What rubbish. First of all, it's got a 3% rate of inflation. We've been well above 3% for a while. Secondly, it assumes 4% growth rate - that's both too conservative and too aggressive. For me, it's predicting I'll NEVER get back what I lost, because I'm plugging in real inflation numbers and real return numbers. But that's rubbish too.

The real answer: Nobody knows. Nobody. Not you, not me, not the economists, nobody. There are no scenarios that envisioned the combination of factors we have now, no scenarios for a shrinking first-world population, no scenarios for a reduction in consumption, no scenarios for a global depletion of resources.

Nobody had economic models where the fish ran out, where the zinc would be in short supply, where tantalum for capacitors was all used up, where it cost more to safely dispose of the waste produced by a process than the products made by the process earned. Certainly no economist envisioned the Pozification of the entire system, nor were there any models for describing what would happen when $651 trillion dollars in CDO's turned from assets into toxic waste.

There are no roads here, no maps to guide any of us.


Anyone who proposes a "recovery" to the economy - especially thinking we'll be back to 2006-2007 levels - has their head in a place that's very dark and uncomfotable.