Conrad Black certainly makes a strong case to expect it sooner, rather than later:
When Barack Obama took office, the official normal money supply of the United States was about $1.1-trillion. The $3-trillion in federal budget deficits that have been run up since then have largely, technically, escaped the money supply, though accretions have almost doubled the official total, an unheard of rate of growth (about 40% annualized) in a hard-currency country. About 70% of this debt has been paid by the issuance of bonds to the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the United States government. Whatever the balance sheets say, this has produced the effect of a money-supply increase, which has brought pump-priming to a level of over-achievement not seen since Noah felt the compulsion to build an ark. And the annual trillion-dollar deluge is forecast to continue for a decade.
The world’s reserve currency, the fabled vehicle of the “faith and credit of the United States,” is now virtual money — a symbol for all the other massive problems afflicting the U.S. economy. The imported share of America’s oil consumption, for instance, has gone from 20% to 60%. Large suppliers like Iran and Venezuela have become hostile countries. Yet Americans remain neurotic about paying half the gas price of other oil-importing countries.
But he says that we shouldn’t look to Europe to save the day:
Meanwhile, the European Union is a water-logged vessel in a tempest, frantically bailing. In the six weeks since French finance minister Christine Lagarde last bravely proclaimed her personal fantasy that Greece would not default, the interest on Greek government notes has risen from 20% to 26%. Germany will not indefinitely remain so encumbered with guilt for the Third Reich that it will go on eating the costs of the false prospectus Goldman Sachs assisted Greece and others to file when they joined the Euro. The Germans have only tolerated it up to now because the strain Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and eventually others put on the European banking system and the Euro,keep the Euro in fairly close downward mode with the U.S. dollar, which assists German exports. What a splendid irony that Germany, reviled as the rampaging hun in olden time, is now being entreated by genuflecting masses of its former ungrateful subjects to occupy and dominate them again, at least economically. (The Bundesbank’s uniforms are less stylish than those of the Wehrmacht.)
The EU is in hot contention with the United States as the Sick Man of the Great World Economic Powers, because less than 40% of Eurozone citizens work and over 60% are on benefits of some sort. But not to be discounted in this gripping Olympic contest for total fiscal immolation is geriatric, debt-ridden, stagnating Japan, a great but terribly beleaguered and demoralized country.
How’s that for your daily dose of DOOM? Pretty DOOM-ish, isn’t it?
