In this article, Chris Martenson has summarized the current situation exceptionally well. The chart of debt growth since 1970 really says it all. This shows that we are now at a point where our unsustainable monetary system may have reached significant limits.

Understanding What Happens Next

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Executive Summary

• The sentiment on commodities is shifting in an important way.
• What happens when a global credit bubble meets a secular rise in energy costs? (Answer: nothing good.)
• The only chart you need to understand the future
• Why the next steps of the Fed and other central banks is imminently predictable at this point
• Given the high probabilities and their huge impact, you need to take steps now to position and protect yourself.
• The three critical questions you need to be asking

Part I - What Just Happened

The risk faced by those who are analyzing macro trends is sounding like a broken record. For those younger readers who have no idea what that phrase means, imagine an mp3 song that will stick on and endlessly repeat a random segment of the song you are listening to until you give your device a sharp knock on the side. That's what a broken record sounded like.
The world economy is on the ropes, and it won't ever recover, at least not to anything resembling its recent past. Neither the gleeful housing bubble nor the free-flowing credit that enabled that side bubble to emerge will return. The resources simply do not exist to repeat that final orgy of consumption. A new reality is upon us, and while -- fortunately -- more and more people are choosing to face our predicament rather than pretend the current risks and challenges do not really exist, the absolute numbers of such forerunners are still small, and for the most part they don't include any of our political leaders.
The macro trends of worsening public and private debt loads, a looming and unaddressed Peak Oil threat, exponentially increasing global population, resource depletion, and an all-too-human tendency to use the money printing machine to deal with tough economic problems all remain pointed firmly towards an uncomfortable conclusion: There's a future of less in store for most people.
Our best hope is for a negotiated decline to lower levels of economic activity that allow us to gracefully adjust our expectations to a new and lower level consumption that offers an even more enjoyable and purpose-filled existence. Our worst fear is that a stubborn insistence on business-as-usual by our leadership leads to a future shaped by disaster rather than design.
The fundamental Issue is this: You can't solve a problem rooted in too much debt with more debt. It just doesn't pencil out.

"Here we go again…solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. ...Can the US continue to depreciate the world's base currency?" 
    ~ Goldman strategist Alan Brazil     (Source)

Yet we now see that both Europe and the US are busily conceding to banker demands and coming up with all manner of fancy schemes, in an attempt to hide the fact that old debt is simply being replaced with new debt. 
Consider the confusing news about the European EFSF, the so-called rescue facility for the Eurozone, which is currently conceived to use leverage (to solve a debt problem!) and is thought to look something like this:

(Source) 
We could analyze the details of that flowchart and opine on the structure, but that really won't aid anything. Additional complexity and Jell-O redistribution will not change the basic fact that the debts simply cannot be paid back under current terms or out of any imaginable future economic growth.
As far as I can tell, the complexity serves one main purpose, and that is to baffle enough of the populace for long enough to allow a significant transfer of public wealth to occur in broad daylight into private pockets. In this regard, Europe and the United States seem to be identical.

A Bad Reaction

On September 21, 2011, the Fed disappointed the world equity and commodity markets by announcing Operation Twist, which is nothing more than monetary Jell-O being moved from one side of the plate to another, instead of more QE stimulus (representing additional Jell-O in this metaphor).
The reaction was swift and negative. 
Beginning with stocks, we see that a couple of severe down days (the red bars in the green circle) ensued, following the Operation Twist announcement. 

We also note that the S&P 500 is down year to date (YTD, blue dotted line) and that it is bouncing between the 1120 and 1220 marks (purple lines) with a lot of volatility but not much direction. The simplest explanation for this is that tensions exist between what the fundamental data is telling us about the state of the global economy (not good; more below) and the hope that more central bank money will soon be flooding the world.
As always, this is not a good sign. Any time you read the word "investors" being used in an article about who is driving these price movements, I invite you to replace that word with "speculators," as that's what we all are now. We are left speculating wildly about when and how much thin-air money will next be injected by one central bank or another.
Gold had particularly tough going after the Twist announcement, getting clobbered for ~$100 on the following couple of days (green circle):

