No one likes to hear dire predictions about our future. Yet, at times, they can serve the purpose of jolting us awake from our complacency. When a man as accomplished as George Soros sees such darkness ahead it’s worth to take note.
Soros is quoted in Newsweek as saying:
“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career. We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
Compounding the challenges faced in America is the uncertainty of Europe’s financial stability, which, if it falters, may trigger a full-blown economic collapse that will alter our society in ways most of us are unable to imagine.
Soros continues in his Newsweek interview:
“It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”
A report on Thompson Reuters notes that: “The recent adoption of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 and the proposed Enemy Expatriation Act, if approved, have already very well paved the way for such a society. Under the NDAA, the US government is allowed to indefinitely detain and torture American citizens suspected of terror crimes without ever bringing them to trial. Should lawmakers Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Charles Dent (R-PA) get their Enemy Expatriation Act through Congress, the US will also be able to simply revoke citizenship without trial, essentially removing constitutional rights from anyone deemed a threat.”
Compounding the potential disruption of further dramatic turbulence in the financial markets is the increasing risk that economic inequality may take a more dramatic and disruptive form if compounded by circumstances that push the frail economic stability of Middle America over the edge. Having lost much of their investment savings in 2008 and facing the lost value of their homes, with fears about keeping or finding a job, hope may become a dangerously scarce commodity.
Thompson Reuters also noted, “In a recent survey released by the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of the adults studied believe that either “very strong” or “strong” conflicts exist between America’s elite and the impoverished, a statistic that has skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2009 and 20011, the proportion of those that sense conflicts exist as such between the class groups grew by 19 percentage points.”
Dire predictions and depressing facts may lead to a feeling of hopelessness, an understandable reaction. Yet we must do what we can to mitigate these challenges that often feel beyond our control and influence. Now more than ever before we must make our voices heard, and stand together for what we believe in. Building strong and resilient communities, participating as active citizens, supporting responsible business and using the power of our own purchasing to send a message with every dollar we spend. We must create out own trends that stand out when the statistics are analyzed.
Will this prevent bad things from happening? Certainly not; but, it will mitigate the pain and lay a better foundation for the recovery to follow.