American households will have to sell the housing they had to offered in guarantee of their loans;the price of real estate in the United States will plummet;the credit pyramid,based on the value of American housing,will colapse.Indebted households will become inseolvent.Insurance companies will insist on the payment of premiums.The federal government-itself now paralyzed,like the whole American financial system will be unable to rescue the weakest.Production will slow and joblessness will reach hitherto unknown heights.The crisis could also come more directly from the inability of the financial system to hold on its own savings,which will be invested in increasingly speculative fashion in funds managed on Internet from tax havens.The profitability of capital will no longer be maintained by the rise in the value of assets.The financial crisis is about to explode.

.........

The United States could then become a Scandinavian-style social democracy, or a dictatorship-and even perhaps one after the other.It would not be the first time such a surprise occurred: the first leader to apply the principles required to emerge from the crisis of the eight form was Mosolini;the second was Hitler.Roosevelt came only third.

Jacques Attali

A Brief History of the Future

First published in French as Une breve histoire de l'avenir by Libraire Artheme Fayard 2006