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What’s left are the ‘fatal synergies’ of soaring debt and leverage, diminishing returns on stimulus, the substitution of credit for savings and the coming deflationary tsunami that pops all the speculative bubbles. Imagine a once modest but sturdy home built near a cliff to maximize the vistas.

Events that devastate the majority financially greatly enrich the few who bet on non-linear dynamics. I see the same question in forums, threads, articles and emails: what can I do to protect myself and my family from whatever lies ahead?

I’m sure it’s no surprise that the next five years will be risky and challenging; to the degree that we will be reliant on those closest to us, we are sharing a virtual lifeboat. Consider a scenario in which we’re on a ship that’s sinking, and the lifeboats have been launched. Being some of the last still on board the doomed vessel, we can scan who’s in each lifeboat and choose which one we’ll clamber into.

The sheer weight of this outlandish asymmetry of wealth and power is pulling the nation into disorder. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t address a small elite owning most of the nation’s private wealth and using a sliver of that wealth to influence the federal government so their wealth and political power increase in a self-reinforcing feedback: as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites’ wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on.