[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'L')ord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('agramante', ' ')If that's not collapse, I don't know what is. The banks are dead like Bernie. What's left is for the governments, ours and others around the world, to become insolvent themselves.

[agramante]

I wasn't discussing ecology, which will continue long after our financial and governmental systems have disintegrated into unrecognizability. And I was leaving open the door for significant changes in society as we know it, because society as we have known it is changing, and pretty quickly. When the USA has gone, in about sixty years, from a nation of primarily middle-class asiprants to greater wealth, to reality today that nearly half the country is in or near poverty and inequality is greater than it has been for the last 120, I'd say we've gone through a big change. That change is directly correlated to our use of oil.

Though many elements of the financial systems might now exist in name--mortgages for homes and businesses, and the like--the fact is that increasingly, the majority of Americans lack the means to use those systems. Incomes are too low. The economy has slowed down to the point that nearly half of Americans barely participate in it. The 12 largest US banks control nearly 70% of the nation's wealth--roughly mirroring the private wealth breakdown--but those banks still require constant help from the Fed. The system has already failed. It's a matter of when the Fed can no longer afford to keep it on life support.

I have no idea what will happen then. If values crash and banks close their doors, what remains of their assets will still be for sale to a willing buyer. It was to prevent that that TARP and the following rounds of bailouts were made. But the banks are no longer able to stand on their own, and that in my mind constitutes the crash of the system. Only a crash of the US government will make that still worse. What emerges from that will be substantially different, I don't doubt. We might be arguing a semantic difference here, because I see the potential failure of the government currently backing the banks' bad debts as separate from the failure of the financial system as it existed before. If you consider them part of one system I won't argue the point.