Since I've written this article, my forecasts have begun to make themselves your reality much faster than I had predicted. If you haven't read this article, please do so because you are living through it as you live and breathe.
I urge all college and university students across the United States, England, and the countries of Europe to make their friends and school newspapers aware of this article and the substance which it contains. Spread the news. Tell your parents. If I am correct, and it seems that I am so far, retirement accounts must be attended to and liquidated now and not next year in order to salvage any remnant of value. Make sure that your passports and immigration materials are up-to-date and in order. The "BIG MIGRATION", as I call it, will soon be underway.
And now, the body of the original article which predicts the events to come:
The ensuing five years are going to bring tremendous personal economic challenges for the citizens of the world's industrialized nations. Oil will become a luxury. Personal retirement investments will evaporate. Health care and prescription costs will bring entire sectors of the population to their knees and, lastly, food prices and shortages will put at risk the health of every citizen of the industrialized world.
Petroleum is the raw material necessary for the manufacture of nearly all products upon which human beings depend. The current petroleum crisis, though sudden and severe, is a mere shadow of that which the next five years will bring.
Oil producing nations and the companies which explore for and extract petroleum from far beneath the surface of the Earth have misinformed the public and understated the volume contained within the oil fields in their charge. The amount is far smaller than they have publicly proclaimed. The companies have been the recipients of huge tax breaks and incentives designed to build the infrastructure to bring the oil to the surface and to market, but only in the belief by the respective nations that the national investment was based on sound information. The governments and the public at large have been deceived. Petroleum shortages will become a way of life within the next five years.
Every individual who owns a personal retirement account will see the value of their investments plummet to a level below the principal monies they deposited. Baby Boomers, that huge demographic subset of the population, have suffered through three major economic declines in the prior twenty years which have decimated their retirement savings. Don't look now, but there will be another one, a last straw, beginning next year. The year 2009 will see enormous numbers of people begin to withdraw their retirement funds, many accounts to be emptied and closed completely.
Retirees will have had it with Wall Street starting next year. As soon as they reach the minimum legal age to retire they will remove all of their retirement monies from the stock market and place them into guaranteed fixed income investments. In order to accomplish this they will, of course, be selling the mutual fund stocks within which their savings were invested. The global supply of stocks will greatly outnumber the demand and you're broker won't be able to find buyers for the stocks which you are trying to unload. By 2010, if you hadn't already sold your portfolio and transferred everything to guaranteed instruments, you will have almost nothing remaining in your retirement accounts to withdraw.
The cost of prescriptions and health care will skyrocket. One reason will be that almost everything necessary for the production of drugs consists of some form of plastic or other petroleum-based material. A second reason will be that the pharmaceutical companies will try to recover money which was lost due to the drastic devaluation of their respective stocks.
Prices for fresh food will skyrocket. Petroleum in vitally necessary for the production of the world's food supply. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers are all produced from oil and modern agriculture cannot succeed without them. Gasoline and diesel fuel are required for farm equipment as well as for the transportation of agricultural goods to market. The public in general will resort to consuming the filling but undernutritious and unhealthy products which the fast food industry vends because they are less expensive. Vascular disease will take an even greater toll on the public health due to the enormous fat and sodium content of their newly adopted diet.
The most significant population migration to have ever occurred in the history of the industrialized world will be set in motion in 2010 and 2011, but it may not be as one might predict. Retirees will be emigrating from the first world nations to the second and third world countries in an unprecedented exodus!
Citizens from the United States of America, Canada, Great Britain, and from all over Europe will find that it will behoove them to cut their losses and take up residence in the poorer nations. So many of them will entirely give up citizenship in their former countries that "Little Americas" and "Little Europes" will spring up in countries as diverse as Chile, Ecuador, Turkey, Benin, Togo and Mauritania.
The countries from which they emigrate will, temporarily, halt the exodus for the false reason of "national security"- the actual reason being to enact an emigration or exit tax on those foresighted citizens of the industrialized world who are moving to other countries.
The living expenses will be a fraction of what they would have had to contend with in their former home countries and the host countries will welcome them with open arms. The ensuing economic boom for the poorer nations will raise the standards of living for all of their citizens.
One last surprise is in store for the United States.
There will erupt what will be called the "Carolina Volcano". By 2012, a mysterious series of insect and forest animal migrations through the western portions of North and South Carolina will be quickly followed by new hot springs, which will also appear in the western Carolinas, to be rapidly followed by tremors, and then, the volcano. Due to its raw, explosive nature and the sheer mass of material thrust up into the stratosphere and destined to fall and cover a wide swath of the eastern seaboard, large cities such as Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore will be evacuated until it is deemed safe to return.
I sincerely hope you've moved to the highlands of Ecuador or to southern Turkey well before the hot springs and then the volcano. The economy of the United States will be the worst it has been since the Civil War.