These price drops had nothing to do with an improved outlook on the viability of the world's fiat money systems or a reduction in overall systemic risk. Neither were appreciably altered by the Fed decision, although systemic risk was probably elevated. Without the Fed absorbing additional existing debt, the entire system is at greater risk of slipping into a deflationary spiral that could get out of control.
If that happens, you want to be sure to have gold -- in hand.
Silver was especially slammed and was the undisputed loser of the entire commodity complex, losing as much as 25% in a single session (before recovering):

I have always held that the risk for silver in this current rout would be for it to behave more like an industrial metal than a monetary asset, and therefore slip in price regardless of systemic stress. For a while there, throughout July and August, I began to think that silver was displaying some money-like qualities, but the recent slam dispelled those thoughts.
I continue to think that this rout is not yet over and am waiting on better prices for silver before I remove some of my dry powder and accumulate some more.
The 'off note' in this story is the price of oil: 

Until and unless oil, the main lubricant of commerce and a feed-in to the price of everything, slips and plummets a long way from here, I remain bullish on commodities in general. The macro story for oil is simply that a marginal new barrel of oil costs at least $70 in today's world, and quite a bit more in some cases. 
If oil falls below that $70-$80 level, then you can forget about new supply coming on line. In many respects, we are living in an 'oil shadow' created by the plunge in oil to $38 in 2009, which delayed a large number of oil development projects that would otherwise be yielding supply today.
Should oil fall below the marginal cost again here in 2011 or 2012, then we'll have another oil shadow to contend with a few years down the line.
Of course, I should point out here that the above chart is for US oil only (WTIC) and that the world price for oil is roughly $20 higher, as indicated by the price of Brent crude at $104/bbl.

Slip-Sliding Away

Presently, the global economy is not doing all that well. There are troubling signs from Japan, the US, Europe and now China that the economy is stalling out and in serious danger of slipping back into recession. If that happens, all of the debt-rescue plans will have both additional headwinds with which to contend and new debt implosions to rescue. 
Any analysis of the global economy has to begin with Dr. Copper, the most trusted source for an accurate economic diagnosis. Used in an enormous variety of commercial applications, from houses to cars to electronics to electricity cables, copper prices usually provide a useful early read on the direction of the economy.
That tale is one of weakness:

Copper prices are now back to where they were in 2008, although still considerably up off the lows of late 2008 and early 2009, and are in negative territory YTD by more than 20%.
Consistent with the weakness in copper prices are recent reports of Chinese manufacturing activity slipping into contraction:
China manufacturing data paint weak picture

(Sept 22, 2011)
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — HSBC’s preliminary China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index, or “flash” PMI, fell to a two-month low in September, indicating a broadening slowdown in the Chinese economy, with industrial output swinging from a modest expansion to a deterioration.
The weak data were a factor in the broad equities sell-off in Hong Kong Thursday.
The headline preliminary PMI for the month was 49.4, down from 49.9 in August, HSBC said in a statement Thursday.
The PMI’s output index fell to 49.2 in September, down from 50.2 in August and below the 50 level dividing expansion from contraction.

China is addicted to rapid rates of growth, and its banking system is heavily exposed to a wildly over-priced real estate market, especially in their major urban centers. If the Chinese property bubble busts, then expect major banking stress to follow suit.
Perhaps one nearby indicator is the health of the Hong Kong real estate market, which is now entering a dangerous phase:
Hong Kong’s Tsang Sees Property ‘Soft Landing,’ Backs Peg

(September 27, 2011)
(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang predicted a “soft landing” for the real estate market and said the city will keep its currency peg to the U.S. dollar, blamed for helping drive home prices up about 70 percent.
 “The residential market has basically frozen as a result of the curbs and the global downturn,” said Alva To, head of consulting for North Asia at DTZ, a property broker. “Our surveyors are seeing almost a 60 percent drop in the number of valuation queries from banks compared with normal times.”
Hong Kong’s used home sales have slowed, with prices falling for the first time in seven months in July. That’s not a “very violent reaction,” Tsang said. Prices have jumped about 70 percent since the start of 2009. New loans approved fell 10.3 percent in August from a month ago.

