The Sun Also Sets

The Decline and Fall of the America Empire
Niall Ferguson provides a scary glimpse into a not too distant future where the US faces a precipitous decline. He’s no America-hater, but rather a Jeremiah warning us off the path to self-destruction.

Empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems, including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.

The Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly.

The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that Britain could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire.

What are the implications for the US today? The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises: sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.

Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion ($1.64 trillion), about 10 per cent of GDP, for the second year running.

Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32 per cent to a projected 66 per cent next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office's latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050.

Even more frightening, Craig Robets paints a bleak dystopia too dark for even Glen Beck ..

The Year America Dissolved, by Craig Roberts

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.  The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

As society broke down, the police became warlords... (Read More)

Think it can't happen here?  Economically powerful Argentines of 100 years ago didn't think so either.  Or ponder the dramatic but dignified decline of Great Britain...

It can happen here.