A succinct and appropriate warning by Georg Soros which fits with my own estimates:
As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.
…
“We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
Soros also expresses my fear for Europe. Unfortunately the signs of this happening are piling up:
He’s now convinced that “if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. …"
Soros is not alone in predicting this.
The Global Risk 2012 (pdf) report for the World Economic Forum in Davos is seeing "severe income disparity" and "chronic fiscal imbalances" as the most likely risk factors in the coming 10 years.
But there is still little momentum anywhere to increase taxes on the rich which would help to curtail fiscal imbalances and income disparity. Instead we get talk about more and evermore austerity which will predictably fail to solve any economic problem.
There will be riots and suppression of riots and riots against the suppression. Only after those set up enough pressure genuine reforms will be thought of that will resolve the disparities and imbalances. Throughout the most important issue is to avoid wars which ruling classes traditionally like in such times as they help to divert the attention from their failures.