A 70% jump in prices in two years is not a healthy sign; it is an indication of a bubble. The basic trajectory is simple enough; falling sales then lead to falling prices. Once the dynamic is underway, it will not stop until prices again reach affordability for the median household (at best) and may even badly overshoot to the downside (at worst).
More directly, Chinese real estate developers are encountering a slump in both sales and prices:
China Developers Face More ‘Severe’ Credit Outlook, S&P Says

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese developers face an “increasingly severe” credit outlook, which may force them to cut prices and turn to costlier funding sources as sales weaken, Standard & Poor’s said. A 30 percent decline in sales may leave many developers facing a liquidity squeeze, S&P said after conducting stress tests of the nation’s real estate companies. Most developers would be able to “absorb” a 10 percent sales drop next year, the credit rating company said.
“The worst isn’t over for China’s real estate developers,” S&P analysts led by Frank Lu wrote in a report today. “Developers are bracing themselves for slower sales and lower property prices ahead.”
Fewer than half of the 70 cities monitored by the government in August posted month-on-month gains in home prices for the first time, according to Samsung Securities Co.

What will happen to Chinese lending to the US and Europe if global trade slumps and the Chinese banking system begins to experience severe stress as a consequence of their own real estate bubble popping? Probably nothing good. That's why we have concerns that the enormous bubble in US Treasuries may be exposed as early as next year (2012).
Consistent with the rumblings from Dr. Copper are the reported slumps in global trade recently hitting the wires:
German Exports Unexpectedly Fell in July

(Sep 8, 2011)
German exports unexpectedly declined for a second month in July, underscoring signs Europe’s largest economy is losing momentum as the global recovery falters.
Exports, adjusted for work days and seasonal changes, fell 1.8 percent from June, when they dropped 1.2 percent, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today. 
German growth is slowing as Europe’s debt crisis prompts governments from Spain to Ireland to cut spending, sapping export demand. Factory orders from abroad dropped in July and executives and investors grew more pessimistic last month. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), the world’s biggest maker of luxury cars, said on Sept. 1 that U.S. sales dropped in August.

Japan exports disappoint, could weaken further

(Sept 20, 2011) TOKYO, Sep. 20, 2011 (Reuters) — Japan's exports rose in the year to August at less than half the pace expected as a global economic slowdown, a strong currency and Europe's sovereign debt crisis put Japan's own recovery increasingly in doubt.
"The impact of a slowing in the global economy is starting to become visible in Japan's export figures," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.
"In the coming months exports may go back to posting year-on-year declines, meaning the economy will have no sufficient support factor unless the government quickly implements reconstruction spending."

[US] Economic indicators predict continued weak growth

(Sept 22, 2011)
[F]actory orders, unemployment benefit applications and hours worked were among six measures that weakened in August.

Existing home sales up but price outlook grim

(Sept 21, 2011)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Existing home sales rose in August to their highest in five months as lower prices and rock-bottom interest rates drew more buyers into a still moribund market.
Sales climbed more than expected, up 7.7 percent from the previous month to an annual rate of 5.03 million units, the National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday. The median price was 5.1 percent lower than a year earlier.
Existing home sales have trended lower in 2011 and prices are still weakening. One factor keeping prices low is the high rate of "distressed sales" which include those forced by foreclosures.
Distressed sales accounted for 31 percent of August transactions, up from 29 percent a month earlier.

Comment: Note that falling prices are not a good sign here. Also the 7.7% bump in sales, assuming we believe the NAR data (always worth taking it with a grain of salt), still leaves us well off the peak of several years back and is being driven in large measure by distressed sales.
Let's contrast the distressed bargain activity with new home sales, also for August, to see if a different picture emerges:
New home sales fell in August for 4th month

(Sept 26, 2011)
Sales of new U.S. homes fell to a six-month low in August.
The fourth straight monthly decline during the peak buying season suggests the housing market is years away from a recovery.

The Commerce Department said Monday that new-home sales fell 2.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 295,000. That's less than half the roughly 700,000 that economists say must be sold to sustain a healthy housing market.

New-homes sales are on pace for the worst year since the government began keeping records a half century ago.

New home sales are on a pace for the worst year since records began fifty years ago? That statistic alone should tell you exactly where we are in this so-called recovery. Absolutely nowhere. The decline in new home sales wipes out the warm glow from the increase in existing home sales.

