitability of them for years at the same time as intelligent but ignorant people ignored his warnings and even ridiculed him for speaking out. People were not ready for honesty back in 2008. Americans instead wanted hope and change and fantasy and daydreaming and continued ignorance about economic math, logic and history. A day of reckoning is coming and we will eventually pay the price for adopting and promoting the dishonest monetary system whose two main drivers of fraud are fiat currency and fractional reserve banking.
