So governments step in and guarantee against all systemic risk, and flood the markets with liquidity to get the same old game going again — the one that got us here back in the first place (dot.com), uh, the second place (housing), no, the third place (credit).

Doesn't take a genius to see where this one's headed.

http://www.kunstler.com/

...

I go along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea -- read "The Black Swan" -- that nobody really knows anything. We construct our narratives to try and explain circumstances that are unraveling non-linearly before us, and some narratives are more plausible than others, depending on your vantage point. There are infinite narratives. This is nothing more than my narrative. The circumstances we're entering appear, for the moment, to take the shape of a compressive deflationary depression with the cherry-on-top add-on of a hyper-inflation further down the road -- meaning initially that jobs, incomes, and pensions are lost, but that later on even the little money that people manage to get -- perhaps mostly from government hand-outs of one kind or another -- steadily loses its value. Every way you jigger things, it just ends up meaning the same thing: a much poorer society. It certainly won't be a society of recreational shoppers plying the Target store aisles for scented candles and home accents. Hyper-inflation could make old debts meaningless, but it would also make credit meaningless and spending absurd.
Given the way our society has evolved to operate -- as an endless upward spiral of borrowings -- you can see an awful lot of things not working anymore, and an awful lot of people not working in them or at them. Maybe the governments of the G-7 will get lending unstuck at the upper levels, but who, exactly, is able to borrow now besides companies on the verge of bankruptcy -- and why continue to lend to them? (Except to maintain the pretense that "something is being done.") Besides, there's much too much previously borrowed money that won't ever paid back, and the "work-out" of all that debt only implies the continued distress sale of any-and-all assets -- so that the USA in effect becomes yard-sale nation.
Personally, I think all the rejiggering in the world of numbers and indexes will not solve anything, and really only represents a kind obsessive-compulsive neurosis related to numerology that will do nothing to readjust our daily activities toward the production of things that have real and enduring value. In my narrative, the fate of industrial nations really depends on energy resources. The price of oil may be going down for the moment -- perhaps due to the deleveraging of hedge funds, banks, and invested individuals, perhaps combined with a perception of "demand destruction" -- but the geology and geopolitics of oil have not changed since June of this year when oil was at $147. Let's say US oil consumption is down one million barrels of oil a day. Within the next two years, we're liable to lose more than that in import declines from Mexico and Venezuela alone. The International Energy Agency's latest estimate is for only slightly less of an increase in worldwide oil demand than was previously posted. It's still a net demand increase. World oil consumption still exceeds world production now, perhaps permanently so. Finally, the current plunge of oil prices has suddenly halted the very capital ventures in exploration and development that were hoped to increase the worldwide supply of oil. All this portends an aggravation of oil supply and allocation problems in the five years ahead, and ultimately much more expensive, harder-to-get oil.
What we can't face is the prospect that we might become something other than an industrial "consumer" society. My narrative includes the conviction that we will have trouble producing food for ourselves as petro-agriculture fails, and since society can't go on without food production, I see this activity coming back much closer to the center of our daily lives. We're not ready to think about that. The downside of our unreadiness may be that a lot of Americans will go hungry in the decade ahead.
None of this is an argument for despair, by the way, but it certainly invokes the need for steeply revised expectations and serious attention to a national "to-do" list. We're on our way to becoming another nation, whether we like it or not. No amount of numerological augury or even hand-wringing will change that. The big question for, say, the 24 months ahead is: how disorderly will we allow this transition to be?

I did inhale.