Eric Sprott recaps the last financial decade as a prelude to the future:
To stem the flow of money out of US-based money market funds, Paulson had to provide an almost instant guarantee on all money market funds held within the US. Kanjorski recounts, “If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2pm that afternoon (September 18th), $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, [which] would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. We talked at that time about what would happen if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”7 Further details of these meetings have been provided by Senator James Inhofe, who recounted that Paulson had warned of martial law and civil unrest if the TARP bill failed.8
We were literally hours away from worldwide financial collapse, civil unrest, and martial law, but Hank Paulson somehow managed to leave those flashbulb memories out of his “memoir.” Sprott, among others, predicted it all, from the NASDAQ bubble collapse, the evils of the subsequent “lending mania” in the years afterward to “ease the pain,” and which led directly to the housing bubble, and current housing collapse itself.