Scary book

Yesterday I bought the Amazon Kindle edition of a book that is pretty frightening while at the same time assures us that we’ll survive if we keep our wits about us and hang in there and take the authors’ advice. It’s about bubbles, like the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble and so on. This book predicts the popping of the government debt bubble and, worst of all, the dollar bubble.

The authors, two brothers who are in the financial advice field and a third co-author, wrote another book a few years back when things were rosy and everyone was getting drunk on the rising values of real estate, taking out home equity loans and living high on the hog. In that book, the authors predicted the popping of the real estate bubble, and the banking and financial industry bubble. They certainly gained credibility when their predictions came true. Their latest book explains how they make their predictions, and makes a compelling case for the collapse of our entire economic system. I haven’t heard too much about this book in the normal media, probably because it is so scary a premise that nobody wants to hear about it, so it’s being ignored.

While they’re not into playing a blame game, the authors make the case that bumbling government policies, greed on the part of bankers and stock brokerages, and euphoria on the part of ordinary citizens both here and abroad brought on these messes. They advise us to get out of most stocks but not out of the stock market. There are opportunities to not only survive, but actually prosper. But in the meantime.…

I’m only halfway through the book. Last night when I went to bed, I locked the doors, closed the curtains, unplugged everything that had a glowing LED, turned off the lights and crawled under the blankets. I left the cat outside to guard the house.