CRASHES...
The straight answer is that a crash has 50/50 chance over the next 10 years. Many people say it's 100 percent, and with a much shorter time horizon. George Soros, who's made part of his living -speculating in currencies - says, "Instability is cumulative, so that eventual breakdown of freely floating exchanges is virtually assured."
Joel Kurtzman,
ex-editor at the Harvard Business Review, entitles his latest book: The Death of Money and forecasts an imminent collapse due to speculative frenzy.
To see how this could happen: all the OECD Central Banks' reserves together represent about $640
billion. So in a crisis situation, if all the Central Banks were to agree to work together (which they never do) and if they were to use all their reserves (which is another thing that never happens) they have the funds to control only half the volume of a normal day of trading. In a crisis day, that volume could easily double or triple, and the total Central Bank reserves would last two or three hours.
If that happens, we would suddenly be in a very different world. In 1929, the stock market crashed, but the gold standard held. The monetary system held. Here, we are dealing with something that's more fundamental. The only precedent is the Roman Empire collapse, which ended Roman currency. That was, of course, at a time when it took about a century and a half for the breakdown to spread through the empire; now it would take a few hours.
ENDS -jonz-