Summary: Part I

The world that Europe, the US and Japan are desperately trying to sustain is no longer possible in a world of too much debt and too expensive energy. The plethora of sliding data noted above represents classic warning signs taht one would expect to see from a global economy in systemic decline.
We are now down to the wire. Over the next few months and years, our story of credit growth - four decades in the making - will continue to unwind. Those who place their faith in the authorities to first, understand the true nature of the predicament, and second, implement restorative policies, are at tremendous risk of personal and/or financial losses.
In Part II of this report, Understanding What Happens Next, we discuss important decoupling trends, what steps global leaders will be forced to take later this year to deal with them, why these steps won't work, and what prudent individuals should be doing now to protect themselves and their wealth.

Part II - Understanding What Happens Next

Global Carnage

During these turbulent periods, it's best to back up, widen the view, and ask where we are. Since the beginning of 2011, we observe that global equities have been hammered for losses, while global oil (Brent) and gold remain positive for the year.

Interestingly, we see that commodities in general (CRB) are down less YTD than even the best performing stock market (New York), which is not quite what I would have expected. Commodities typically lose first and most in a global downturn, or rout, and the fact that they haven't suggests that commodities are now being viewed as a safer place to be than equities. This is a stunning turn of events if it holds out going forward.
Of course, this would fit with my preference, which is to view commodities as a more direct and tangible form of wealth than stocks, especially in a world where global oil remains over $100/barrel and directly drives the prices of all the other commodities.
On a month to date (MTD) basis, commodities have lost slightly more than equities, so we'll really have to wait this one out to see if a new pattern is emerging or not.

The Only Chart You Need

I'd like to return to the one chart that explains it all, our old friend Total Credit Market Debt. If there were just one single chart to reflect and meditate upon, this would be it.

What you're looking at is total US credit market debt over the past 40 years. In each decade, on average, credit market debt slightly more than doubled, giving us five full doublings in only four decades (blue triangles = doublings).
The math formula tells you than an exponential curve fit is an almost perfect match to the data (where a 1.000 would be perfection itself).
As long as credit is doubling and then doubling again, roughly every 8-9 years, then everything we know about prosperity, rising markets, and stable money systems is useful knowledge. 
When credit growth no longer can be sustained, then everything we think we know is really no longer useful, because the entire system is no longer behaving as we expect.

History Repeating 

We've been down this road many times in the past. In 1933, the exact dilemma posed by the condition of "too much debt" was outlined by Marriner Eccles (for whom the current NY Fed building is named) in Senate testimony:

The time came when we seemed to reach a point of saturation in the credit structure where, generally speaking, additional credit was no longer available, with the result that debtors were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin to apply on the reduction of debts.
This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds, bringing about what appeared to be overproduction, but what in reality was underconsumption measured in terms of the real world and not the money world. This naturally brought about a falling in prices and [a rise in] unemployment.
Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus bringing about a continuing decline in prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds – decreases in wages, salaries, and time of those employed.

The debt structure, in spite of the great amount of liquidation during the past three years, is rapidly becoming unsupportable, with the result that foreclosures, receiverships and bankruptcies are increasing in every field; delinquent taxes are mounting and forcing the closing of schools, thus breaking down our educational system, and moratoriums of all kinds are being resorted to – all this resulting in a steady and gradual breaking down of our entire credit structure, which can only bring additional distress, fear, rebellion, and chaos.
(Source) 

Does that sound at all familiar? It should, as it is the exact condition in which much of the developed world now finds itself. The current debt structure of Europe, Japan, and the United States remain unsupportable.
The basic narrative here, stripped of all the TARP, TALF, and EFSF SPV leveraged complexity, is that a 40-year credit binge is ending. The sub-plot to this story quite often involves a villain who ties currencies to the train tracks and succeeds in seeing them destroyed.  
Even as we face the daunting task of picking up the pieces of a 40-year credit binge, which would be difficult enough on its own, we are additionally saddled by two unnerving ideas. The first is that this was truly a global credit binge. There is no historical analog, and there are no safe places to hide. Every border has been breached by this collective loss of sanity. Second, energy costs are now a rising structural deterrent to global economic growth as we (used to) know and love it.
The risks here are ever the same as when I first began writing about the convergence of multiple exponential trends ranging from population to resource depletion to credit and money growth. The entire system of money and commerce is at risk.  What hasn't changed is humanity's ability for self-deception, wishful thinking, and outright denial.
Along with this uncanny ability of authorities to repeat history with extraordinary fidelity while earnestly believing the current circumstances to be unique, we must also factor in the unmistakable signs that we are, for the first time ever, hitting global resource and ecological limits. If nothing else, these will simply prevent our economic and monetary systems from expanding a comfortable few percent this year, next year, and all the years after that.
That's all; nothing too dramatic. Just the end of perpetual growth as a safely assumed feature of our economic landscape and asset pricing models. Slipping from 3% to 0% does not seem like much on paper, but it represents a world of difference to our monetary system. For those who understand how our entire economic and monetary systems are utterly dependent on continuous exponential growth, that last sentence should raise serious and legitimate concerns. 
The useful part about understanding the framework for perpetual growth is that the news is not as confusing and even makes sense. 

