Game of global hot potato

Mark Fisher on Roman back flash. Some excerpts:

• "Historians cite the late second century as the turning point of the Roman Empire, when the once-proud, feared society began its descent into infamy. As the ruling class was undermined by civil wars and attacks by outsiders, respect for law and social institutions began to erode. In the end, a combination of political and economic mistakes led to the empire’s downfall.
• The US government’s version of bread offerings proliferated throughout the fiscal crisis, in which collapse was averted only by a massive financial bailout and an endless supply of paper money, along with the rest of the seemingly endless sustenance being shoved down America’s throat.
• Even more unsettling is the government’s inability to fix the financial crisis. After a stream of stimulus programmes and bailouts, the Federal Reserve continues to print enormous quantities of dollars and buy the nation’s debt.
• Once the world realises that the US is the new Rome, the traditional tenets governing asset correlations will no longer hold, and we can expect a breakdown in traditional stock-bond portfolio theories. Since paper assets are ultimately shoved down to zero, expect hard assets to benefit along with commodity-related equities. The name of the game going forward—let’s say the next five years—will be buying ahead of whatever China and other developing nations are trying to accumulate and diversifying away from the US.
• As China continues to thrust its dollars at all things commodity-related, it’s hard not to laugh when hearing President Barack Obama speak about trying to identify ‘environmentally sound’ opportunities in energy. It’s only a matter of time before the mechanism that has allowed the government to sustain its trade deficit for longer than it should have—similar to the Asian dollar peg of the 1990s—causes a simultaneous decline in the US currency, asset prices and the economy. As people begin to realise that their paper currencies, stocks and bonds are all garbage, we can expect a meltdown.