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The twenty,thirty somethings will not be able to buy homes with the student loan debt they carry, therefore the housing problem will not be going away for a very long time. Also with everyone having health care doctors are already trying to cash in on that by charging a monthly fee for the care we used to get. The world as we have know, will be unreconizable.....
Putting an end to greed would be a great way to start and also I do not see the construction trade picking up anytime soon either....People are afraid to part with the little money they have.
Read "Vulture's Picnic" by Greg Palast for an interesting discussion of past, present and future world economic trends.
I predict the industrialized nations will be able to afford returning to nuclear power for electrical energy while the developing nations will be stuck purchasing ever more expensive petroleum from the existing sources. They will stay mired in the over population, under employed and underfed trap the IMF and World Bank have arranged. A few like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) may be industrialized enough to improve their living standards.
The US will no longer be able to afford to be the cops of the world for Wall Street and the City of London. They will have to find another enforcer for their loan sharking. We may lose our world petroleum currency monopoly but that will only force us to turn inward and invest within North America instead of putting money in the hands of our competition.
We will, because of our ageing population, adopt a limited form of universal health care as the private insurance companies can no longer afford to pay both claims and huge dividends. They will turn the pay part over to the federal government as they did with Flood Insurance. Our college graduates will remain renters for at least a decade or so after graduation because college loans will destroy their credit. The prices of single family houses will stay the same of decrease as demand drops due to the loss of demand and the deaths of many of the current owners due to old age. Legal immigration will increase to provide low paid health workers to tend the increasing numbers of elderly.
I hope to live long enough to see most of this. It should be interesting.
Pretty simple. Private monetary growth is mostly real estate driven. With the bubble burst and boomer down sizing I see either large deficits or depressed prices. The Fed now takes a back seat to fiscal policy.
Long bonds are DOA with nothing but down side.
After that its China and energy.
Basically our economic system sucks. Its asset driven, not capital driven.
"Its asset driven, not capital driven." Would you please explain the difference.
I agree with the system sucks remark but I believe it is because the government protects against losses for the big inverstors and huge banks but offers no help for the small share or property holder.
"Its asset driven, not capital driven." Would you please explain the difference.
Sadly one often does have to explain the difference. The field of economics became purposely dismal.
Unfortunately things that generally cannot be improved upon have the most stable values. Thus its not better mouse traps that can secure funding. Only things that already have stable value tend to secure big loans and support monetary growth. The reason they are stable in value is because human labor cannot add to the supply and is thus inherently divorced from human production. Every new invention fears the alchemist. Those who have gold do not, and yet land, gold and water rights do not represent a lick of progress. As I have said before ,for lack of a better term, it was historically called economic rent. If I sharpen a stick, its capital. If I charge you to take a stick from my tree, its rent.
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I agree with the system sucks remark but I believe it is because the government protects against losses for the big inverstors and huge banks but offers no help for the small share or property holder.
That is a problem but not quite as deep as the other. More of fewer rent seekers make little difference. Its all basically hammock money. The concept is known as a productive vs unproductive loans. The credit system we have now rewards those who control unproductive assets and is biased against productive assets. Even our patent laws followed to the letter are failing to protect innovation and is instead being used to block competitors.
I think I understand. The current owners of the physical assets such as gold, land, coal mines, utilities that use coal and similar make money by charging rent for the use of their asset. The inventor and industrialist use capital to develop a more efficient way to produce goods and services at a profit. The use of these goods may threaten the people renting the assets and are resisted by the existing wealth. Indeed money sunk into housing does not create progress and may be manipulated into creating the illusion of wealth. This was done during the housing boom and bust.
We have become an economy dominated by owners that are using their political power to rip off the renters instead of investing to create progress in energy supply and transportation.
what is going on is called transhumanism..we are on are way to become a Type 1 type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale...
Transhumanism, abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as study the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. They predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman".
Current status of human civilization Michio Kaku suggested that humans may attain Type I status in about 100–200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years.
Carl Sagan suggested to define intermediate values (not considered in Kardashev's original) by interpolating and extrapolating the values given above for types 1, 2 and 3, by using the formula ,where value K is a civilization's Kardashev rating and MW is the power it uses for interstellar communication, in megawatts. He calculated humanity's civilization type (in 1973) to be about 0.7, with respect to this extrapolation (apparently using 10 terawatt (TW) as the value for 1970s humanity).
Type I civilization methods
Large-scale application of fusion power. According to mass-energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second. While there is no known method to convert matter (by itself) completely into energy, an equivalent energy release could theoretically be achieved by fusing approximately 280 kg of hydrogen into helium per second,[6] a rate roughly equivalent to 8.9×109 kg/year. A cubic km of water contains about 1011 kg of hydrogen, and the Earth's oceans contain about 1.3×109 cubic km of water, meaning that this rate of consumption could be sustained over geological time scales, discounting the protium-deuterium imbalance.
Antimatter in large quantities would have a mechanism to produce power on a scale several factors above our current level of technology. In antimatter-matter collisions, the entire rest mass of the particles is converted to kinetic energy. Their energy density (energy released per mass) is about four orders of magnitude greater than that from using nuclear fission, and about two orders of magnitude greater than the best possible yield from fusion.
The reaction of 1 kg of anti-matter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy.[9] Although antimatter is sometimes proposed as a source of energy, this is currently infeasible. Artificially producing antimatter according to current understanding of the laws of physics involves first converting energy into mass, so there is no net gain. Artificially created antimatter is only usable as a medium of energy storage but not as an energy source, unless future technological developments (contrary to the conservation of the baryon number, such as a CP Violation in favour of antimatter) allow the conversion of ordinary matter into anti-matter. There are a number of naturally occurring sources of antimatter we may theoretically be able to cultivate and harvest in the future.
Solar energy through converting sunlight into electricity by either solar cells and concentrating solar power or indirectly through wind and hydroelectric power. Currently, there is no known way for human civilization to successfully utilize the equivalent of the Earth's total absorbed solar energy without completely coating the surface with man-made structures, which is presently not feasible. However, if a civilization constructed very large space-based solar powersatellites, Type I power levels might be achievable.
What is the next unexpected event that is going to happen?
If parts of Obamacare stay intact, look for the great depression of 2014.
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Expected is a better word
,where value K is a civilization's Kardashev rating and MW is the power it uses for interstellar communication, in 
