Hi Pic:

I have read Chang's document and, as you say, the prognosis is grim. Whenever I read these apocaliptic forecasts I am left feeling quite helpless. If you depend on your investments for your income and lifestyle maintenance what are you supposed to do if Chang is right? He says the markets will be virtually worthless early next year, the U.S. will be bankrupt, and creditor nations will then go to war with three debtors - the U.S., Britain and Israel. What a depressing forecast!

If you think about this objectively (hard to do!) you have to wonder what such a war would accomplish. It wouldn't result in debt repayment. Would other countries occupy those three debtor nations and, if so, to what ends? What would China accomplish by sending troops to occupy the U.S. mainland?

I assume Chang is advising us to sell all of our equities and buy gold. Is that his recommendation? What then do we do for income? In Chang's future world there won't be any way to convert it back to a stable currency we can use for economic survival. So we would be sitting with a small pile of gold in our home vault while the Chinese army marched in our streets demanding that we do what? Give them our gold?

It seems to me that this idea that the world economy is going to collapse and that a world war will result is just too much for the individual North American citizen to contemplate, much less prepare for. We are pretty well forced to just hang on and hope that the Changs of this world are wrong and that the human race is not quite as helpless and/or ruthless as he is positing it to be.