Martin has published several papers recently that are pretty coherent and I think offer some very good points and thinking about the way our economy and money system work, and don’t work. Again, his strong point is his read on history and his ability to put it into an economic context.
In this piece he correctly states that a gold standard is bunk and he offers some good insights on the movement of currencies and what to expect (generally the opposite of what the majority thinks will happen). If you look at his model, it does have a major turn date that occurs before the mid-point of next year – the last turn did occur close to the March ’09 low point in stocks, but it could also mark a major turning point in the dollar.
At any rate, this is an interesting read, it will make you more aware by reading it, but I would caution anyone about taking his predictions too seriously. Remember, predicting the future is pretty much a fool’s errand unless there is mathematical certainty involved – and in this case there most certainly is, the debt is completely mathematically impossible to ever repay and thus you know that events are coming. When predicting market events, the easiest thing to predict (which is not easy) is direction, the next hardest to predict is the depth, and the hardest to predict is timing. Thus you should always take people’s read of the future with a many grains of salt.