• Unemployment stubbornly high? That's what we'd predict from stubbornly high oil prices.
• Oil prices high despite weak economic growth and reduced demand? That's what we'd expect if we are at or near the peak of production.
• Debts that made perfect sense under a regime of smooth growth but are suddenly revealed to be unsupportable? Welcome to the new normal, where even the slightest downward tweak to the assumption of future growth calls into question the entire edifice of prior debts.

Central Banks Must Inflate Or Die

I truly do not envy the position in which the Federal Reserve and other central banks now find themselves. Having birthed the most magnificent credit bubble in all of history, they now face either the prospect of a massive destruction of current living standards and an explosion of unemployment, or a possibly ruinous loss of faith in their one and only product, thin-air money. It's quite an unsavory choice.
I would invite you to re-read the Marriner Eccles quote above and then to follow the link to read the rest of his testimony. The story of too much debt is an old one with quite predictable consequences, but the difference between the 1930's and now is that what constituted "too much" back then was a fraction of the current debt load. That is, we are in far worse shape today than back then, even without the looming resource issues being taken into account.
Once we wrap our minds and hearts around this reality, we are free to move onto the tasks of carefully observing where we are in the narrative arc and towards necessary actions.
The pattern I see playing out in the markets is this: First there's a financial crisis (2008), which then becomes a fiscal crisis (seen across the globe), which will then turn into a currency or monetary crisis. There's really no avoiding the completion of that pattern now, even if there was no such thing as Peak Oil.
The recent actions by the ECB, Bank of Japan, and the Fed have all confirmed the idea that everything possible will be done to prevent the recognition of losses on debts held by the big banks in each respective country.
Where 2008 was the opening salvo in the credit crisis and was heralded initially by widening credit spreads that presaged the stock market and commodity rout, this next crisis will strike deeper as it will call into fundamental question the money system itself for a much wider selection of economic participants. In other words, where there used to be just a few gold bugs here and there, their ranks will swell with new arrivals who share the conclusion that debt-based fiat money itself is both the root of the problem and the thing to avoid.
The predicament has always been simple enough to describe: There's too much debt. Adding more debt on the public side of the balance sheet is no cure; it's only a stopgap measure designed to buy time, which only worsens the eventual bust.
So the next leg of this crisis will still be rooted in the same initial patterns seen before marked by widening credit spreads (check), tanking financial stocks (check), and plunging commodities (check) -- but with a new element best described as a loss of faith in paper money itself (in progress). This last point is what gold has really been signaling more than anything else.

