Hogan wrote:

I'm torn. On the one hand, I see the turbulence from the stock market, and the MASSIVE bailouts/busts occurring on Wall Street. I 'get' the CDS situation and the theory of 'deflation becometh megainflation to blow us up'. It all seems like a big, imminent deal. I'm making changes in my life to account for a range of outcomes.

On the other hand, I walk around and it appears to be business as usual. Trains run on time, no breadlines for sure. Hell, our own gov't doesn't formally acknowledge we are in, or even entering a recession.

And then there are the people: I can't speak for everybody, but many of those I've talked to are mentally preparing themselves for the worst, whatever that means for them individually. But I think a lot more people just don't pay attention because they don't want to worry about something that's ultimately out of their control.

I don't know. Either we're getting all worked up about nothing, or TS is about to hit it really hard. Who knows what or if or when?

I for one am really interested in seeing how far this goes......from a safe distance.

I'd recommend listening to this guy's podcast, it's on once per week.

Who knows ???
The story so far, the U.S. consumed and endebted themselves , paying in dollar I.O.U., flogging pretend value paper to the rest of the world, the credit machine seized, a factor might have been the need to spend ever greater amounts on imported oil at a faster rate that thoses petrodollars could be recycled, That was bad timing but something was bound to happen anyway .
Now after " dropping suitcases of money from helicopters, the last weeks, running out of ammo , the U.S. government has been doing the financial equivalent of loading the guns with the familly silver! To some degree it worked , slowing a financial free fall into a steep slide .

Now for the real hard part The U.S. government has pawned two generation of citizens, the debt burden must be above the Maastrich treaty standard of good finances U.S. treasury bond are paying nothing much , to get more money the interest rates would have to increase , it would sink the economy already in deficit the need to borrow is greater due to increased interest on the debt .
both candidates make promises of tax cut ...more deficit

The dollar until a few months was doing the decent thing and dropping like a stone It melted down debt , gave a breath of fresh air to manufacturing while depressing imports , now it's the opposite .

Gold hasn't moved ....I really don't understand this one ??

the mainstay of the U.S. economy is heavily into services and retail there probably is going to be a slaughter in the malls .
More unemployment , more federal outlays , more deficit .

A lot of the basics like clothing and consumer electronics are imported , while the G-7 relly on luxuries and high tech exports
Who is going to trade the economies out of the hole ??

Is it going to be a super inflation downturn or a constipated one like the Japanese with deflation .

Right now the main support of the dollar is that it's the currency of debt , if China , the saudis, Japan and other pull out of the dollar ,a great chunk of their " assets "will vaporise , they are stuck!

A big part of the population is due for retirement, old folks will vote for whomever to save their pension plans

Please could someone make it all make sense !!

Your thinking Duende is pretty much identical to mine. And the cognitive dissonance of looking around and continuing to see the appearance of normalcy, while simultaneously being privy to the enormous volumes of information flowing constantly through this site indicating that 'something wicked this way comes', is downright maddening.

Part of me is terrified about what the future holds (being woefully unprepared), yet another part of me wants to just scream BRING IT ON ALREADY, just because I am SO sick of watching all these f#cking drones shuttling busily to and fro, either totally oblivious to the tsunami approaching or deliberately ignoring it because their god-d@mn mid-afternoon cup of Starbucks is more important....

You'd prefer them running after you with dull steak knives, won't you?

It wasn't just the government, it was everyone else too. The entire US economy these past 10-15 years was based on debt. Like I was telling one of my classmates, debt economies always fail.

Speaking of drone awareness, these graphs may be of some value (both search volume and news volume):

Google Trends

It has to be considered that "depression" is also used to describe human mood, altough as of late, some percent of it is definitelly linked to the economic one.

The search volume is relative to the number of people performning the search, so probably not too indicative, but the news volume is more real.

Perhaps other, more popular terms can be added to better decipher the mutual relativity of the query items.
example

don't think any Econ & Finance board members are suggesting there will not be serious economic hardship & problems soon & further serious problems for society in the long term. But short of starving to death economic hardship is really not really 'doom' unless you're some pudgy consumerist muppet.