Many streams make a large river

I’ve been biding my time comes to economy for a while, watching the spectacle from the sidelines, looking for those signs. They do keep dropping in. You might think that Japanese Airlines going bankrupt is one of them, but not really, that company have been sinking for a couple of decades. It will render more people unemployed, but that’s just icing on the cake.

Instead I’m watching commercial real-estate in the US and Europe that is deteriorating step by step, I’m keeping a close eye at OPEC and claims that they (and others) want to replace the USD in the near future, I’m watching news about the sex-industry and the existence of real life pirates both of which are good indicators of how the world economy is going, and lastly I look at protectionism which is really the only last card to be played before the real mayhem starts.

We’re building a perfect storm, and have been doing so for a while now.

The debt accumulation across the globe surpasses anything ever seen before, zero interest rates, the printing presses spitting out trillions, toxic assets, and manipulations of commodity prices, stock markets trading at 40-50% overvalue, the unemployment numbers and so on and so on. It all comes together in a steady stream of dooming signs.

What I am still contemplating are two things.

Firstly what the catalyst(s) will be. Will the dollar collapse first or commercial real-estate? Will the Chinese bubble burst before the Swedish Housing bubble? How long can so many banks hide away their losses in mortgages and keep buying property from themselves without crashing? Isn’t it time for the Japanese Yen to fall into pieces soon? Will Venezuela start a war or will the US beat them to it and attack Iran? Will Yemen insurrectionists blow up oil-wells in Saudi Arabia before a large terrorist attack hits Europe?

And secondly we have the question of ‘when’?

Although true some economies have been recuperated, at least a little, but most of the problems remains, now worsened, and short of divine intervention the US, and several other countries, will crash and burn. Will it be soon or a couple of years down the line?

As you can see I’ve had a poll on my blog for a while now and you guys reading my crap seem to agree on disagree. I have myself for about 6 years now said that during spring of 2010 it will all come down around us, not all at once though, it will not be a stock market crash and thousands of banks going down almost simultaneously as during the Miniscule Depression of 30’s, oh no, our modern societies are more complex than that.

We’ve already had one crash last spring and if it wasn’t for the Keynesian madness that ensued things would have turned ugly already back then. The problem with this “save” is that it has made things much, much worse and hardly a single country has any muscles left , it has all already been done and there’s no savings, no borrowing and no printing left that can “save us” a second time.

I think that soon there will be a huge terrorist attack. A nuclear bomb in London, a chemical attack on Paris, a biological attack on New York, something of that nature and magnitude. And I think that will be the catalyst for more war and all the “green shoots” will then turn into withering plants stampeded into the ground. Soon thereafter commercial real-estate and several European housing bubbles (UK, Spain, and Sweden) will crash and then the slippery slope turns into a howling chasm of ever increasing despair.

I find this scenario to be the most likely one and I see it coming pretty soon.

Don’t you feel it too? Can’t you sense it? And are you prepared?