There are places in this country which are booming. South of DFW... Mansfield, Midloathian...etc. It's easy to find doom and gloom. However, Fun and profit is where you find it.
The whole country is not going down the toilet, but the country as a whole is going down hill fast. Those people smart enough to stay ahead of the curve realize that the midpoint of the country is drifting off through lack of effort and attention by the middle class, having been sucked in by the wall street gang and their own egos. The lower class is stable. It was poor tbefore and it is poor now, so no change there with the exception that it is growing fast and growing very discontent. This is something that you rich folk may need to keep your eye on
The urban part, same as in the US in the Great Depression... South America, for the most part has lots of water and some parts of it have cheap hydroelectric power, lots of it.. they might do ok considering that they aren't as urbanized as the US is.. In the US people could ramp up local food production quite quickly, there is much good info.. in the old days when people all gardened they could start a patch and be harvesting stuff in a month...
Confidence, that has reached negative levels, and without some sense of confidence, the consumer, whether American, European, Asian, South American or otherwise will continue to only purchase life sustaining necessities Confidence has been attacked and challenged by the collapse of the financial structures that it was propped up upon. Housing wealth, although artificially inflated was one of the legs that propped up American confidence.... gone!, and more foreclosures to boot... Credit and Derivatives were used and abused and allowed to jeopardize whatever other stability seemed to exist before it. gone!, and more collapses to boot... Interest rates, tax shelters, tax cuts, tax incentives, export based job and export based economies.... pretty much gone!, and more contraction to boot.... depression, uh, yeah, many people are replacing confidence with depression, many municipalities too, many companies too, many industries too, many trades and trade crafts too... what's to turn it around? stay tuned.... ((all we now have remains hope))
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2000/3/12/8913.html "According to the Mayan calendar "Tzolkin", our solar system is experiencing "The Great Cycle", which lasts for some 5,200 years from 3113 B.C. to 2012 A.D. In "The Great Cycle", the Earth along with the solar system are moving across the "Galactic Beam", which originated from the core of the galaxy. The diameter of this "Galactic Beam" is 5,125 Earth years. In another word, it will take the Earth 5,125 years to cross this " Galactic Beam" (Figure 1). The Mayas believed that after crossing this "Galactic Beam", the solar system will experience a fundamental change. They named this change the "Galactic Synchronization". "