[Futurework] The coming crash

[Keith Hudson]

Credit card debts are now at about 130% of disposable income in England, 
and it's much the same in America and Australia (not sure about Canada) . 
This means that if consumers stopped all spending on non-essential items 
and saved hard it would take well over a year to pay off their debts. At 
the same time (in England, and I guess in America) house buyers are 
over-exposed way beyond anything previously.

Greenspan and the Bank of England have been encouraging consumers to vastly 
over-extend themselves by setting absurdly low interest rates. It's all 
going to crash. When?  Who knows? But it cannot be all that far off.

I know ..... I know .... long-time FWers will say that I've been 
forecasting an economic crash ever since the latish 90s. It didn't happen. 
We were overtaken by the madness of the IT boom -- which turned out not to 
be a boom. That's all gone now (even though share prices are still too 
high.) Pensions funds -- state and private -- are deep in trouble all over 
the developed world.

There's the mother and father of all crises to come -- all caused by the 
arbitrary setting of currency values and the capricious settings of 
interest rates. There's no possibility of any equilibrium in this 
situation. It can only go on until there's a crash.

Keith Hudson

Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, 
<www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk> 

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