Seven Sharks in The Tank

Once I cringed when Kevin Phillips sparred with a Democratic foe on NPR. Last Friday, on Bill Moyers' Journal, Mr. Phillips received high marks from Mr. Moyers for his prescient book, Bad Money. On the show, and presumably in the book as well, Phillips speaks of Seven Sharks in the tank with the U.S. economy.

And the first is financialization because we're so dependent on this industry that's sort of half lost its marbles. The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. The third is you've now got home prices collapsing. The fourth is you've got global commodity inflation building up.

The fifth is you've got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics. The sixth is that you've got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it's not just commodity inflation, it's a shortage of oil. And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar. Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one. And when Greenspan says it's a once a century, I think it's another variation but on a par with the Thirties.