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 Have you ever wondered what our world is going to look like five or ten years down the road? Well, today our world is changing at a pace that is faster than ever before, and the decisions that we all make right now are going to have a dramatic affect on the years ahead. In many ways, 2012 represents a huge turning point for America. There will be a presidential election, 33 seats in the U.S. Senate will be contested and every single seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs. But the changes that are happening in America go much deeper than politics. Anger and frustration are growing to frightening levels, and we have become a deeply divided nation. Our affluence is rapidly crumbling and our national values are being transformed at a staggering pace. America is drowning in debt, addicted to entertainment and full of people that think they know it all. America is arrogant, cocky, smug, brash and full of pride. But if we continue down the road that we are currently on, we will be greatly humbled someday. It is just a matter of time. (Read More.....)
 An economic nightmare is descending on Europe. With each passing month, the economic numbers across Europe get even worse. At this point it is becoming extremely difficult for anyone to deny that Europe is plunging into a full-blown economic depression. In fact, some parts of Europe are already there. In Spain the overall unemployment rate is over 22 percent, and in Greece one out of every five retail establishments has already been closed down. All over Europe, economic activity is rapidly slowing down, unemployment is skyrocketing and bad debts are unraveling. It isn't even going to take a default by a nation such as Greece or a collapse of the euro to push Europe into an economic depression. All Europe has to do is to stay on the exact path that it is on right now and it will get there. Normally, European governments would respond to an economic slowdown by increasing government spending. But this time most of them are already drowning in debt. Instead of increasing government spending, most governments in Europe are actually cutting back. All over Europe, national governments are being encouraged to implement even more tax increases and even more budget cuts. The hope is that all of this austerity will help solve the nightmarish sovereign debt crisis that Europe is facing. But unfortunately, all of these tax increases and budget cuts are also going to involve a tremendous amount of economic pain. (Read More.....)
 If you are an American under the age of 30, you have probably figured out by now that the entire economic system is stacked against you. The way that our economy is structured today is ridiculously unfair to younger Americans. First, we endlessly push our young people to go to our ridiculously expensive colleges and universities where the pile up enormous amounts of debt. Then they get out into the real world where they find that only a handful of really good jobs are available for the vast army of college graduates entering the workforce. Sadly, most of the jobs that our young people are working these days do not pay enough to be able to support a family or buy a decent home. Meanwhile, our politicians are busy mortgaging their future. Our young people are expected to support a Social Security system that will not be there when they get older, and every single day more than 2 billion dollars is added to a debt that will hang around the necks of younger Americans and their children for the rest of their lives. If you stop and think about all of this for too long, your head might just explode with anger. Well, not literally, but you get the point. The truth is that this is going to be the first generation in U.S. history that is going to do significantly worse than their parents, and that is a terrible shame. (Read More.....)
 When it comes to government debt, it is not just new debt that is the problem. Every single year, governments around the world must "roll over" gigantic mountains of debt that come due. That means that the actual borrowing that takes place each year is far greater than the yearly budget deficits that you see talked about on television. In 2012, a total of 7,600,000,000,000 dollars of debt must be rolled over by the G-7 nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China. When you add in interest payments, that number rises to over $8 trillion. And that does not even include any new borrowing that all of those nations will do in 2012. This is a debt bomb that could devastate the entire global economy at any time. Everything will be fine as long as global lenders are willing to lend these countries gigantic mountains of very cheap money. But if that changes, and there are already a multitude of signs that a massive global credit crunch has begun, it will mean a complete and total financial nightmare for the entire world. (Read More.....)
 Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. We had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen and life was quite good in America. But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores. Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down the shocking decline of our cities. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of good jobs have been shipped out of the United States. As our economic infrastructure has been ripped out right in front of our eyes, an atmosphere of unemployment, poverty and despair has descended on many of our major cities like a soaking wet blanket. Today, many of our cities that once were considered to be some of the greatest in the world have been transformed into rotting, post-apocalyptic hellholes. When you visit many of these cities and look into the sunken eyes of the residents, you almost get the feeling that something has sucked all of the hope and all of the life right out of them. For a while, large numbers of Americans still believed that the right politician would bring them "hope" and "change", but now crushing despair is giving way to absolute desperation for millions of people. Desperate people do desperate things, and as our major cities continue to decay they are going to become very dangerous places to be. (Read More.....)
 Are we on the verge of another Great Depression? Christian Lagarde, the head of the IMF, said this week that if dramatic action is not taken immediately we could actually see conditions "reminiscent of the 1930s depression" and that no country on earth "will be immune to the crisis". Right now, financial panic is sweeping across Europe, but most Americans are not too concerned about it because they simply don't understand how important the EU is. The truth is that the EU has a much larger population than the United States does. The EU has an economy that is nearly as large as the economies of the United States and China combined. The EU has more Fortune 500 companies that the United States does, and the banking system of Europe is substantially larger than the banking system of the United States. Anyone out there that believes that a massive financial collapse in Europe would not dramatically affect the rest of the globe is being delusional. The European debt crisis is one of the biggest stories that we have seen in a long, long time and the coming financial meltdown is going to permanently change the global economy. (Read More.....)
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