Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson sees two plausible scenarios at this point. This is one of them (The Quiet Coup):
The second scenario begins more bleakly... It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate,
the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because
eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European
banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the
Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further.
The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and
the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better
off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S.
economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth
rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen
as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury
is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source
of great embarrassment.
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