Listen to messybear... He's the canary in the coalmine, and there are millions behind him. Take a look at the inflation figures here--

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/20/72818/8319/446/460273

The seeds of collapse were sown under St. Reagan, with his borrow and spend policies, the gutting of the US manufacturing base, and worse, a world-wide policy trend favoring the super-rich at the expense of everything else, including infrastructure and sane financial policies. The tech boom and Robert Reich's brilliance combined with Bill Clinton's savvy politicking slowed the car down nicely, but GW got behind the wheel and slammed the accelerator down, stacking regulatory bureaucracies with cronies and sympathisers, removing all protection, plundering the treasury and passing it out to said cronies through war contracts and outright theft, and removing the restrictions that kept our shaky money system based in some version of reality... Consumer debt is now at 133% of GDP. Oil has stabilised at over a hundred dollars bbl. Foreclosures in the millions, if not the tens of millions are on the way. Citigroup is selling off its office real estate to desperately try to get cash into its system, selling off its seed corn, as it were... Britain is nationalising banks

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1203404580.php

in an attempt to stop the bleeding, and we are approaching the point where the growers of basic products like wheat, oats and grain will be unable to meet global demand. Which reads as famine in many places in the world which have never experienced such a thing.

So listen to messybear. He is legion.