Conclusion

I am expecting the rout to continue for a while. I expect it will not 'end' until the Fed (et al.) engage in more monetary printing, or QE. I am still expecting these new thin-air injections by the end of the year, because I think that economic weakness and financial rot are too far developed to wait much longer than that.
Providing political cover for the Fed will be Europe going first and a renewed global economic slump that has the power to mute China's concerns over US money printing. If the pain is deep enough, even the most stalwart of critics will beg for relief. 
So from a timing standpoint, I would prefer to be in cash, out of equities (on the long side), and sitting on my hands with respect to existing physical gold and silver. In fact, this is my exact position at present.
Upon the announcement of additional QE efforts, I will be going 'all in' to gold, silver, and other things, and out of cash. Make no mistake; we are well on the path towards currency destruction. History is clear on the subject; most will be paralyzed by the shock of having their currency wither away and will do nothing to prepare. For those who do move to protect themselves, the ones who move earliest gain (or preserve) the most.
The big bubble, the one that will reverberate for a very long time after it bursts, is faith in US Treasuries, and, by extension, the US dollar itself. Some people like to say that the US dollar is not backed by anything, but that is not true. It is backed by US Treasury debt, which is backed by the productive output of the US citizenry.     
Faith in Treasuries is the same thing as faith in the dollar. Lose one and you lose both.
My advice here is to keep your investing head down, play it safe, don't try to time the markets unless you are a seasoned pro (especially the physical gold and silver markets!), and trust that the basic trajectory of the story has not yet shifted in any way so as to cause us to shift our larger stance on wealth preservation and personal/community preparation.
Yes, the wiggles and jiggles are becoming ever more closely spaced and violent, but that is exactly what we expect at this stage. There will be periods of immense distress and then periods of stability without apparent recovery. It is only after the passage of time that we look back and notice just how far we've slipped. For instance, five years ago it would have been unthinkable to see unemployment this high, but here we are. Now we look back and think fondly on 5% unemployment.
The future has arrived. We are no longer waiting for the changes to happen, they are here now. Read the papers; the changes and disruptions are already upon us. They are exceeding the abilities of our most earnest authorities to comprehend let alone manage, and they are increasing in number and severity.
You job is to decide what you are going to do in advance of even greater disruptions. Three questions apply.   What should you continue to do? What should you stop doing? What new things should you start doing?
It's probably worth repeating this advice from a report last June:

What to Start, Stop, and Continue Doing

Let's start with the easy part:  Please continue to note that the sun comes up every day, time is precious, life is fun, and purpose and opportunity will still be there even if credit isn't. The world does not stop because a flawed credit and money system ceases to be effective. It just changes.
Also continue with whatever efforts you have underway to prepare for a future of less brought about by decreased credit and more expensive energy.  I won't re-enter all of the possible steps towards resiliency here at this time, preferring to refer you to our What Should I Do? (WSID) guide and the conclusions of past reports that advise buying gold and silver, keeping some cash at home (just in case), and becoming more self-sufficient in terms of food, energy, and water, to the extent that this is possible for you.
What you should stop doing is hoping that somehow all of this can sort itself out, by releasing any lingering support for the idea that 'They know what they are doing.'  They don't.  The defenders of the status quo are doing everything they can, (very intelligently and diligently, I might add), to sustain a system that they apparently do not know is structurally flawed both internally and externally.  I do not fault them for this view; it is exceedingly difficult to see the forest when one has been raised to tend to a single tree.  By knowing the connection between energy and the economy, you are in a position that is relatively rare, and, as far as I can tell, thoroughly missing from the highest-level discussions.  
You should also stop or severely limit taking on consumptive debt.  For many younger people, this idea now includes college tuition, as it becomes clear that the return on investment (ROI) there is deeply negative in many instances.  Student debt in fields where there is a positive ROI still makes sense, but steadily rising costs continue to shrink that pool of opportunity.  Colleges are actively pricing themselves out of the game, and many will fail in the coming years because of a failure to self-impose rational and rationalized costs.
A third thing to stop is holding onto the belief that stocks and bonds always go up over the long haul.  You know, like houses, at least up until that narrative broke apart in 2007.  In a world without growth, both stocks and bonds are horrifically overvalued, at least in aggregate.
Connected to this is the idea that you should start using your liquid assets to increase your personal and local resiliency, while your currency still has quite a bit of value.  While it is possible that it will have even more value in the future, the odds of that being true are decreasing rapidly.  Why not use those assets now to buy gold, silver, productive land, soil amendments, energy retrofits and systems for your house, and other things that will either return a handsome profit in the future or preserve your future cash flows by limiting your expenditures on energy, food, and other rising prices?

Gladly, we have our community here to bounce ideas off of and help us maintain a level stance in uncertain times. The diversity of investing opinions and ideas of how to approach the decisions we need to make is a constant source of strength for me, and I hope for you as well.
I am truly distraught at the great number of people who are approaching the next few years without a grounded understanding of what is happening and what they can do about it. The number of aware people continues to swell at a rapid pace, but the absolute number is still astonishingly low. 
That leaves us the additional responsibility of preparing ourselves as best we can, and perhaps overdoing it so that we'll be in a position to assist those around us who will be relatively unprepared and possibly shell-shocked by the pace and magnitude of the change made more pronounced by their own willful denial of the facts on the ground.
Be well, invest prudently, and continue with your calm, determined efforts towards greater resilience.