Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM BONNER is President and CEO of Agora Inc., one of the world’s largest financial newsletter companies (www.agorafinancial.com). He is the creator of the Daily Reckoning (www.dailyreckoning.com), a financial newsletter with more than 500,000 readers in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, and is translated daily into French and German. Mr. Bonner is also the coauthor, with Addison Wiggin, of the international bestsellers Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt.

ADDISON WIGGIN is the Executive Publisher of Agora Financial. He is also the Executive Producer and a writer of the feature-length documentary film I.O.U.S.A., which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Wiggin is the coauthor, with Mr. Bonner, of the international bestsellers Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt, and author of The Demise of the Dollar … And Why It’s Even Better for Your Investments.

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“The Golden Age of American capitalism is over. … In the space of half a century it passed from gold, to silver, to paper, and is now somewhere between plastic and navellint.”
—From The New Empire of Debt

In the last half of 2008, the Empire of Debt received the margin call from Hell. Now, all of its citizens are asked to pay up as the U.S. economy stumbles down a dangerous path of financial turmoil. What exactly went wrong?

When things are good, people tend to believe the most outrageous things—that the financial sector could get rich by lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back, and that a whole economy could flourish by luring consumers to spend more than they could afford. These hallucinations created an immense worldwide bubble of debt and dollars. And now—with the U.S. government inflating the biggest bubble in public debt the world has ever seen—a financial whirlpool has formed and threatens to drag the entire country down the drain.

In The New Empire of Debt, the internationally acclaimed author team of William Bonner and Addison Wiggin return to reveal how the epic financial bubble that is plaguing the United States will soon bring an end to this once-great empire. Throughout the book, they offer a frightening look at the United States’ precarious position and discuss how government control of the economy and financial system—combined with unfettered deficit spending and gluttonous consumption—has ravaged the business environment, devastated consumer confidence, and pushed the global economy to the brink.

Along the way, Bonner and Wiggin warn of the dangers that lie ahead and offer practical advice to protect your financial well-being as the American empire collapses upon itself. You’ll discover that you don’t have to tie your own fate to the inevitable destruction of America’s system of imperial finance. Instead, you can take some simple steps to weather the crisis.

Bonner and Wiggin have been studying the financial landscape for more than twenty years. With The New Empire of Debt, they not only show you how we got into this mess, but how to get yourself out of it.

Aus dem Klappentext

"The Golden Age of American capitalism is over. . . . In the space of half a century it passed from gold, to silver, to paper, and is now somewhere between plastic and navel lint."
-From The New Empire of Debt

In the last half of 2008, the Empire of Debt received the margin call from Hell. Now, all of its citizens are asked to pay up as the U.S. economy stumbles down a dangerous path of financial turmoil. What exactly went wrong?

When things are good, people tend to believe the most outrageous things-that the financial sector could get rich by lending money to people who couldn't pay it back, and that a whole economy could flourish by luring consumers to spend more than they could afford. These hallucinations created an immense worldwide bubble of debt and dollars. And now-with the U.S. government inflating the biggest bubble in public debt the world has ever seen-a financial whirlpool has formed and threatens to drag the entire country down the drain.

In The New Empire of Debt, the internationally acclaimed author team of William Bonner and Addison Wiggin return to reveal how the epic financial bubble that is plaguing the United States will soon bring an end to this once-great empire. Throughout the book, they offer a frightening look at?the United States' precarious position and discuss how government control of the economy and financial system-combined with unfettered deficit spending and gluttonous consumption-has ravaged the business environment, devastated consumer confidence, and pushed the global economy to the brink.

Along the way, Bonner and Wiggin warn of the dangers that lie ahead and offer practical advice to protect your financial well-being as the American empire collapses upon itself. You'll discover that you don't have to tie your own fate to the inevitable destruction of America's system of imperial finance. Instead, you can take some simple steps to weather the crisis.

Bonner and Wiggin have been studying the financial landscape for more than twenty years. With The New Empire of Debt, they not only show you how we got into this mess, but how to get yourself out of it.

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The New Empire of Debt

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Tradition ... is the democracy of the dead. -G. K. Chesterton

One of the nicest things about Europe's cities is that they are so full of dead people. In Paris, the cemeteries are so packed that the corpses are laid down like bricks, stacked one atop the other. Occasionally the bones are dug up and stored in underground ossuaries that are turned into tourist attractions. Thousands and thousands of skulls are on display in the catacombs; millions more must be spread all over the city.

In Venice, a dead man gets-or used to get-a send-off so gloriously sentimental he could hardly wait to die. There is barely room within the city walls for the living and none at all for the dead. Cadavers were loaded onto a magnificently morbid floating mariah-a richly decorated funeral gondola, painted in bright black with gold angels on her bow and stern. Then, as if crossing the river Styx, the boat was rowed across the lagoon to the island of San Michele by four gondoliers in black outfits with gold trim.

