Just FYI, One of the World&#39;s Smartest Money Men Says a Crash Worse Than 2008 Is ComingS

Stanley Druckenmiller is a legendary hedge fund manager, former partner of George Soros, and billionaire investor. He is one of the more levelheaded and reasonable of the hedge fund gods. He's made billions of dollars by reading the world economy correctly for several decades. So it's worth at least passing on the fact that he is convinced that a new financial crash is looming for America. Worse than the last one!

With the caveats that A) sure, every hedge fund guy has a pet theory, and B) sure, it is plausible that long-term investing success may be attributable to luck to some degree, we will simply note that A) Stanley Druckenmiller predicted the last financial crash (the collapse of the housing bubble) years before it happened, and B) he has a sterling track record in matter such as this, and C) he has no real reason to bullshit on this topic, at this point. So, for those of us who are mere peons on Main Street, gazing uncomprehendingly at the economic machinations of Wall Street and Washington, it is worth pondering deeply his warning—which (like the dangers of the housing bubble) is nothing secret really, it's just something that we tend to ignore until it is too late, and comes crashing down upon us all.

Druckenmiller's basic warning: the old people of today are sucking us dry, and leaving nothing but a pile of debt for future generations. As he told Bloomberg:

Druckenmiller, 59, said the mushrooming costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with unfunded liabilities as high as $211 trillion, will bankrupt the nation's youth and pose a much greater danger than the country's $16 trillion of debt currently being debated in Congress...

Druckenmiller said unsustainable spending will eventually result in a crisis worse than the financial meltdown of 2008, when $29 trillion was erased from global equity markets.

In other words, if we don't find a way to fix out of control Social Security spending, we will all die broke. Imagine a crash far worse than 2008! Unemployment Stories, Vol. 264. Druckenmiller also predicts that the current stock rise is artificial and temporary, so there is essentially little hope for you to invest your own way out of this problem.

"With the proper education and with proper voices out there, we could have 40 million kids marching down to Washington," Druckenmiller says. Haha, can you imagine a 40 million-strong youth march for entitlement reform? No. We will just wait, and revel in the inevitable collapse when it happens. Like global warming, we know it is coming, yet we will do nothing. The only question is which will get us first.