|
Bloomberg's James
"Jim" Pressley has reviewed my new book, When Giants Fall.
Although his
assessment, entitled "Trader Panzner Foresees Wealth Destruction, Rising Crime,
Guns," is reasonably fair as far as it goes, it
reminds me of the reaction I got when Financial
Armageddon was first published at the peak off euphoria in March
2007.
Back then, most
people -- including the highly-paid experts on Wall Street -- dismissed the
notion that the world was on the cusp of the worst financial crisis this
century and a devastating global economic meltdown.
Still, I suppose the
optimists could be correct this time, right?
Abandon hope, all ye
who open this book. Michael J. Panzner, author of “Financial
Armageddon,” is back with a new jeremiad on our cracked and
out-of-joint times.
His outlook is grim.
We stand on the cusp of what hedge- fund manager Barton Biggs would call
“an episode of great wealth destruction,” Panzner writes in
“When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the American
Era.” Things are already bad for Americans and they are going to get
worse.
Working hours will
rise and pay will fall, forcing many people to take two or even three jobs,
he asserts. We’ll be traveling on foot -- or by bicycle or boat. More
and more of us will live in extended-family households, three generations
under one roof. We’ll recycle rainwater, draw heat from the sun and eat
food grown in our own gardens.
Tax revenue will slump,
unraveling safety nets like Social Security and Medicare. Hospitals will
shut. Police budgets will be slashed, crime will surge, more people will pack
guns. The dollar and modern payment mechanisms may give way to “barter
arrangements, alternative financial instruments and collective support
networks,” he says.
“Like the other
great spasms in our history, the one that now seems to be unfolding is
unlikely to be narrow in scope, shallow in depth, or short-lived in
duration,” he writes.
And so this book
goes, with page after dystopian page outlining the decline of the U.S. and the splintering of the planet into brutish nation states fighting over dwindling
stores of commodities, energy and water.
Bleak Collage
Panzner, a veteran
trader who has worked for banks including HSBC Holdings Plc and JPMorgan
Chase & Co., has read widely. The text bristles with references to
historians such as Paul Kennedy and Niall Ferguson. He quotes Chalmers
Johnson here, Richard Haass there. Pat Buchanan and Naomi Klein pop up in
between.
The result is a bleak
collage of quotations describing a U.S. adrift in a dangerous world:
Americans have overspent, lost their prestige and gone soft. Oil production
may be peaking, poor populations are exploding, and the planet is being befouled.
China’s foreign reserves have surged to $1.95 trillion.
Sound familiar? It
should.
The spectrum of books
on America’s shifting place in the world is now wide. At the bright end
of the scale, Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World” stresses
“the rise of the rest,” not the decline of the U.S. George
Friedman’s new book, “The Next 100 Years,” goes further. Far
from fading, he says, the U.S. has “just begun its ascent.”
Sensible Primers
Toward the middle of
the doom-and-gloom gradation, we have sensible primers such as Charles R.
Morris’s “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown”; Robert J.
Shiller’s “The Subprime Solution”; and Mohamed
El-Erian’s “When Markets Collide.”
And then there are
books like Panzner’s. They argue that we’re plunging into a new
Dark Age.
Now, I’m not
one to ignore a wake-up call. I listened when Shiller began measuring the
girth of the U.S. housing bubble. I paid heed when Morris predicted the bust
would result in at least $1 trillion in bank write downs.
What disturbs me
about Panzner is his hectoring tone and the depth of his gloom. Even the
Statue of Liberty is upside down on the cover, an image sure to make Osama
bin Laden smirk.
Click here to read the rest.
Michael J. Panzner
Editor, Financialarmageddon.com
Michael J. Panzner is a
25-year veteran of the global stock, bond, and currency markets and the author
of Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending
Catastrophes, published by Kaplan Publishing.
| 
