I'm not sure if it's going to actually collapse. Though the world's national economic and trade systems are intertwined, there are still winners and losers meaning some nations are prospering and doing so with a measure of organicness which is to say their success is not primarily dependent on trade with another country. Even China has managed to wean itself off an almost total dependency on the West for profit building a growing working and middle class that now accounts for a material share of Chinese GDP purchasing Chinese products in China.
It's still not clear yet if China will form a currency/financial sector bloc that competes directly against the EU and the US but if the TPP fails and they actually do that will provide more global decentralization even though they will still be intertwined. It's speculative at this point.
That said, most Western nations have incurred massive debt (with the exception of the Russian Federation) and, given the present economic environment, are looking at a future of austerity.
The average person in the West is going to suffer serious economic hardship as the ability to maintain a lifestyle fueled by government spending is curtailed by rapid debt escalation as stimulus fails to bring about economic recovery which finally results in a debt-to-currency ratio that can no longer be ignored. That's when the social welfare finally begins to decline by necessity, in order to save the currency, leaving a lot of people in abject poverty.
Normally, this wouldn't be a big problem for those in agrarianism with access to a barter economy but the present changes in the weather which appear to be a long term trend (e.g. snowlessness, drought, etc...) are going to severely hurt them too.
More eclectic topics like the superbugs that are starting to emerge, which are totally antibiotic resistant and have depopulation potential, fortunately are few and presently contained. We'll need to open up some research avenues for creating powerful new antibiotics which could treat them. Substances like tea tree oil, for example, could be used to create powerful new antibiotics to deal with superbugs. That's not happening currently though and if a really active variant of tuburculosis becomes totally antibiotic resistant and starts spreading or a new aggressive retrovirus jumps the barrier it could pose a depopulation risk.
Difficult times are coming. We've not seen anything yet. Every time I pick up a newspaper and read how peachy everything is, I wonder if the people writing those articles live on the same planet I do.
Good to see you again, brother. <smile>
This looks like a latter day repeat of the Great Depression of 1929, sure enough, with three major differences: the new nation of Israel, born out of the Holocaust in 1948 and Jerusalem freed of Gentile domination in 1967 for the first time in 2573 years! Those are two, the third being: the world now has a global economy. If any of the major financial players collapses, the rest of the world's financial systems will follow like a line of dominoes.
Furthermore, the first two events appear to be the most significant fulfillments of Bible prophecy since the New Testament was written; and both, in my opinion, end the "time of the Gentiles," Luke 21:24, and place us in the "end-times" of Daniel 12:9, "And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end."
Point being: if we are indeed in Daniel's "time of the end," this coming world financial collapse will be like none that has ever come before it.
