Jeff Clark of Casey Research, writing at Zero Hedge, offers us the transcript of a roundtable featuring some of the world's best macroeconomic minds, Peter Schiff and billionaire Jim Rogers among them.
The "highlights":
Q: A lot of economists, including the government, believe the worst is behind us economically. Do you agree? If not, what should we be on the lookout for in 2011?
Jim Rogers: It is better for those getting all the government largesse, but the overall situation is worse. More currency turmoil. State and local problems, plus pension problems.
Bill Bonner: None of the problems that caused the crises in Europe and America have been resolved...
Peter Schiff: ...We are [like] an indebted family going out for an expensive meal to celebrate getting approved for a new credit card. It might feel good (at the time), but we're still simply delaying the inevitable...
John Williams: An intensifying economic downturn – what formally will be viewed as the second dip of a double-dip depression – already has started to unfold. The problem with the economy remains structural, where household income is not growing fast enough to beat inflation...
Steve Henningsen: ...What I will be watching for this year is sovereign and U.S. municipal debt corpses floating to the surface sometime in the months ahead...
Krassimir Petrov: ...No, the worst is yet to come. No structural changes have been made, no problems have been fixed. Printing money, a.k.a. Quantitative Easing, is a quick fix that has postponed the problem, yet also made it a lot worse. I would say that we are still in the early stages of the crisis and have another 4-8 years to go.
Bob Hoye: The worst of the post-bubble economic adversity is not behind us.
...Q: The U.S. dollar ended 2010 about where it started; does it resume its downtrend in 2011, or are fears about its demise overblown?
Jim Rogers: No, but further down the road...
Peter Schiff: It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the dollar will collapse, but it will take a miracle to avoid that outcome in the near term. It really depends on when the creditors of the United States realize that they are not going to get their principal returned to them in real terms, but rather in grossly devalued dollars. We have already seen the average duration of U.S. Treasury debt drop below that of Greece. No one wants to buy a 30-year bond with negative real interest rates as far as the eye can see...
John Williams: There remains high risk of a dollar selling panic unfolding in the year ahead, as the U.S. economy tanks anew, as the Fed continuously expands its easing, and as dollar holders dump the U.S. currency and dollar-denominated paper assets. Such would be a precursor to the inflation problem.
Thanks to reckless borrowing and spending programs like the "Stimulus" program, which failed to stimulate anything but government hiring, the U.S. dollar is tanking. The charts above represent the day's spot price of gold, oil and silver, respectively.
They continue to shoot to new highs, seemingly on a daily basis.
But Ben Bernanke, who completely failed to predict the housing crisis, now insists that long-term inflation risks are "unlikely."
In other news, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President just stated that the U.S. is at a "tipping point" and that it is "on a fiscal path to insolvency."
And America's current entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- are all headed for collapse if left untended. And rather than fix those problems, Democrats rammed a new entitlement program, Obamacare, down our throats last year; it will be the largest such program in world history.
As James Simpson aptly put it, "It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact."
And now we have proof: the Left is trying to collapse our society.
Our only choice in 2012 is to politically eradicate the traitorous Democrat Party; to vote for the most conservative candidates possible; and to try and restore the rule of law in this country.
Anything less condemns our country to an ugly fate: the exact kind of collapse advocated by Cloward and Piven.
2012 is right around the corner. What are you doing to help reestablish Constitutional conservatism?
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