Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake: Armageddon It

I know I'm probably boring the crap out of everyone with my Chicken Little Economy Series, but there actually is method to my madness. Just bear with me.

I always keep one eye on the business news, because despite the fact that the gang at CNBC are a pack of inveterate liars who slavishly shill for their corporate masters, money has a preference for following craven truth no matter how base or amoral. So every once in a while somebody will pop up with a clear-eyed estimation of things with a greater frequency than you are likely to find, say, on the NBC evening news.

And the other day in between fluffing CEOs, human ashtray Ron Insana (who will always go down in my memory as he appeared on the Today Show set on 9/11, with a big pile of soot on his head...who thought that was a good idea...) interviewed a famous fund manager named Julian Robertson, who has worked on Wall Street for 53 years and manages the Robertson group of funds. As Al Martin recounts it:

They used to call him, still do call him 'Never Been Wrong' Robertson. He has predicted every economic cycle, every debacle, every bull market, and every bear market.

Of course, he's a very old man now. But his reputation on the Street is like nothing you could imagine. When the segment of his interview was through, his comments alone took the Dow Jones down 50 points. Just on his comments alone. That's how powerful this man's reputation is.

Robertson was actually a teary-eyed, an old man. When Ron Insana asked him about his predictions, he said that he's worried about the speculative bubble in housing and the fact that more than 1/4 of all consumer spending is now sustained by that bubble, plus the fact that 20 million citizens could lose their homes in a collapse of the speculative bubble in housing, and that the Fed and, indeed, central banks worldwide would act in concert out of desperation to reinflate the global economy in the process, creating an inflationary spiral unheralded in the economic history of the planet.

Insana then asks, "Where does it end?" And he said, "Utter global collapse." Not simply economic collapse; complete disintegration of all infrastructure and of all public structures of governments. Utter, utter collapse. That the end is collapse of simply epic proportion.

In 10 years time, he said, whoever is still alive on the planet will be effectively starting again.