Meanwhile, everybody is studiously avoiding the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

If you ever wanted to see an example of the butterfly effect as a spinoff of chaos theory, consider this: A man in China ate a bat and crashed the stock market. But that's not the gorilla.

The corona virus was not the cause of the crash, it was only the trigger. People are running to gold in an effort to protect their wealth, while the gorilla just stands there and smiles. We are facing an imminent global economic collapse that in all likelihood will be worse than 1929.

Did you know that the average household debt in the U.S., excluding mortgage debt, is $40,000? Did you know that in China the average is even higher? Did you know that globally, counting all forms of indebtedness, there is $275,000,000,000,000 hanging out there? That's 275 Trillion dollars (or equivalent) that cannot possibly be handled other than by massively devaluing global currencies.

Retirement pensions will be gone. Thousands [millions?] of businesses are closing their doors. Banks are tottering -- look for Deutschebank to be the black swan that takes down the global banking system. There will be a massive housing collapse as people with no income look at the $300,000 mortgages on their homes that are now valued at less than half the price. In the U.S., think of the ramifications of a country where there are more handguns than people.

Breadlines, tent cities, food riots, violence in the streets. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, I hope so. But I'm 75 years old, I have seen a lot in my time, and just as I said in a post on this BBS in late 2007, I am scared shitless. I saw it coming in 2007 when apparently only I and Peter Schiff believed it, and I see it coming again now.

So what am I doing about it? Not a damned thing I can do but sit and watch the train wreck and hope the gorilla overlooks me. I am better off than 95% of the people on this planet: I have absolutely zero debt, I own my own home where property taxes on a half-million dollar property come to less than $400 USD per year, I make my own electricity (solar panels), I live in an agricultural village where guns are a rarity and community spirit is high. If even one of the three retirement income sources we have in the family survives, we will have enough to get by, but I don't know what we'll do if, as is likely, all our retirement income fails.

Finally, remember the traditional method of ending a depression that has generally worked well in the past. Likely I'll be dead before this all gets sorted out, and I take some solace in that.

tanstaafl.