The Second Great Depression is coming to town.

Remember “The Great War” was renamed “World War One” after 1939?   Next up, the "Great Depression” will be renamed the "First Great Depression”.

The near future holds something equal to or greater than the Thirties depression.  And as in that depression, governments will make it worse, thinking to make it better.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
   The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
      Are full of passionate intensity.  (Yeats)

Not everyone will suffer.  Perhaps Canada will be spared apart from a slow economic period and a 25% rollback in housing prices.  Despite the collapse of a couple sovereign nations, states, counties, cities and bank empires and despite a concomitant rise in unrest, most citizens won’t be hurt. A lot of the notional money on loan is matched to notional risk insurance money issued by other financial institutions.   When claims and counter party claims collapse, how many individuals actually take a loss?     Crony elites have morals much like the typical citizen but from their favoured positions in governments, unions and businesses,  they have been busy covering decades of enlightened looting by issuing IOU's charged to future taxpayers. Thus they fund unsustainable pensions and hare-brained Solyndra schemes.. The bailouts worldwide are transfers of risk from the ones who did the gambling to the voters who maybe should have known better.

There is a countervailing push from know-how and networking that is creating opportunities for wealth as big as or bigger than the looming losses.  No individual is in charge of it, as if the possibilities themselves were alive and exploiting us.  This push may yet bring enough wealth to bail out the failures of self-serving busybodies.

Like a low key Kurzweilian singularity, this push includes cheap power from cold fusion,  credentials that can be verified without a college or university degree,  voter networks in real time doing what MP’s ponderously do, the resurgence of drilling jobs in the US despite opposition by government at every stop, more healthy and wealthy old people who have a longer life expectancy at the end of each year than they do at the beginning of each year, fewer dictators thanks to ubiquitously leaked documents and video, greater honesty in government thanks to Google searches of past promises, and so on.

There's turmoil up ahead followed by a stagnant decade paying off the bills, but there's a reasonable possibility the unpredictable will perk up everything.

Added expressing a similar view:

"Last night I was on CNBC’s Fast Money. Everyone seems to want to talk about the impending Great Depression: Europe fails, contagion spreads it to here, all of our banks fail, everyone loses their jobs, blah, blah, blah. The world feels like it’s ending.  But it’s not. I listed my reasons why. I won’t list them again here. It’s not important. Innovation is happening. The economy is growing. And Europe is not going to disappear."