How American versifiers must have envied one of their own, Ezra Pound, when he took his last gondola ride in such fabulous style in 1972. And then, what luck! The former classical scholar, poet, and admirer of Benito Mussolini got one of the last empty holes on the cemetery island. Today, when Venetians reach room temperature, the best they can hope for is a damp spot on the mainland.

We do not hasten to join the dead, but we seek their counsel. When corpses whisper, we listen.

"Been there. Done that," they often seem to say.

Reading Margaret Wilson Oliphant's history of the dead dukes, or doges, in her classic book, The Makers of Venice, Doges, Conquerors, Painters and Men of Letters, we felt as though someone should have sent a copy to George W. Bush. "Read this. Spare yourself some trouble," the author might have written on the accompanying note. But who reads anything but newspapers in the Capital City? Who reads at all? In the United States if it isn't on the evening news, it didn't happen. Ancient history is something that happened last week.

Too bad. For practically all the most preposterous ideas that emanate from the feverish swamps of the Potomac were tried out in the feverish swamps of Venice, hundreds of years ago.

LESSONS OF THE FOURTH CRUSADE

"Democracy! Empire! Freedom! Nation building!" The ideas are cast into the murky lagoon of human affairs as if the words were clarifying magic. Suddenly, wrong is as distinct from right, as day from night. Good from bad ... success from failure ... how clearly we see things in the crystal waters of our own delusions!

The United States congratulates itself as being the finest democracy the world has ever seen, but the system for ruling Venice eight centuries ago was also democratic. People voted for people who voted for other people, who then voted for yet more people who elected the doge. The whole idea was to allow ordinary people to believe that they ran the nation, while real authority remained in the hands of a few families-the Bushes, Kennedys, Gores, and Rockefellers of thirteenth-century Venice.

"So easy is it to deceive the multitude," says Mrs. Oliphant. "The sovereignty of Venice, under whatever system carried on, had always been in the hands of a certain number of families, who kept their place with almost dynastic regularity undisturbed by any intruders from below-the system of the Consiglio Maggiore was still professed to be a representative system of the widest kind; and it would seem at the first glance as if all honest men who were da bene and respected by their fellows must one time or other have been secure of gaining admission to that popular parliament."

To Mrs. Oliphant's dictum on the multitude, we add a corollary: It is even easier to deceive oneself. Today, rare are the Americans who are not victims of their own scams. They mortgaged their homes and thought they were getting richer. They bought Wall Street's products as though they were gambling in Las Vegas and believed they were as clever as Warren Buffett. They went to the polling stations in November 2004 and believed they were selecting the government they wanted, when the choice had already been reduced to two men of the same class, same age, same schooling, same wealth, same secret club, same society, with more or less the same ideas about how things should be run.

In Washington, DC, the United States Senate met in the same solemn deceit as the Consiglio Maggiore-pretending to do the public's business. While down the street, America's own doge, George W. Bush, took up where the Michieli and the Dandolos left off: trying to hustle the East.

Making a very long story short, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as at the beginning of the twenty-first, many people saw a clash of civilizations coming and sharpened their swords. They were, then as now, the same civilizations, clashing in about the same part of the world-the Middle East.

What was different back then was that the effort to make the world a better place (at least in this episode) was being prodded forward by the French, who were then an expanding, imperial power. St. Louis (King Louis IX) went on two crusades with a French army and failed both times.

Mrs. Oliphant's history tells of the arrival of six French knights in shining armor, who strode into San Marcos Piazza to ask the doge for help. They were putting together an alliance of civilized Western armies to reconquer Jerusalem, they explained-in the same spirit as King Louis centuries before.

They brought out all the usual arguments. But the Venetians were not so much convinced by the French as they convinced themselves. They were, they said to themselves (just as Madeleine Albright would repeat centuries later), the "indispensable nation." Without them, the effort would fail; therefore they must act. Yes, they could still fail, they acknowledged, but look what they had to gain! For not only would they being doing good, but they stood to do well, too-implanting trading posts and ports along the way.

And so a fleet of 50 galleys was assembled and set off, the old doge leading the way. Finding their French allies a bit worse for wear and tear, the Venetians proposed a new deal: Instead of attacking the infidels forth-with, they would warm up with an assault on Zara, a town on the Dalmatian coast that had recently rebelled against its Venetian masters.

The French protested. They had come to make war against the enemies of Christ, not against other Christians. But since they needed the Venetians' support, they had no choice.

In five days, the city of Zara surrendered; its defenses were no match for the armies in front of them. And so the city was sacked and the booty divided up. Soon after came a letter from Pope Innocent III, who wondered why they were killing fellow Christians; it was the pagans they were meant to be killing, he reminded them. He commanded them to leave Zara and proceed to Syria, "neither turning to the right hand nor to the left."

The pope's letters greatly troubled the pious French, but the Venetians seemed undisturbed. They ignored the letters and remained in Zara until a new comic opportunity presented...