MODERATOR'S NOTE: Another round of doomsday fear-mongering from Jon Roland. Either that or a bad attempt at satire. Someone's been watching too much SciFi...
---Sasan --------------------------------------------------------- No one really knows. But it could come down to minutes that decide whether we get a rough landing or a crash. Here is what I posted to a blog: How one approaches the present crisis and possible responses to it will depend largely on whether one favors traditional "rational choice" (or "efficient market <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_market>") economic theory, or behavioral economic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics> theory, which accounts for the irrationality of market players. A disciple of the first will tend to expect the worst case scenario to be only a severe recession, that will correct the exuberance of the credit market in a few years. However, someone who considers the psychology of the players can contemplate a much worse scenario: 1. Within a few days of failing to respond with a massive infusion of liquidity, finance institutions worldwide cease to make loans on any terms to anyone, and most of them file for bankruptcy. 2. Several market sectors that depend on financing, such as housing, motor vehicles, and contracting, collapse totally. 3. Inflation, not just from an infusion, but from the failure to make one soon enough, rises to first 100% within a month, then accelerates to 1000% the next month, and continues to spiral until the monetary situation resembles that of Zimbabwe. 4. Unemployment rises to 20% within a month, then to 50% the next month, then even governments have to lay off workers, and the rate climbs to over 90%. 5. Pension funds and insurance companies stop paying out on policy claims. Even Social Security fails, after the value of the payments becomes so low that it is hardly worth the effort to cash the checks. 6. Civil disorder begins to burn down cities. Public officials are systematically hunted down and killed, along with lawyers and bankers. Gang leaders and rogue cops emerge as local war lords. 7. People revert to barter, but since most people will have nothing worth bartering, they will begin to starve. Efforts to plant crops will be overrun by hungry urban refugees unwilling to wait for the crops to grow. 8. Situation finally stabilizes in about a decade after the world population has fallen to less than 1 billion worldwide. Several countries, who tried to start nuclear wars to regain control over their populations, are nearly wiped out. Muslims and other ethnic groups, falsely blamed for many of the problems, are genocidally exterminated everywhere on Earth. First functional nuclear weapon built from raw materials by a couple of disgruntled adolescents, who use it to take out a city. 9. The planet will largely revert to a subsistence, sometimes near stone-age state, for over a century before finally begin to recover, but never fully recovers. During that process, world population falls to less than 10 million. A disgruntled adolescent creates a deadly plague in this shack and releases it, leaving less than 20 human survivors, not enough to be a viable gene pool. 10. The "After Man" scenarios shown on TV proceed to wipe out evidence of humanity. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
